Social

Lastly, let’s take a look at the social factors of off-page SEO. Besides social signals directly from the searcher, there are other ways good results on social media will help you rank better.

Whether that’s directly through more links or indirectly through a PR boost, social matters.

Elements of Social for SEO

There are two main factors of influence:

Quality of Shares

SEO marketing and social media marketing go hand-in-hand because the goal is to tell Google how great you are. If people are out there sharing your content and spreading the reach further, what does that tell Google?

It tells them people like what you have to offer, and you’re providing great value to people. This is good for Google.

Number of Shares

The secondary social metric is the number of shares. Landing a viral hit is every marketer’s dream, but it is overrated. There are a lot of tips and hacks out there, but the truth is a little simpler: Make awesome content.

That means different things to different people. For example, in the marketing space, I’ve found long-form content almost always outperforms short-form. Now, consider celebrity gossip sites for a second. No one wants to slog through a whole bunch of words. The opposite is almost true here. Their audience wants something succinct with a lot of drama. They want more videos and images with less text.

This is the bread and butter of sites like Buzzfeed and TMZ. They draw you in with these big headlines that make something sound way more exciting than it is. How many people do you think share that without even reading the article?

Probably a lot.

To get shares in the SEO game, you simply need to create awesome content that people like to read, on a site where people are reading. That’s again why I said before how important it is to guest post on sites with an actual readership. If you’re guest posting somewhere with no readers, do you think the post will get any shares?

3 Tips to Improve Your Social Sharing

Here are three tips to get more shares on social media:

1. Create great content: Creating the best quality content is the way to get shares, plain and simple. Google spends plenty of hours and more money than you can fathom preventing people from gaming the system. It’s a simple concept, really. It’s an exchange of value. Everything in business is an exchange of value, and the same goes for SEO marketing. Provide valuable content to Google, and Google will reward you.
2. Be consistent: Consistency is extremely important in SEO and social media. If you post once every three months, not only will social media algorithms hate you, there won’t be anyone around to share the content because it’s been so long since your previous post. Posting consistently on social media requires you to have new content to share on a regular basis as well. It all goes full circle.
3. Make it easy: There are many plugins to promote social sharing, so you need to use something on your site. If the reader can’t figure out a simple way to share your post on social media, they’ll likely move on.