How Social Shares Can Help Your SEO

Social shares. Can they be useful for SEO?

They can. But probably not in the way that you think.

In this post, you will learn how social shares can help your SEO. Even when they refer to little to no traffic.

Let’s get into it.

Are social shares a ranking factor?

Social shares are listed as a direct ranking factor in Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines. So, more social shares will help you rank better in Bing!

Bing can’t send as much traffic to your website as Google, but it still gets over 900 million searches per day. That’s still huge.

What about Google?

Bing has been very transparent about certain parts of its algorithm, but that’s not how Google rolls. Even when we can get a straight answer out of them, we should probably take it with a grain of salt.

I understand why. They’re trying to protect their IP.

But FUD isn’t cool. 

Anyway, it’s unlikely that social shares will have a direct impact on your Google rankings.

However, they can give you a boost with other factors that will have a direct impact on your rankings. 

For example:

  • More traffic to your website – Google uses traffic data from Chrome in its algorithm. This was confirmed in the May 2024 algo leak. They also used private browsing data for a while. The latter was confirmed in a class-action lawsuit. Whether you’re getting traffic from social or direct traffic by a user typing in your URL manually, this traffic will help you rank in Google.
  • Link acquisition – Backlinks are a direct ranking factor. You need as many of these as possible. It’s possible Google could count some social shares as links, but the jury is still out on that. But social shares from the right accounts could lead to bloggers & writers discovering your content and linking to it. Publishing newsworthy and trending content is the way to make that happen.
  • Increased brand searches in Google – It has long been theorized by some SEOs that branded searches could be a ranking factor. Not that Google would ever confirm that. More branded search traffic can never be a bad thing, however.

Note: What I’ve written above may rub some people the wrong way, and I’m not sorry. The benefits are there. 

Some SEOs have conducted correlation studies and concluded that social shares don’t directly influence rankings. Then a bunch of people read those studies and conveniently ignored the nuance of their findings. Well, they didn’t seem to read past the clickbaity headlines in most cases. In particular, the part about direct vs indirect impact on rankings. 

It’s also worth noting that correlation studies are interesting but largely meaningless. We know that social shares influence different factors that do have a direct impact on rankings. But it’s beyond the scope of a correlation study to factor in those nuances.

Get your content indexed faster in Google

It’s a shame I don’t get paid every time I’m asked how to get Google to index content faster.

And there are a few different things you can do like using Google’s Instant Indexing API (only for job listings and a few other things), submitting your sitemap, requesting indexing directly via GSC, etc.

But there’s another way.

Share your post on X (Twitter) with popular hashtags. That’ll help.

X (Twitter) isn’t a walled garden in the same way that Facebook is. So, content can be crawled and indexed.

This is confirmed in X’s robots.txt file. Here’s a screenshot that shows Google’s crawler can access hashtags and a few other things:

x robots.txt file google crawl

I’ve used this approach to speed up the indexing of content for many years.

Now, there was a brief point in time when this stopped working. This was shortly after Elon acquired Twitter. But it was changed back not long after

Note: Never buy any kind of SEO indexing services. They’re pointless and nothing more than a grift. They always have been and always will be. If Google isn’t indexing your content, there’s likely a technical SEO issue. Or you just need to grow your site and acquire more links. You also need to train Google’s crawler to visit your site more regularly. Updating your content more often is another way to do that. 

The benefits of social shares go far beyond SEO

Social media doesn’t convert anywhere nearly as well as some other marketing channels. Email is a good example.

And for some, that makes the case for largely ignoring social media.

I think that’s a mistake.

If you run a service-based business, a single click can turn into a customer who stays with you for years and spends huge amounts of money with you.

For example, I used to write articles for industry publications that generated hardly any clicks. Plenty of views, sure. But referral traffic was grim.

I still managed to turn those clicks into a customer that spent over $40,000 with my marketing agency. Not bad, right?!

It went even further. I used social media and other tactics that referred fairly low amounts of clicks to take an agency from 0 to 6 figures in less than 4 months.

There are those that would have looked at what I was doing at the time and said it was a waste of time.

But the revenue tells a different story. 

It’s not the number of clicks, it’s what you do with them that counts.

What can you do to get more shares on your content?

The first and most obvious way to get your content shared on social media is to use your own accounts.

Scheduling tools like SocialBee can help you save time here. You’ll need to share your content every so often. A couple of paid boosts will help as well.

What about getting shares from other people, especially if you don’t have much of an audience yet?

There are a bunch of tools on the market that sell “social signals” as a service, but most of them provide no way of finding out whether content is actually being shared or who is sharing it.

Those should probably be ignored.

But there is one that works differently. It’s called Quuu Promote. I’ve had a monthly paid subscription for years, and it delivers great results for my content.

Here’s how it works:

They run a content curation and social scheduling tool called Quuu. This app is used by people who want to find engaging content to share on their socials.

The Quuu app will recommend content to these users. It’ll either send content to its built-in scheduler or a third-party platform like SocialBee. Some of the content comes from Quuu Promote customers.

This is the most effective way to get shares on content.

Here’s a screenshot from some of my active promotions:

quuu promote active promotions

I’ve been using the platform for quite a few years now, so my lifetime analytics do like kinda crazy:

quuu promote lifetime analytics

You can promote a variety of content types, including videos. They do have safeguards in place for quality, as you might expect. This is important for users of their curation platform.

You can also add your social media handles so that you get tagged on platforms like X (Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn when your content is shared.

All you need to do is submit your RSS feed or individual content URLs, select a topic category, and the platform will do the rest. Their AI will then generate social shares to help you get more engagement.

I also occasionally share posts that link to my sites. Amplifying these posts is a very good thing to do. 

Try Quuu Promote for yourself.

The results you get from Quuu Promote depend on the number of posts you submit, the quality of those posts, the topic category you choose, and who shares them.

Quuu users won’t share everything. They do have the option to not share content if they don’t want to. 

If you test Quuu Promote, you’ll need to test out different topic categories and submit a bunch of posts. Posts will be recommended to Quuu users for around 90 days, and some of those users will add your post to a queue so they won’t be shared immediately. 

Most importantly, you can’t just submit one post and expect results. Some content will just fall flat. Others won’t. Submit enough high-quality content, and things will balance out, providing there are enough Quuu users subscribed to the categories you choose.

Note: I am an affiliate of Quuu Promote, but I have had a paid subscription with them for years. I wouldn’t spend money on a tool for years unless it were good. That said, your mileage may vary. Take from that what you will.

Final thoughts

Most social shares aren’t going to refer to much traffic.

Some won’t generate any clicks at all. Others have the potential to drive a lot of traffic, providing you can get the right people to share your content.

Regardless, social shares can still help your SEO. The benefits are just more nuanced.

They can help you rank higher in Bing directly.

In Google, you’ll be looking more for the indirect benefits such as increased brand searches, direct website traffic, more backlinks, and faster indexing of your content.

And with so much competition, it’s critical that you take every opportunity to make your content more visible.

Even if referral traffic is low, there are still opportunities to be found.

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