‘Social signals’ and their effect on your search rankings

Though it is widely acknowledged that social media plays a valuable role in any SEO campaign, it is currently incredibly misunderstood and massively complicated. If you are making the most of this tool, engagements and activities will make a noticeable impact on your website’s overall ranking, however, it probably won’t be in the way you expect.

As Moz recently stated in their 2015 search ranking factors report, Google has never disclosed its SEO algorithm to us, which then makes it beyond impossible to isolate a singular factor that has direct influence over domain authority. What we can do is use readily available data to make an educated guess at the most successful and influential factors.

The report also discussed page-level social metrics and how they are evaluated to be the ninth most correlative quality for high search rankings. ‘Page-level social metrics’ refers to both the quantity and quality of tweeter links as well as shares on Facebook.

Simply put; the more shares and retweets your content gets, the higher your chances of achieving your dream ranking.

It is also thought that the number of likes or followers your pages receive does not play a factor in you search rankings. This is not to say that having a large following is worthless by any means, the more followers you have the wider the pool of people you are reaching and the higher the chances are your content will be shared and reach even more people.

As always, the quality is much more than the quantity, this applies for content as well as followers. Having fewer followers that are high engagers is much more valuable than having more silent ones. There are heaps of techniques you should be using to try to increase your audience engagement.

While social media does undeniably have the power to impact you ranking in search engines, it is important that you understand what elements of social media marketing are affective and which ones aren’t.