Awesome Social Signals for Your Website

Any successful website is designed and curated for the user. Thankfully search engine algorithms have caught up and now reward these efforts with high rankings and greater visibility.

With so many different ranking factors, it can be easy to forget about the easiest and simplest: social signals.

What are Social Signals?

Social signals refer to all the shares, likes, retweets, mentions and so on that your site has on social media.

Visible Shares

These are the shares, likes, comments that you can see and have control over. They are all tallied in analytic systems, can be quantified and are easy to understand. Visible sharing occurs when someone shares something publicly or on their feed, and this can be easily assessed by web owners. If someone likes your post on social media, that can be tallied on your blog post and in your analytics.

Invisible Shares

If someone shares your link through a private message, however, this cannot be qualified. You cannot tell who is sharing your link, who they are sharing it to, or the response. Though you cannot track the information, these invisible shares are invaluable.

Think about the benefits that word-of-mouth marketing has for any business. Invisible sharing or private message sharing is just the digital equivalent. It is one friend going to another and telling them “hey, look at this, I think you’ll be interested.”

Making your content easy to share and post linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. to your content on your social media is an excellent way to encourage this behaviour.

Do Social Signals Increase Ranking?

The answer is largely undetermined, though many experts believe that social signals do have an impact on your ranking. One study by QuickSprout determined that activity on social media channels could raise your rankings by as much as 7%, though the volume you would need to see a significant impact is quite high.

How Do Social Signals Boost Ranking?

The short answer is that we aren’t entirely sure, just that there is a correlation between social shares and better rankings. This could be due to a few reasons:

·         Social Share Links Build Up Your Backlink Profile

Top experts flip flop on whether social sharing does have a direct impact on your ranking, with most saying that yes, a very healthy social presence is essential to others saying it is just a correlation, not causation.

In this theory, the links you earn from social signals and sharing actively works towards your backlink profile and boosts it. Content that has a lot of shares (think 50+) and more comments will, theoretically, provide a more significant boost to your ranking.

·         Social Shares Mean More People See It

In this second example, the benefits are second-hand. This means that more people see your link, share it, and talk about it, the more likely they are to use your link in their own digital content and blog posts. In this theory, the benefits are second-hand and increase your chances of organic link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. on top of the immediate benefit of word-of-mouth marketing that you get from social signals.

Benefits of Social Signals

Regardless of whether social signals do or do not have a direct impact on link building, they are essential for any site to be successful.

1.    Brand Building

If you want to build up your brand, then you need people to see it, become familiar with it, and refer to it. This can be difficult to do if you only have your website. By having social media people

can have a place to ask questions in a way they are comfortable with, see the posts you have made, read reviews, see your work first-hand, and so much more.

By prioritising social sharing, you can get your expertise out there, and build up trust in your brand. If people refer to your guides as useful content, then they may later hire you or buy one of your products to get the results outlined in your guide.

As stated before, invisible sharing or person-to-person sharing via a messaging app has the same benefits as word-of-mouth marketing.

In short, even if social signals don’t do anything for your ranking directly, they do help your brand grow in reputation and visibility.

2.    Link Diversity

Any healthy backlink profile has a diversity of links. This means backlinks on top, reputable sites, links on small-time blogs, and of course social signals. Not having any social signals linking towards your site could indicate to Google and other search engines a lack of authenticity when assessing your overall backlink profile.

3.    Referral Traffic

When people share your content, they want others to see it. Even if just one other person clicks on your link or visits your site after a digital referral, you are already enjoying some of the best organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. you can.

4.    Viral Sharing

By making it possible to share your website or content through easy social shares, you increase the chances of your content becoming viral. This is rare in the grand scheme of things, and you will need to really invest in viral marketing or in creating content that really captures people’s attention to do it. Still, the mere possibility is enough to allow for and encourage social signals to your website.

5.    Word-Of-Mouth Marketing

People don’t share to large audiences. They share with their audience. This audience is primarily comprised of friends and family. This makes their word, and what they share, so much more impactful. The chances of organic growth and interest in your brand is much higher when a friend or family member recommends you on your behalf, and digitally this word-of-mouth marketing looks like social signals.

6.    Authenticity

Last but certainly not least, authenticity. Every big brand out there has social signals going to their site. They encourage people to share their content with all social media channels. They want their name to get out there via their fans. Not having this can really hurt your brand’s appearance and presence to your users.

Social signals show that your brand is thriving, that it is active and that its audience is engaged.

How to Get Social Signals

The next question on many people’s minds is always how to get social signals pointing to your website and content. There are, at their core, two options:

Organic Growth

Social media is inherently social, which is why any organic approach to marketing and engagement is always going to help grow your account and encourage people to share your content with others.

Easy Sharing on Platforms

You can make this easier for them by crafting posts that outline the basics of a new article on non-linked platforms. It is easy to share an article or page on Facebook, for example, but sharing a link directly through Instagram is much more difficult.

By making it easier for people to share your content on social channels, especially those that don’t make it inherently easy, you can boost the engagement and social signals to your site.

Easy Sharing from Your Content

You also want to make it easy for people to share the content they see from your site. These people are likely already fans or customers of yours, so making it easy to share the products, guides, or pages they see on your site on all of their chosen channels can really boost engagement and social signals to your content.

Making Social Sharing Templates

It can also be useful to make specific templates. Pinterest, for example, can share both the image itself or a header-image format where users on the platform can immediately see the Pin is a guide and that your content is the real reason it was pinned, not just because the image was pretty. You will need to include this image on the page so that when users go to Pin it, they can easily just select the Pinterest image to share.

Essentially you want people to be able to share the optimised version of your content, no matter which social site they use or how they want to share.

Paid Social

The second option is through paid social, and if you have had any experience with PPC formats before you will know that you need a strong strategy going in or else risk wasting a lot of money. A social marketing agency can help take the guesswork out of the process, especially if you cannot afford a specific social media manager to handle the job on their own.

The benefits of a paid social agency are numerous. For one, they have access to all the top analytical tools and best practices of the day. You will also be investing in their years of expertise both in marketing and, in Click Intelligence’s case, with SEO.

Combining the value of social media marketing with SEO improves your overall presence online. It gives your customers a more rounded, established presence online to visit, share to their friends or family, and of course, hire. By mixing organic social signals with paid social, you can see long-term results and immediate results, and enjoy a combined approach for your SEO.