What Are Social Signals?
The importance of social media has continued to grow in recent years, both in the private and commercial sectors. A share on a social media portal can provide more traffic to your own site. Likes and comments on tweets enable unfiltered communication with potential customers. This gives companies an impression of their image and they can try to respond to users’ comments with appropriate content. So social signals are an indicator of the quality of content, but do they also affect the ranking of a page?
To a certain extent, yes, because if the content is right, maybe one or the other blog (or other site) will put a backlink — and backlinks are relevant for Google ranking. So social media and social signals certainly seem to have an impact on a site’s ranking, and subsequently on traffic.
Of course, marketing strategists have also recognized this and are now trying to use social media and social signals for search engine optimization. However, whether and to what extent it is really possible to integrate social signals into SEO measures is hotly debated by experts. Several studies claim to have found that social signals have a very direct influence on the Google ranking. Successful pages whose content is classified by Google as very relevant and which have received many likes and shares via social media are said to serve as proof.
In summary, it can be said that although social signals have an influence on the ranking of a page, they can only be used directly for SEO measures to a limited extent. Of course, this does not mean that they are useless for search engine optimization. However, social signals should be seen as what they are: an indicator for the reach of a page.
Social signals stand for reach
Great sites that rank well on Google usually have lots of topic-relevant content and lots of backlinks, because both are crucial for a good position in search results. However, these pages often have something else — lots of followers on social media channels. This, in turn, provides further traffic to the page. If you have 10,000 followers on Facebook or a similar number of followers on Twitter, a status update or a few tweets will certainly attract a few of these followers to your site, who will then leave social signals such as likes or provide further traffic with shares.
Ultimately, it is of secondary importance whether these social signals have a direct effect on the ranking, and can, therefore, be used for SEO measures or whether they only work via the “detour” of backlinks from followers. Much more decisive is the effect that social signals can have on other users.
How can social signals be used?
Just like “real” user ratings in online stores, social signals have a very special effect on other people — they act as a confidence-building measure. It is this simple — if a page has so many followers, it must be relevant to the topic; otherwise it wouldn’t have so many followers.
However, one should not overestimate this effect. Just because a page has 100,000 followers on social media, the traffic will not necessarily go through the roof. The content of the page must be of a correspondingly high quality to justify this large number of fans.
And it must be regularly expanded, because otherwise 100,000 followers will quickly turn into 100,000 good-for-nothing that provide neither traffic nor social signals.
However, if social signals are integrated into a sensible content and marketing strategy, numerous new opportunities arise that can ultimately also improve Google’s ranking. High-quality and up-to-date content ensures many social signals and a lively and active social profile page. This in turn forms the basis for further measures, such as setting up a newsletter distribution list with addresses of people who are actually interested in the services and products advertised. Alternatively, it would also be conceivable to build up a channel for direct marketing that complements the regular sales channels.
But even without further measures, this approach can move a company forward; social signals create trust, and that can be ideally used for brand building and brand awareness. In addition, followers can indirectly improve rankings by setting backlinks on blogs or private pages, for example.
Just like all other SEO measures, one-sided marketing strategy will hardly lead to success nowadays. To be successful in search engine optimization, you have to rely on several measures that interlink, and thus complement each other. So social signals can certainly ensure more business success, but only if they are combined with good content, activities on the social media channels and other SEO measures.
