Samir Palnitkar, President of ShopSocially, and Tim Ahlenius, Senior Digital Strategist at Americaneagle.com, presented a webinar in July showcasing strategies to boost SEO rank using social signals.
Palnitkar and Ahlenius said retailers can unlock the latent power of social to drive SEO rank of their website by employing these 4 strategies.
Increase Content Sharability via Onsite Social Apps
Google’s official blog says that sharing is an important factor impacting the SEO rank. To improve the SEO Rank, marketers should embed onsite social apps on their site to drive higher sharing.
To drive shares on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, best strategy marketers can adopt is C2C. Besides creating valuable social testimonials, social recommendations also bring in quality social traffic back to retailers website. Retailers can convert customer delight on order completion into SEO boost for their sites.
Optimize shared content for maximum SEO benefit
Marketers should optimize the content snippet shared on social media 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, thus increasing the credibility and click-through rate. Marketers must ensure that the product details are included properly in OG tags; product images are indexed and relevant.
Social UGC for SEO benefit
Customers are sharing content about their favorite brands on various social media channels. Marketers can convert this social user generated content into social brand UGC by getting users to add brand hashtag to their social updates.
A hashtag in social SEO is equivalent to keyword in content SEO. It defines the intent of user and increases the searchability of brand on social media. Marketers can aggregate these social testimonials and curate these precious social referrals into one page. Getting customers to add your brand hashtag enhances brand’s overall digital presence and boosts SEO rank of your website.
Social UGC as Social Proof on site
Social user generated content acts as excellent social proof on website. Real-time social buzz by real people with their true social profiles increases the user engagement on site thus increasing the page rank for the site.