Make em’ SHARE

As we mentioned in this series earlier, Google isn’t something you need to fight. Your goal and their’s should be the same. Their interest, as regards search, is to deliver to the end user the content that is the most valuable given the search terms entered. YOUR goal should be the same.

And so we’re making great content, but we’re paying attention to certain ranking factors that Google looks at as algorithmic indicators that their customer (the end user on Google) likes what they’re seeing.

One of those ranking factors is also social shares. Because, in the list of things that readers usually do when they love a piece of content (they’ll scroll, they’ll stick around, they’ll click around), they also might just SHARE the content on social media.

People don’t generally share articles on social if they think they suck, right? 🙂 So, a social share is a pretty nice vote of confidence in your piece of content.

So, yes, part of modern SEO today is to do what we can to get more shares across social media. Now, you can’t make people do that… but you can encourage it. Stuff like:

• Using tweetables. Highlighted quotes in your blog post that encourage people to retweet it (with, of course, a link to your post).
• Using images optimized for Pinterest. Infographics work well.
• Give them a content upgrade or some other bonus, but they have to share the article in order to unlock it.
• Use something like Thrive Comments for your blog comments… which allows you to give them a call to action after they comment. Which, of course, could be to share it.
• Have accessible social media share buttons on your content to begin with. Duh! 😉

All this stuff encourages social shares.

But, you know what you can also do in order to give you a big boost?

Pay for traffic. Yes… ads. We’re talking Facebook Ads…. promoted tweets… stuff like that.

Because many times when you pay to boost a piece of content, one of the awesome side effects other than direct click-throughs is that they’ll reshare the post. Essentially, they’re re-sharing your AD. They’ll reshare on Facebook. They’ll retweet. And all of that just adds to the social fuel being poured onto your page.

So, absolutely, you can very much help to engineer your own search rankings by buying traffic!

I mean, it’s up to you if you’re willing to do it. But, don’t act as if SEO is all a matter of luck. There’s a lot you can influence in a number of ways and paid traffic is one of them.

We’ve got the Facebook Ads Blueprint to help you get started with that.

See ya tomorrow.

– David