Even though quality link building is still one of the best ways you can use in your digital marketing strategy to gain top organic rankings on Google, social signals also plays a huge role. Integrating social signals into their algorithm was the most logical step for Google to take with the trend around social media and real-time search playing a key role.
Various social media elements have already been integrated into Google’s search algorithm and these have already made a huge impact on search engine rankings. Although it is still not clear how much influence social media signals have on organic search results, using social media is not a nice to have anymore, but a must have if you are serious about your precious rankings and your authority online.
Every retweet, “like” or share on Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, or any other social media channel counts as a social signal. A social signal is basically telling Google that the content being shared is valuable and others will enjoy it as well. The more shares, likes, and retweets you receive from something you have shared, the higher the chance that it will be assigned a high value on the search engine result pages.
Aside from just adding a huge benefit to search rankings, another great benefit to having high likes and re shares on your content is the fact that more people will see your updates helping your content travel. This translates directly back to more website visitors, since a recommendation by a friend that is trusted will have a better mind share compared to a random result on the search engines.
What should you do to get started with social signals
If you already have social media profiles setup on all the top social networks like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, you have to realise that this is only one part to get it going. You need to be active on the social web and regularly curate and create updates and posts that are relevant to your business and your target audience.
Focus on finding ways to enhance user engagement with your brand, and make it easy for your target audience to share your content with their own social circles by using a magnetic content marketing strategy. Magnetic content is designed to attract interested readers instead of pushing them in.
By using social signals and integrating social media into your overall marketing strategy, you will not only be able to enhance your presence on the social web, but you will also have the ability to improve your organic search engine rankings.