How you can improve your search rankings through social signals
With the advent of online presence and marketing also came the social media platforms. Over the years communication over these platforms has evolved immensely. What used to be simple instant messaging has now transformed into full-blown product and service promoting giants. In no previous point in time have we had a better time reaching our desired audience. It has developed into science in itself. Social likes, shares, comments, and more, all play a vital role in our rankings on the global search platforms.
Social media affects our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) standings in a big way. These two concepts work together in unison to create a synergistic effect and offer the audience value and relevance. Here we will go deeper into the rabbit hole and see how we can leverage these terms to serve us best.
1. The traffic towards our site
We must do everything we can to make it easier for our readers to share the content on our sites. Generating traffic towards our site, via shares, comments, mentions, etc. is key. For example, leaving our audience to manually copy and then paste the URL of the content in question is very bad practice. Audience’s attention spans and patience is very limited in today’s turbulent and saturated online market. If we cannot meet a particular demand, there are plenty of others that can. The result would be us losing on precious opportunities for our content to be promoted because of bad user experience. Making it easy for our audience, both old and new, to effortlessly share our content is paramount.
Thankfully there are many plugins available that make it easy to share your content on social media directly from your site.
2. Platform-specific optimizations
Platforms through which we can view, interact, and share content come in many shapes and sizes. Having an adequate and satisfying presence on all of the signals that we are with the times. This diversity in the digital mix of social, local, and mobile marketing also affects SEO greatly. People are searching for content on their mobile phones now more than ever before. Computers are stationary, and are slowly but surely being replaced for those purposes. Purchases are researched on the go and instructions are required immediately. So, it makes sense that mobile devices have quickly become the number one medium through which most content is consumed.
Search engines tend to look very kindly on sites that are mobile-device-friendly. Add share buttons that will offer visitors an easy and convenient way to share the content. If we have separate sites for different regions, we should optimize our click-throughs for the biggest impact on local search rankings. Additionally, look into creating specific optimized landing pages for products and/or services.
3. Professional advising
Since everything we are talking about here is done online, it can get fairly technical and complicated, which may be problematic for some, especially if you’re are a small company and do not have a dedicated tech team. One of the most widely used strategies is to out source these endeavors to professional digital marketing agencies as there are plenty of organizations out there such as Eight Clients. There is no shame in hiring and delegating these tasks to a professional services company, in fact, by doing so, it frees you up to work on what you are good at, which will ultimately have a much bigger impact on your company’s bottom line.
4. Tweaks and miscellaneous
There are plenty of additional things that we can do to optimize our SEO rankings. To go over some of them, we will start with honing our social profiles. Creating a clear and consistent image of our brand across all media channels is one of the best things we can do. People like consistency and being able to easily recognize and share that in which they are interested in. Which brings us nicely into our next point, regular content updates.
Our online presence is not a set it and forget it type of deal. We need to come up with regular, relevant content to keep the audience engaged. A simple, one-page web site is just not going to cut it. Keeping a steady and consistent update schedule will instill trust with our brand. It will show that we can stick firmly to an idea and follow through with the promises. If you need help with scheduling content to go out consistently across your social profiles, check out tools like Buffer.
Search engines focus on quality over quantity, one thing to take note of. Companies with a strong social media presence will get much further, much faster than those that don’t utilize these powerful platforms. With this knowledge, we can climb the SEO ranking ladder with great speed and reach more people than ever.