Boost SEO Rank Using Social Signals – ShopSocially and Americaneagle.com Webinar Tells You How

Social signals are influencing SEO Rank. 7 out of top 8 SEO Ranking factors today are social in nature. Marketers using back-links and keyword optimization to drive SEO are still not aware of the full potential of social for their SEO needs. To help marketers unlock this latent power of social, ShopSocially and Americaneagle.com conducted a webinar to showcase proven strategies to boost SEO Rank using social signals. Below is the recording of the webinar and the presentation used.

Recording of the webinar:

Presentation used in the webinar:

Strategies to Boost SEO Rank Using Social:

1. Increase content sharability via onsite social apps:
Google’s official blog now says that sites can rank better if their content is shared often by users. To increase sharing, marketers should embed social apps on their site. Marketers can also incentivize sharing so that customers do social SEO for them. This results in C2C spread of brand on social. By encouraging social sharing of purchases on their e-commerce stores, retailers can convert customer delight on order completion into SEO boost for their sites.

2. Optimize shared content for maximum SEO benefit:
Marketers should ensure that the content snippet shared on social media is optimized to derive maximum SEO benefit. Besides optimizing the title, description and image for SEO purposes, marketers can also influence the share blurb by asking a leading question in the sharing interface. Leveraging Google Authorship is an important tool for content marketers. It shows the author’s Google Plus profile in the search results, increasing the credibility and click-through rate. See the recording/ presentation to find out how to set up Google Authorship.

3. Channel social UGC for SEO benefit:
Customers are already sharing a lot of content about brands on social media. From simple Facebook status updates to rich visual testimonials on Instagram, this social UGC can be used for SEO benefit by getting users to add brand hashtag to it. Hashtag in social SEO is equivalent of keyword in content SEO. It defines the intent of user and increases the searchability of brand on social media. Search engines show more social results when users search for a hashtag.

4. Show social UGC as social proof on site:
Social UGC acts as excellent social proof on website. This is social buzz by real people with their true social profiles, and hence increase the user engagement on site. Also by embedding this social UGC natively on site using Product Stories app of ShopSocially, marketers can have a fresh content on their page regularly, further boosting the SEO Rank.

Excerpt from the Question & Answer Section of Webinar

Question: How do different search engines treat hashtags? Do they show different results?

Answer: All search engines have already integrated hashtags in their index. If user start typing a keyword with hashtag (#) symbol, you will get a different auto-complete suggestions as compared to normal keywords. For example, if user searches on Google for “Social SEO” and “#SocialSEO”, different results are shown. Hashtags as search keywords brings up more social media results. This clearly shows that hashtags are being treated differently and search engines.

Question: What are some of the key considerations to use social signals for enhancing SEO rank of an e-commerce site?

Answer: To ensure that your sharable content is being optimized for SEO, e-commerce sites can do following:

  • Make sure that product details are included properly in OG tags; product images are indexed and relevant
  • Link social sharing posts to relevant product URL on your website
  • Product videos can significantly add to the virality. In fact, YouTube has now become 2nd most popular search engines
  • Monitor your social community to ensure positive reviews on social network

Question: Are all users created equal or are there some users that may have a bigger impact on SEO?

Answer: Users with a larger and/or more active social network have bigger impact on SEO. For Social brand UGC like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook visuals, getting a user with an active social network gets more clicks and drives more sharing. With more number of social signals, it has higher SEO impact.

boost SEO ranking through social and referral marketing

For more details how to employ these social SEO strategies for your brand, please write to us at [email protected] or contact us here