How to Use Social Media for Search Visibility, Part 3 (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

Should you reward shares, likes and comments?

Another good tactic you can employ for social media is offering rewards for shares, likes and comments. Now, this one's a bit controversial — but I've seen it produce massive amounts of success for some websites, so we'll call it rewards.

What do I mean by that? Well: "share my content and get a 10% discount voucher", "like my content to enter my competition" — all of those sorts of things you've probably seen. If you can get people in a loop — they get an offer that says "share this and get this", they get it, they get onto the site, they place an order or they share it to more people — suddenly you've got a big explosion of traffic. So have that in your thinking when you're posting your social content.

Does social media influence SEO?

Going back to the first part of this section: does social media influence SEO? Absolutely. It's about traffic, and it's about engagement.

Google is massively rewarding relevancy. When someone lands on your site: is it relevant? Did they find what they wanted? Did they take an action? Did they move around your site? Did they buy? Did they enquire? Is there a conversion in there?

So what you want to do — and I'll come on to this later — is make sure there is a conversion goal in your site, built with Google Analytics. Google can then see that it's working, and that's going to send great signals back. All of this — shares, likes, comments, engagement — is called social signals, and you and your website need to think about that.

But don't just post "this is who we are, this is what we do", because nobody's really listening. Try to put interesting content together that your audience is going to watch, want to engage with, click through on, and then take an action on your website. That is one of the things that's going to massively benefit your SEO.