How Important Are Social Signals for SEO Rankings?

So a question, how important are social signals for SEO rankings? I’ve seen this debate many times over the years some people believe there is an impact, others will simply deny they have any impact at all. As many of you will know I like to try and test things and I wanted to see if social media signals did have any type of impact on a blog post I created.

Now what I mean by social signals is not me posting articles on my social media accounts, I mean getting engagements on these posts with other people, them linking sharing and commenting on my posts that require’s time effort and building relationships with others in the industry. Talking to influencers and getting them to share your content.

Testing

So around 4 weeks ago I done this article on SEMRush, my focus was to rank well for “SEMRush Tutorial” I have the guys over at my office in July showing one of my training classes their new functions and features, so I created a blog post which went into detail on all the different things that SEMRush can do.

After posting a blog it is normally no longer than a few days before my article gets picked up and indexed. My article was crawled and indexed and sat on page 3 for the search term ” SEMRush Tutorial ”

On around the 10th of August, I decided to share my article on social media to see what impact that would have on my rankings. The article has no backlinks ( it does have one now ) though. So I put the article on social media, I had SEMRush themselves retweet and share the article and many others also helped by kindly doing the same.

social signals seo

So after a couple of days of getting some decent social signals, I went back to Google to check my rankings to see what position I would be as a result of doing this, I was pleasantly surprised to see my article sat in pos 3 on page 1 for ” SEM Rush Tutorial “.

social signals for seo

Now I know many people will jump on this and say that they don’t have an impact on SEO, others will agree and I think if you think logically about it, an article that gets some decent social signal has to look more important to Google than an article that doesn’t.

I know that this isn’t exactly a competitive search term, however to me this clearly shows that social signals can have an impact on a website’s rankings.

Its also not bad for my affiliate sales on SEMRush too, which is always a nice little bonus with 4 sign ups in the past week to the FREE trial I give folks on that page. And you can also see the increase in traffic from people clicking on my SEMRush tutorial page and signing up and trying out the tool.

So it is always good to have social media as part of your overall marketing strategy as in my own mind, social signals do carry some weight and if you are not already doing this, then get involved and try it out and see what impact it has on your rankings.

And you may also be able to boost your affiliate sales too as a result of increased rankings. And it is also worth bearing in mind that your social media profiles, if you have the right type of audience and contacts on there, can also drive serious amounts of traffic to your website.

seo social signals

Need help with your social media or SEO campaigns? Feel free to get in touch to find out how we can be of assistance!

 

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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years. In this time I have gained extensive knowledge in the subject of SEO and have build up a wealth of experience in SEO and other digital marketing services.

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Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.

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