Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
(This is part two of The “new” SEO That Only 7% Of Marketers Truly Understand)
It’s the same logic with social SEO. Everyone uses social networks, so they’ll theoretically share good content and cool sites as they come across them. If a person really likes an article, they’ll share it with their friends.
Also, with the old way of thinking, popularity can only be gauged from people who own websites (i.e., a popularity vote only happens when another webmaster links to your site). In many niches, there aren’t many websites.
So how does one compete for top rankings without artificially building links? Even if their sites are amazing, they wouldn’t get anywhere unless people linked to them, which wouldn’t happen because barely anyone has sites in their niche. Make sense?
Incorporating social signals opens up a whole new world of accuracy. Now, popularity can be gauged from everyone, not just webmasters. It’s like only allowing webmasters to vote in an election.
In some elections across the globe, there might not be many webmasters. Which makes it obvious to allow all citizens to vote, as in this case, social network users.
Hopefully, that makes sense and explains why Google is using social signals to figure out how popular and high-quality a site is. Social signals are a term for backlinks from social networks or sites.
There are basically two kinds of social signals and places where they come from: SOCIAL NETWORKS and SOCIAL BOOKMARKING sites.
Social signals are becoming increasingly important. For obvious reasons, Google can’t solely rely on social signals as the only ranking factor.
So a combination of contextual and social backlinks is key right now, along with amazing content. What’s interesting is that a year ago, you couldn’t use social signals alone to rank a website for nearly anything. Now, however, using social signals alone, you can rank for some fairly competitive keywords.
The main social signals Google is paying attention to are:
- Google Plus Ones & Shares
- Facebook Shares
- Facebook Likes
- Twitter Tweets
- Twitter Retweets
- LinkedIn Shares
- Digg Diggs
- StumbleUpon Stumbles
- Other bookmarks
- Other social links
Social signals are dominated by the three main social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. There is a close correlation between rankings, incoming links, and Facebook likes in high-ranking websites. But besides those three sites, all social backlinks work similarly.
Diggs, Stumbles, Delicious shares, pretty much all social bookmarks, community websites, and social networks— all social backlinks contribute toward your “Social Presence.” A social presence is what Google wants to see.
Your presence doesn’t have to be in the form of Facebook likes and Tweets. It can be a mix of social shares, bookmarks, and backlinks. However, a strong presence on the three main social networks helps a lot. But annoyingly, a presence on those networks is very difficult to artificially create.
You need to build a real presence. Which brings me to the third core component.
Core Component Three: Community
Community is what brings this all together. If you can build a community, you’re pretty much sorted. Building a community is difficult, but your community will do most of the SEO work for you. They say you only need 1,000 raving fans to turn your book into a bestseller.
The same goes for websites, but it’s more like a few hundred. If you can get a few hundred to regularly read your content and share it, SEO will take care of itself. You’ll need to have some input with the contextual links, but a community sharing your content will create a lot of natural background noise so you’ll never be penalized for artificial link building.
If you can get a group of people reading all your content and sharing it, you’ll find your traffic exponentially increasing. But again, not every website can have a following. If you want huge viral success, choose a niche where you can build a community.
The first two components are freshness and popularity. Publishing great content is quite easy if you have a passion for the niche or hire someone who does. Then if you build a community, popularity will come naturally. Social signals will be automatic, you’ll attract more natural backlinks, and obtain great rankings.
So it begs the question: how do you build a community?
Since it’s a complex subject, I’ll break it down into the following steps:
- Publish Cool Content (I mean seriously cool stuff)
- Syndicate The Content (Syndicate and share the content on social networks and popular websites)
- Drive Extra Traffic (Build Some Contextual Links, Guest Blogging, etc.)
- Capture Readers (Set up an autoresponder and install opt-in forms)
- Install Social Sharing Buttons (Add sharing buttons for the top social networks to your content, this will cause viral traffic – traffic creating traffic)
- Send Subscribers Back To Your Content (Email your opt-in list of subscribers, sending them links to your new content as you publish it)
- Build Community Features (Comment Section, Forum, etc. – places where your subscribers can communicate with each other and discuss your site’s content & topics)
That concludes the three new principles and rules of “new SEO” and what you should be doing to hedge against Google updates.
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
In prosperity,
David Wood
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
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coffeemoneyuk
Seriously. NO comments on this?? Okay – let me be the first Dave;
Great content and a solid breakdown of what it takes to succeed using SEO as a part of your content marketing plan.
One thing worth adding to your list is the value of your network – the community you build may only be small but if it “buys in” to what you are providing in terms of content and conversation, that community will give you a MUCH bigger piece of the pie in terms of shares, comments, and ultimately “Friend Rank”. Google is way too wise to trick or manipulate, and anyone teaching short term tactics is doing it for their own gain and not yours. Good stuff Dave!
Emily Walcott
This post really helped me understand the shift in SEO strategies. I’ve always thought backlinks were the most important factor, but now I see how social signals can make such a difference. Thanks for sharing, David!
Jacob Helms
I’m having a hard time believing that social signals alone can help rank a site in competitive niches. Do you have any data or case studies to back this up? Would love to see some concrete examples.
Oliver Green
Could you explain a bit more about how Google is incorporating social signals into rankings? I’m particularly interested in how these signals compare to traditional SEO factors like backlinks and content quality.
Alicia Pearson
While I find the post insightful, I think there’s still a heavy reliance on backlinks. Social signals may help, but traditional SEO tactics should not be disregarded. What’s your take on this balance?
Monica Reyes
Hey David! I loved reading this post. It’s been a while, how have you been? We should catch up soon. Your insights on community building are fantastic as always.
Samuel Lawson
This is so relatable! I’ve been struggling to gain traction with my website even though the content is great. Now I see how much I’ve been missing out on by not focusing on social signals. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
Leo Cross
I’ve been using BuzzSumo to track social signals and compare them to competitors. Have you tried it, David? It’s a great tool that complements the strategies you’ve mentioned in your post.
Samantha Wells
I’ve learned so much from this post! I’ve always been focused on backlinks, but I now realize that building a community is crucial for long-term success. Thanks for opening my eyes to a broader SEO approach.
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What’s being missed is that step four — ‘capture readers’ and ‘send subscribers back to your content’ — are two separate systems most people never actually build. Skip either one and the community section collapses no matter how much you post.
I built the sharing buttons and syndication piece first, over about three weeks. Traffic ticked up. The part that actually stalled was ‘build community features’ — I set up a comment section and a forum sat empty for two months before I pulled it down. Freshness and popularity, in my experience, came a lot easier than community ever did.
There was a regular at my diner who’d sit at the counter for an hour just talking to whoever sat next to him, and half my slow nights turned busy because people wanted to be near that. Reading this piece on building a community before the SEO comes, that’s exactly it — you can’t syndicate your way to a room full of regulars, you have to be worth sitting next to first.
Seven steps on top of the other six from parts one and two. I work nights. Something in this stack has to be optional.
Do six things forever and you’ll be popular — that’s the plain version. Nobody says what happens when you’re already exhausted from your actual job.
I should say upfront I spent years on the field development side of a large direct-sales company, so I’m biased toward believing community matters, because we built entire incentive structures around exactly that. Nia, what you’re describing isn’t a personal failing, it’s a structural one — the seven-step list in this post assumes a person has the same hours available as someone doing this as their only job, and most of the field never does. What we saw internally was that the small percentage of people who did build real community features were almost always the ones who dropped one of freshness or popularity to make room for it. The post treats all three components as equally weighted and constant. In practice they trade off against each other, and against your actual life, and nobody upstream says that part out loud.
The social signals list is very US and UK centered — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg. In my market, and I think many others outside America, WhatsApp groups carry the sharing that this post assigns to Facebook shares entirely. Does ‘social presence’ as Google measures it recognize a community that lives mostly in private groups, or only public shares?
We called this something else back in 2009 — ‘raving fans’ was the phrase then too, same 1,000-true-fans idea repackaged with Digg and StumbleUpon standing in for whatever the current networks are. The tools change every few years. Publish good stuff, get people talking to each other about it — that part hasn’t moved in three companies’ worth of watching it happen.
Gus, ‘hasn’t moved in three companies’ is an anecdote, not a mechanism. The post claims a close correlation between rankings and Facebook likes on high-ranking sites — correlation with high-ranking sites tells you nothing about causation, since popular sites get both links and likes for the same underlying reason. What would actually distinguish ‘social signals rank you’ from ‘popular things get liked and linked’?