3 Ways in Which Social Signals Improve Ranking

by ​Chloe Smith, Guest Contributor

When talking about search engine optimization it is a constantly changing industry. Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others are just the biggest players on the field but are not the only ones. Businesses have put a great deal of effort and time in staying ahead of their algorithm changes to gain the most exposure. Publishers and content creators are on a constant quest to drive their search result rankings to the first page. Even when this holy grail has been reached, they still need to keep creating quality, engaging content in order to keep it. It is not enough today to just create quality content but to also combine it with SEO for maximum result.
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Key points in using social signals to improve our rankings.

Studies have shown that social signals have a great role to play when it comes to search engine optimizations. The biggest challenge for the marketing department is to isolate the social signals that resonate the most with our audience. Here, we will go over the key points in using social signals to improve our rankings.

The basics
First of all, what are social signals? These are activities like tweets, retweets, likes, votes, pins, you name it. The labels themselves differentiate from different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and many more. What these do is indicate to search engines that a large audience has interacted and endorsed the brand in question. If content is fire, social media is gasoline. Combine these two, and we have the recipe for spreading our word very far.  By adding sharing buttons to our site, we grant our audience the ability to “socialize” our content within their circles. From there on, news of our brand will cascade on to other followers, not initially aware of the situation.

Optimizing for the social, local and mobile experience
Diversifying the mediums over which we can promote our brand influences SEO in multiple ways. The time has come when more people are spending time on mobile devices rather than stationary ones. Thus, research and purchasing are done mainly on the go, more specifically, from the mobile phone or tablet. A natural progression of this is that search engines greatly take into account mobile-friendly sites. An important factor for our local search ranking is social proof. By social proof, we mean different content like reviews, comments, and quotes from the experts in the field. It adds to the weight of our content by demonstrating trustworthiness and seriousness. We can always amplify our social proof by, as we said, providing the means for interaction with our content. This includes, but is not limited to, commenting, liking or disliking (no such thing as negative advertising), sharing and many more. If it is evident to the consumer that our content is viewed and shared many times, he is likely to repeat the trend.

Increasing traffic
To generate more flow to our site, we should make it easy for others to share our content. Usually, this is done via social networks, and there are many of them. Some are tech industry giants, and some are less known niche environments. A common example is not including a “copy to clipboard” button when someone wants to forward our URL address. Our time-pressed and short attention span readers do not have the time to manually copy and paste a URL forward. As a result, we will lose the opportunities to promote our content because of unintuitive and bad user experience. Since in today’s environment, all of these actions are done online, it can get quite technical and complicated. That is why there is no shame in offsourcing these endeavors to professionals. There are plenty of reputable social media agencies in Sydney, that we can choose from. The trick is to pick one that resonates the most with our type of content, and in extension, our audience. And this is the usual practice since it is mostly the industry giants that have the capacities to tackle these problems internally.

Social signals have become an integral part in optimizing search results to work in our favor. And it is only expected to increase in the foreseeable future. All industries have embraced the necessity of social media and other forms of marketing. And there is a good reason for it, as online marketing, if done right, can leave the greatest impact and reach the biggest audience. All the major search engines have advanced very far, to the point where all of these components are carefully integrated into their algorithms. And these algorithms are in a constant state of development and advancement. It is no longer enough to create quality content, there is plenty of it out in the wild. But it is necessary to use various tools in order to promote it. Social media is sure to enjoy a great deal in SEO ranking benefits. So, use these principles and reach out to as many people as possible, today.​

Author bio:

Chloe Smith is a business consultant for SEO Reseller Hub, a cycling enthusiast and a part-time writer always willing to share tidbits of advice. She believes that passion, courage and, above all, knowledge breed success. When she’s not working, she’s probably somewhere cuddled up with a good book, and a cup of lemongrass tea (or more honestly binge-watching the newest Netflix hit show).

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