Social Signals in SEO: Understanding the Value of Likes for Every Business

Content creation is currently one of the primary drivers of marketing and business success. No matter where it’s published, it has the power to draw attention and educate your audience. However, the end goal is not content creation itself. It is an engagement. And that’s because engagement is what drives conversions.

Audience engagement can do a lot, including:

• Boost marketing efficiency.
• Stimulate lead generation and customer acquisition.
• Increase profitability, and more.

And which of these is true about social signals? In fact, each of these statements.

Of course, there are many metrics that speak about audience engagement. These can include organic traffic, pages per session, the time people spend on your site, etc. Nevertheless, metrics like likes, saves, shares, and others play an equally important role, although they are frequently overlooked. In this article, we’ll tell you why they matter so much and why every business should measure and optimize them today.

What Are Social Media Signals?

Social signals are tools meant for interactions between users on social media platforms. In marketing and business, these are used as metrics to gauge user engagement, as well as a form of proof. They can take many different shapes depending on the specific platform in question. The most common types include:

• Followers
• Likes/reactions
• Comments
• Shares/retweets
• Mentions/tags
• Saves
• Pins (Pinterest)

Why Should Every Business Care About Social Signal Metrics?

New followers, a large number of likes, and similar metrics are great indicators of the success of your SMM strategy and the growing popularity on networks. However, the influence of these metrics is much deeper than that. There are three areas of your business that can be improved by them:

Online Visibility

Today, SMM has a massive impact on brand equity, firstly, because of the exposure it gives you. There are 5.66 billion identities on media platforms (out of 6.04 billion overall users on the web). So, getting out there automatically gives more visibility.

Engagement indicators play an important role here. That’s because they demonstrate the popularity of your content to the networks themselves. And their algorithms reward you by pushing your publications higher in feeds and recommendations. This way, engagement signals help more people find you.

Brand Awareness

Despite giving you a broader reach and general visibility, media networks will not give you greater awareness unless people engage with your content and become new clients. Why? There is a marketing phenomenon known as banner (ad) blindness. The human brain constantly filters out unnecessary information. When users don’t intentionally interact with your content, it gets recognized as unnecessary information.

Yet, when you consistently generate signals (aka engagement metrics), the audience will remember you and start recognizing your content. It will also make your brand pop up in feeds more frequently. Respectively, your awareness will grow. Additionally, a strong SMM strategy can give you more brand mentions. Some people may simply share your publications. Others may tag you in their publications. Sometimes, you may even earn backlinks from the shareable content you create. And all of this can also contribute to your awareness through PR.

Credibility

High engagement metrics indicate the relevance of your content, as well as the high level of trust among users. People who come across your profiles and content for the first time will likely look at the number of followers, likes, and overall interactions to see how credible your brand is.

A recent survey by the Bazaar Voice revealed that modern consumers want to see trust marks on all types of copy they see on the web, from customer reviews to website copy and media publications. This need has emerged from the growing number of fake content they see on the Internet. And that’s where likes and other signals matter a lot. They show that other people are engaging with you, which builds perceived reliability and authority. Furthermore, they give you enhanced social proof.

And what is social proof in marketing, you may wonder? It’s a phenomenon where others’ opinions guide people’s purchase decisions. Simply put, the likes you receive from some give you more leads and, potentially, sales.

Social Signals for SEO

So, social signal metrics impact:

• Online visibility
• Brand awareness
• Credibility

This is already enough to understand why they matter for every business. But there is more.

We all know SEO as a powerful tool for becoming visible on the web and generating traffic. Back in 2015, Google’s search advocate, John Mueller, explicitly stated that engagement signals are not direct ranking factors. And we could put a dot here. However, it’s more complicated than that, and engagement that comes from your SMM strategy can actually affect your rankings. Just indirectly. And that’s one more reason why you should care.

Though they may not be direct factors, social media signals can indirectly improve your rankings. Here are a few big benefits of social signals SEO:

• The overall reputation of your website and content is among the direct ranking factors. Based on Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines, its manual search evaluators do look at the brand’s networks and publications to assess the reputation. So when they see engagement, it can reflect on your reputation.
• E-E-A-T is also a direct factor. Your activity on various networks can affect it in two ways. Firstly, publications made on platforms like Instagram or Facebook often share first-hand, real-world experience and expertise of a brand, which helps establish you as an authority in your niche. Secondly, likes and shares act as votes that help boost trust.
• A rapid surge in virality is a strong indicator of trust and relevancy. Search engines notice it when something goes viral and provide more frequent crawling and faster indexation for such content to keep their rankings relevant. And, let’s face it – there is no better place to go viral than media platforms, and your SEO social signals are direct indicators of virality.
• Traffic is also a well-known factor that affects your positions in SERPs a lot. However, it doesn’t only come from organic search or ads. SEO social signals can also bring more people to your site. When people come across your publications and see that they’re relevant and engaging, they will be more likely to follow the link in your bio and check out your website. This can give you additional quality traffic for better rankings.
• Lastly, let’s not forget about something that matters most today. The growth of AI-powered search is rapidly changing the way we approach SEO. In a world where zero-click search becomes a reality, we really want to focus our efforts on getting featured in AI results. And that’s one more area where we see the value of social signals for SEO. Although they are not direct AI ranking factors, likes and shares can give you greater visibility, awareness, and authority, which are all important for AI search.

Measuring Social Signals

There are two ways to check social signals:

1. Built-in tools. Pretty much all platforms offer embedded analytics. For example, there are Meta Insights for Instagram and Facebook, and X Analytics for X.
2. All-in-one marketing analytics tools. All-around solutions like Google Analytics or Sprout Social give you insights into all aspects of your marketing from a single dashboard.

Regardless of the chosen analytics method, you need to focus on things that matter the most, such as:

• Follower growth
• Engagement rate
• Shares and mentions
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Sentiment

Pay attention that we don’t list vanity metrics, such as likes, here. The truth is that these metrics may look impressive, but they don’t reflect the long-term impact of your SMM efforts. And that’s why you should focus on stronger and more reliable metrics, such as those listed above.

Additionally, don’t forget to track the impact of your SMM efforts on other marketing areas, such as SEO. Use solutions like AI results tracking tools like airesultstracker.com and an SEO analytics tool as a part of your SMM analytics.

The Bottom Line: How Businesses Can Strengthen Their Social Signals

After reading this guide, you should better understand the social signals SEO and brand link and know why they matter for your business. The last question left there is how to improve your engagement in networks. And the truth is that there is no secret to this. SMM success is mainly determined by consistency, effort, and quality. So, here are a few basic tips that you can use:

• Create quality and shareable content.
• Post consistently.
• Actively interact with your audience.
• Encourage followers to tag you and create user-generated content.
• Optimize your profiles using SMO.
• Continuously monitor the results and refine your strategy.