How Your Social Media Efforts Connect With Your Ranking from We Blog Better

How Your Social Media Efforts Connect With Your Ranking

Posted: 02 Dec 2013 09:00 PM PST

As a business owner, brand ambassador or everyday blogger, you know that search engine rankings matter. In many cases, they can make the difference between people being able to find your site in the first place, or going to your competitors for the same product or service that you provide.

You also know that search engine rankings are not affected by willpower, that they take targeted efforts to change.

You're probably also aware of the importance of social media. Facebook has 1.15 billion active users who check their sites an average of 5 times a day. Twitter 500 million total users with an average of over 400 million tweets posted per day. Anyone who has not taken the time to consider the impact of social media on potential marketing efforts has been missing out. But, what about a link between search engine rankings and social media efforts. Is there a connection that could make one beneficial for the other?

The answer is a loud and resounding yes. Social media efforts may affect search engine rankings more than any other SEO efforts, especially with recent changes to search crawlers and the demise of traditional link building. Keep reading to learn more.

The Data

Recently, an SEO company set out to find the link between social media efforts and search engine rankings and placements. Multiple websites were created across the country that were in the same niche, with a similar basic set up and use of location in the title and tagline. From there, different efforts were used on each site relating to social media promotion and search engine rankings were tracked over a series of months.

What they found was clear: the websites that took part in social networking activities and promotions saw a rankings rise of 2.88 to 16 places. The sites that did not use social media for promotion – the control group – saw a small decrease in placement. The underlying message? Without social media efforts, it may be impossible to increase search engine rankings.

Why do Social Media Efforts Connect With Rankings?

In the past, the number of inbound and outbound links, traffic and other factors were the most important ways to influence search engine rankings. While they still have an impact – to an extent – the search engine giants quickly found that these efforts were easy to manipulate on a large scale, leading to less reliable search results for the average online user.

Because search results should be credible, a new method had to be found, an unbiased method that could be used to validate one website's credibility over another. This is where social media became important. Social media sites were created with the intent of connecting regular people with other regular people, with the brands that influence them and with the world in general.

Posters share information relating not only to their lives – photos, statuses and so on – but, also relating to brands that influence them – specials, stories and more. In other words, everyday social media users give credit to businesses of all sizes. Search engines became aware of the trend and started to develop algorithms around this idea. Today, social media efforts have a larger impact on rankings than any other single factor.

What Matters Most?

Like any other SEO effort, it's important to understand that certain social media activities matter more in relation to search rankings than other activities. The following factors have been proven as the most effective for increasing rankings:

Number of Facebook likes for a brand or company page,
Number of Facebook shares for a brand or company's posted content,
The number of Twitter Followers,
The number of Twitter Retweets,
The number of Tweets that link to a brand's website or mention their tag,
The number of Google+ Circles a brand participates in or is mentioned in, and
The number of people who +1 a brand's content on Google+.

According to the latest study, these factors weigh most heavily in Google search results, but also impact other searches on Bing, Yahoo and other search sites. It's also important to note that these are not the only factors that play a role in search engine rankings, Pinterest, Foursquare, Reddit and other network sites play a role as well.

Regardless of the efforts used, it's important that any individual or business looking to increase search engine rankings take social media efforts into account, putting research, time and energy into increasing social networking activities. The data in, social media efforts are directly linked to search engine placements.

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