Do Shares + Likes Help You Rank Higher?

Social signals are not a Google ranking factor.

But they can increase your brand’s visibility in search results, generate traffic to your website, and build brand awareness. This is why social media should be part of your overall marketing strategy.

Do Social Signals Affect SEO?

In 2015, Google’s John Mueller stated unequivocally that social signals are not a direct ranking factor.

He explained how social content can sometimes make its way into search engine results pages (SERPs), which could drive traffic to your social media profiles or your website.

In other words, generating more likes, shares, or reposts (formerly retweets) for your article will not help it rank higher in Google. But it can still benefit your brand.

How Social Signals Could Affect SEO Indirectly

Despite not being a direct ranking factor, social media signals can play an indirect role in SEO.

But it can help your overall reputation, which can improve your site’s search performance over the long term.

Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines mention social media posts and profiles as one of the factors that manual search evaluators should use to assess the reputation of both content creators and websites.

Note: These guidelines are used by manual search evaluators hired by Google to give feedback on the overall quality of the search results. Google uses this feedback to make changes to search algorithms and improve quality of the results over time.

Social posts can also align with Google’s focus on...