Social Signals and How They Affect the SEO of Car, Leisure Vehicle & Motorcycle Dealers
Social signals refer to visible user interactions such as shares, likes, comments, and mentions, which can be detected by search engines. While they are not a direct ranking factor, they can indirectly influence your organic SEO performance by increasing traffic and engagement — similar to how backlinks can have an impact.
When you share links on social media, you create opportunities for more visitors to reach your site. Increased traffic can positively affect other SEO ranking factors, such as dwell time, click-through rate, and repeat visits.
Are Social Signals Important for SEO?
Social signals can indirectly benefit SEO by boosting key engagement metrics. If your content attracts visitors via social media and those visitors stay longer, interact more, and explore other areas of your website, search engines may interpret that as a sign of quality and relevance.
Do Social Signals Directly Improve Rankings?
No — search engines do not currently use social signals such as likes, shares, or follower counts as direct ranking factors. This is largely to prevent manipulation. For example, a large influencer could artificially promote a low-quality site to millions of followers, skewing search results if such signals were counted as ranking criteria.
However, the indirect benefits are significant. By driving targeted traffic, social media can help improve the performance of your user experience and content optimisation strategies, both of which feed into search engine algorithms.
Social Signals – Best Practice Checklist
- Share your website content regularly across relevant social media platforms.
- Encourage genuine engagement — comments, shares, and discussion — not just likes.
- Use engaging visuals and headlines to increase click-through rates.
- Track referral traffic from social media to measure performance.
- Integrate share buttons into your website to make sharing easy for visitors.
- Ensure linked pages are optimised and provide value to keep users on-site longer.