How to Improve Your Social Signals for SEO
One of the biggest factors that contribute to your organic search ranking is the trust that your website and brand has established across the web. There are a number of ways that the search engines identify how trusted a website is. The domain age of the website and the quality of inbound links pointing to the site have always played a role which is at the foundation of a traditional SEO campaign. However as the web has continued to become more and more social, the search engines now consider “social signals” as an organic ranking factor. Social signals include the number of social shares that are achieved and who is sharing your content in social media. Shares from high authority accounts (lots of followers, lots of brand page activity) are best. Social signals help the search engines understand what content is valuable and what businesses/brands are popular on the web. It also tells the search engines that you market your business in different ways online and care about the experience of the end user.
Here are 4 ways to improve your social signals for SEO:
Align your content and social strategies
Content is an essential component of online marketing today. Content should be informational in nature (not promotional) and be useful to target audience members. It should answer a question that they have or help them solve a problem. This kind of informational content is what social followers are most likely to share with their connections. It’s important to determine the right time of day to share your content, which is determined by the social behavior of your followers. This can take some testing to determine what times are best.
Add sharing buttons to content
You don’t want your sharing buttons to be overwhelming or distracting. There’s no need to include links to every social network under the sun. Be selective and choose the networks that are most applicable to your target audience and list the sharing buttons in order of importance. For a B2B, it’s likely that LinkedIn is going to give you the most traction, followed by Twitter. For B2C, Facebook is probably the most relevant. Include a call to action with the social buttons at the end of the post.
Get social on social media
Many businesses are still using social media incorrectly. They are only using it as one more outlet to promote. The whole point of social media is to interact with and connect with others. This is essential if you want to build a strong following and grow your network. It takes some effort and outreach to connect with influencers in the industry.
Social ads
There are varying opinions on the effectiveness of social advertising. Some businesses swear by it while others have found it to be a waste of money. It’s always worth testing if you have the budget to do so. Sponsored posts in social channels can improve your visibility and lead to more quality followers and social shares over time.
Categorized in: Social Media
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