How Social Media Impacts Your Search Rankings

Social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn always rank well for businesses. The content you are posting on your social media networks also has an impact on your overall ranking strategy. Your individual activity on social media networks and how it relates to your website ranking is referred to as “social signals.”

What can be confusing is understanding the impact of an individual post to your website ranking. While speaking at the social and search conference Pubcon in New Orleans this week several industry experts established some guidelines for improving your social signals.

Don’t write boring content. Krista Neher, CEO of Boot Camp Digital, gave this simple advice. She said take an extra two minutes to purposely improve every piece of content you are going to publish. This goes for tweets, posts, blogs and any other content. Too often businesses are in such a hurry to get content out they are missing the opportunity to create better content that has a higher chance of getting shared or engaged with.

Shares on Facebook matter most. Alison Zarrella, author of The Facebook Marketing Book, shared that on Facebook shares are best, followed by comments and lastly likes. She recommends that you avoid over publishing promotional offers and links to your website. When you are going to publish a promotional offer try to add in valuable content to your user base. Create content to accompany your offer that would be easy to share. If the content will make the user look informed or funny they are more likely to share it with their friends.

How people search is changing. Even though we cannot easily measure direct effects of posting on social media to your overall website ranking everything is moving toward social signals. This makes sense since the search engines are attempting to deliver search results that matter most to the users. Justin Sanger, former CEO of Local Search, explained that marketers need to stop building links and start focusing on the fact that search engines are trying to mimic human behavior. If you want to go to restaurant and your friend gives you a suggestion you are likely to go there. So obviously getting networks of people to talk about you will eventually dominate search results. And this is best accomplished on social media networks.

Jabez LeBret is the author of the Amazon No. 1 bestselling law office marketing book How to Turn Clicks Into Clients. As a partner at Get Noticed Get Found, a legal marketing agency, over the last nine years he has delivered over 800 keynote addresses in six countries. His main area of expertise is managing Gen Y in the workplace, advanced Facebook strategies, LinkedIn strategies, Google+, SEO, local directory optimization, and online marketing. 

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