Are You Thinking About Social Signals For Your SEO Campaign?
Chad Faith
Director of Content
In the world of social media networks, professional marketers use social signals as an au courant term to refer to a page’s popularity on the Internet. Since social signals entail the number of times your content is tweeted about, shared, and liked; you are correct if you feel that you can attract a wider audience by sending out more signals. However, did you stop to think if this process can help improve your search engine performance?
Today more than ever, the relationship between search engine visibility and social signals is growing stronger. However, you need to understand that more social media attention does not necessarily equate to better search engine rankings. But, the consensus among many SEOs is that pages tend to be ranked well on SERPs if they send out strong social signals.
Social Signals – Signals You Should Not Ignore
Now, the thing is we are not asking you to consider social signals as the principal metric for directing your optimization plan. What we are saying is that you should never ignore social signals and consider using them as a rough audience snapshot that assists you in gauging the popularity of your pages. If you do this right, you will not encounter many problems in building more popular pages that attract more social attention. Let’s clear the air further by weeding out common misconceptions as well as understanding their abilities – on what they can actually do or not do for you.
Social Signals Do Not Directly Influence Organic Rankings
Yes, if this wasn’t clear to you prior to reading this, social signals do not have a direct impact on your own content ranking. What you will observe however is that your social posts do show up in SERPs. These posts can be treated like any other piece of content to give you a little more presence or provide some context for users as well in the search results; they can rank for your product names, keywords, and etc.
In addition, Google has repeatedly stated that there is a correlation to content being shared a lot and ranking well in search, because it is stellar content. That’s why it still brings us back to the fact that there is no direct ranking signal in the ranking algorithm from Google.
Building Social Presence Should Go Hand in Hand in Building Social Signals
Even if having a strong social presence does not contribute directly to your page’s SEO performance, it still plays an integral part of maximizing your visibility. What’s more, Google has direct access to many social networks in this era and will present their posts just like any other web content.
Social Signals Help Generate More Traffic
Today, social signals are being observed as securing an important seat in the modern online marketing world. Since they do provide direct feedback on a given page’s popularity, they certainly deserve your attention. Also, it’s worth noting that pages with the capability to resonate with your audience can help shape your future content – similar to earlier posts that had a strong social impact. This is truly a good way to target a broad user base and ensure more traffic comes flowing through your site. Google is always watching and will definitely take notice when ranking your pages.