How can social signals improve SEO?
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 5:10 am
The more people see your content, the more likely you are to acquire backlinks organically. Now high-quality backlinks are a search ranking factor. Let me give you an example.
Johnny Ward is a travel blogger and founder of a website called Onestep4ward. In 2017 he completed his travels across every country in the world. It's a story that generated a lot of attention on social media and then in the press.
All that press attention generated a lot of backlinks russian email list to your website. Those backlinks make your site more authoritative and increase the likelihood that your content will rank on Google.
That sudden drop in traffic in January 2020 is likely due to COVID-19. Few people are doing travel-related searches during lockdown.
More recently, he was part of a team that rowed across the Atlantic. It was another story that got a lot of attention. You can see that there are increases in organic search traffic after these events.
There is a correlation between those increases in traffic and new authoritative backlinks. Some of those links are also highly targeted, with anchor text that aligns with the keywords you're targeting.
Social signals help increase the reach of your content, making it more likely to get authoritative backlinks organically. Those backlinks can improve your search rankings. So how do you get those social signals that generate all that exposure?
Here are three tips you can follow to generate more social signals from social media.
1. Create (authentic) shareable content
Remember that social media users are laypeople looking for useful information in an easy-to-digest format. Also remember that users don't have time to search for ways to share your content. For example, users are unlikely to navigate to another group, let alone log into Instagram, Twitter, or Tumblr, just to share your content.
So, make sure you write content that provides high value, is engaging and easy to share.
Here are some ways you can make sure your content gets shared:
Post every day: This will always keep your brand fresh in your consumers’ minds.
Use images: An image speaks a thousand words, that's been proven. It's also true that images are more likely to attract users and be shared.
Listen on social media: “Listening on social media” means monitoring what people are saying about your brand and telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. You can also respond to criticism and hopefully turn negative comments into positive ones.
Run contests and offer prizes: No matter how small the prize, the desire to win will drive people to share such content.
Create partnerships: Collaborate with other brands and influencers on the platform to increase your visibility.
Finally, cover all the bases. It's not enough to post on Facebook or Instagram alone. You need to explore other social media channels, including new and emerging ones. TikTok, for example, may be relatively new, but it's already becoming a great channel for viral content due to its collaborative nature.
TikTok’s potential as a viral marketing channel was demonstrated in 2020 when an Idaho man, Nathan Apodaca, posted a video of himself riding a skateboard down a highway after his truck broke down, taking a sip from a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice as Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” plays in the background:
Since that video went viral, Ocean Spray has gone viral as well, with celebrities (and Ocean Spray’s CEO) taking part in the “Dreams” challenge. Due to accidental exposure via TikTok, Ocean Spray’s website has been linked to by high-authority websites that published articles about Apodaca and his juice-drinking, longboarding commute:
Why was Ocean Spray so successful in leveraging the power of TikTok to improve its SEO? While the exposure of Apodaca’s video was accidental, adding a page for Nathan Apodaca on the company’s website was deliberate (as seen in the Ahrefs screenshot above), as it gave websites a page they could link to whenever they mentioned the relationship between the brand and the content creator.
Johnny Ward is a travel blogger and founder of a website called Onestep4ward. In 2017 he completed his travels across every country in the world. It's a story that generated a lot of attention on social media and then in the press.
All that press attention generated a lot of backlinks russian email list to your website. Those backlinks make your site more authoritative and increase the likelihood that your content will rank on Google.
That sudden drop in traffic in January 2020 is likely due to COVID-19. Few people are doing travel-related searches during lockdown.
More recently, he was part of a team that rowed across the Atlantic. It was another story that got a lot of attention. You can see that there are increases in organic search traffic after these events.
There is a correlation between those increases in traffic and new authoritative backlinks. Some of those links are also highly targeted, with anchor text that aligns with the keywords you're targeting.
Social signals help increase the reach of your content, making it more likely to get authoritative backlinks organically. Those backlinks can improve your search rankings. So how do you get those social signals that generate all that exposure?
Here are three tips you can follow to generate more social signals from social media.
1. Create (authentic) shareable content
Remember that social media users are laypeople looking for useful information in an easy-to-digest format. Also remember that users don't have time to search for ways to share your content. For example, users are unlikely to navigate to another group, let alone log into Instagram, Twitter, or Tumblr, just to share your content.
So, make sure you write content that provides high value, is engaging and easy to share.
Here are some ways you can make sure your content gets shared:
Post every day: This will always keep your brand fresh in your consumers’ minds.
Use images: An image speaks a thousand words, that's been proven. It's also true that images are more likely to attract users and be shared.
Listen on social media: “Listening on social media” means monitoring what people are saying about your brand and telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. You can also respond to criticism and hopefully turn negative comments into positive ones.
Run contests and offer prizes: No matter how small the prize, the desire to win will drive people to share such content.
Create partnerships: Collaborate with other brands and influencers on the platform to increase your visibility.
Finally, cover all the bases. It's not enough to post on Facebook or Instagram alone. You need to explore other social media channels, including new and emerging ones. TikTok, for example, may be relatively new, but it's already becoming a great channel for viral content due to its collaborative nature.
TikTok’s potential as a viral marketing channel was demonstrated in 2020 when an Idaho man, Nathan Apodaca, posted a video of himself riding a skateboard down a highway after his truck broke down, taking a sip from a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice as Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” plays in the background:
Since that video went viral, Ocean Spray has gone viral as well, with celebrities (and Ocean Spray’s CEO) taking part in the “Dreams” challenge. Due to accidental exposure via TikTok, Ocean Spray’s website has been linked to by high-authority websites that published articles about Apodaca and his juice-drinking, longboarding commute:
Why was Ocean Spray so successful in leveraging the power of TikTok to improve its SEO? While the exposure of Apodaca’s video was accidental, adding a page for Nathan Apodaca on the company’s website was deliberate (as seen in the Ahrefs screenshot above), as it gave websites a page they could link to whenever they mentioned the relationship between the brand and the content creator.