Social Signals: The Importance of Social Media in Search Marketing
This week we’re going to take a look at the importance of social media in a company’s SEO efforts, a topic that has taken on increased importance since Google rolled out its latest algorithm adjustment in early May. More specifically, we’re taking a look at the role of social signals—be they “likes,” “retweets,” or “+’s—and whether a page that has more likes or retweets will rank higher for a specific search.
Over the past several years, numerous SEO experts and agencies have been conducting studies to determine if Google counts social signals as a ranking factor. Prior to this most recent change to Google’s core algorithm, case studies were conducted that found that pages with low-competition keywords would receive a boost from social signals and that receiving tweets from “influencers” could effect short-term ranking for certain keywords.
Now looking at Google trends since the start of May, researchers have seen pages with Facebook Likes and Google Plus Ones performing better for keyword searches than those without social signals. So how do you make your site more “sociable” to encourage users to send those all-important social signals to Google? Here are a few steps that every site should embrace.
- Make Your Pages Social
If a user wants to share a certain page on your site, do you at least have FB, Twitter, and Google+1 buttons for them to click? In optimizing your site for social signals, you should go through all of your site’s pages and have your developer add the social buttons’ embed codes to all the pages you want shared. In most cases, this will be almost all the pages on your website, with the exception of such pages as your site map or your site’s privacy policy. You want to make the pages that people will actually want to share sociable.
- Add Images to Your Posts
This is a minor step that can have a major effect on your pages’ performances. Studies have found that adding an image to a page that you want shared on social media can increase overall engagement—such as increasing time spent on the page and reducing a page’s bounce rate—which are factors Google will certainly take into account when ranking a page.
- Create Exceptional Content
At the end of the day, the best thing you can do to increase social signals on your website is to create content that people actually want to share. This could be a Top 10 list, an original video, or an exciting infographic; what matters is that you’re creating content that users want to engage with and ultimately share. So rather than creating content for the sake of content, research what type of topics and content pieces your users are most likely to interact with and start investing time into creating truly excellent content.