Perhaps you’ve recently lost your top spot on Google. Or maybe you aren’t getting as many referrals from Google as you did last year.
Seeing that decline in your analytics can be nail-biting, especially when you are still trying to grow your website.
However, there is a surprising way to turn things around with your SEO. It comes in the unlikely form of social media.
“But social media doesn’t impact SEO,” we hear you say. Well, this isn’t the entire truth. And we’ll explain here how social signals can give your website the SEO boost it needs right now.
What Are Social Signals?
Social signals refer to any interaction your website content receives on social media posts. It covers a multitude of platforms so that interaction might include shares, retweets, likes, views, votes, comments, and pins.
You can think of social signals as an opportunity for the general public to vote on how much they love the content you posted.
How Do Social Signals Impact SEO?
The “signal” part of social signals tells you how Google uses social media when ranking content. You can find out more about Google’s ranking factors here.
Social media isn’t a direct part of the Google algorithm, so it doesn’t impact ranking as a fully-optimized title and description do. However, it’s a signal, or a sign, to Google about the quality of your content.
Posts that are getting plenty of traction on social media are an indication to Google that they are a worthy read.
And what we know about the Google algorithm is that it likes to rank high-quality content that people love (and relevant content). So social signals are an indirect way of influencing the Google algorithm.
Simple Ways to Improve Your Social Signals
Now that you know why social signals are helpful for SEO, it’s time to take action. Here are a few simple ways to improve your social signals and boost your engagement on social media:
- Be consistent by posting on social media daily
- Have social media buttons on your website to make your content easy for readers to share
- Use catchy titles that will grab people’s attention
- Re-share your most popular content regularly
- Interact with your social media followers
- Monitor your analytics to get an insight into what your most successful content is on social media
- Create different formats for your content, such as a video to accompany a blog post
The more you use social media, the more of an impact you’ll see on your SEO efforts.
Don’t forget to share brand new content as soon as you have posted it on your website for maximum impact. Google loves current articles as much as they love popular articles.
Improve Your Social Signals Today
Don’t sit and worry about a declining SEO presence. By boosting your efforts on social media, you can quickly and effectively show Google how much your audience loves your content.
Using social signals, you’ll get more traffic from Google and more traffic from social media. It’s a true win-win!
For more helpful guides from us, visit our How To section now.