Do Social Media and SEO Impact Google Rankings?

Social Media and SEO – The Truth

The Internet is an ever-evolving thing, and getting the marketing results you need requires adaptability. You might have stuck with simple SEO “techniques” in the past, but changes in search engine algorithms make it important to realize how important social media sharing is to your overall SEO strategy. With that being said, knowing your current SEO ranking and score is extremely important before even thinking about making any changes.

There are important reasons why you should incorporate social media in your SEO campaigns, but here are 3 super important things to think about in regards to socials impact:

1. Social Links Might Boost Your Search Rank

In Google’s Matt Cutts’ 2014 video he says that Google crawls social websites for data in the same way that it would any other site:

“Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index, and so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it then we can return that in our search results.”

2. Social Media Profiles Do Rank in Search Engines

Walmart’s facebook page ranks number 6 when you search “Walmart” on google. Most people consider Google+ non-essential, business owners and marketers shouldn’t ignore the fact that your Google+ profile is one of the first things you will see and possibly click on.

3. Don’t Forget About the 2nd Biggest Search Engine

Bing said:

“We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results.”

Now, here are 8 reasons why combining social media and SEO into your marketing campaign are critical to your business’s success.

1. The world is getting more and more social online.

As of August 2014, there were 2.95 billion active Internet users, and 2.03 billion active social media users. People use social media to connect with their friends and family, and they rely on recommendations from those same contacts when they are looking for solutions to their problems. Social media sharing helps you reach out to more of an audience than SEO alone ever could.

2. Rankings are strongly correlated with social signals.

While social media shares aren’t directly involved in the internal workings of the search engine algorithms (YET), the number of likes, shares, followers, tweets, and mentions may affect your organic search rankings and also boost traffic.

3. Social shares give you more inbound links.

You will increase traffic, even aside from the search engine rankings, from social shares. Links are like online votes users place on your website, increasing your online visibility and sending more traffic to your page. A great social sharing WordPress Plugin is Sumome which will solve this need for free. If you are not using WordPress, I highly suggest making the switch before you get to deep in your SEO campaign as much of your work may go to waste.

4. Social Sharing + SEO Multiplies Your Presence Online

Once again, you get more traffic from social shares. Where we used to use link building campaigns to improve our online presence, recent changes in the landscape of the Internet makes social media sharing more effective in generating quality traffic.

5. The traffic from SEO + Social is real traffic.

Here are some interesting figures: 95% of links generated through traditional SEO “link building” methods don’t bring in quality, targeted visitors to your site, because traditional SEO focuses on keywords and not content relevance. On the other hand, 95% of social media links involve real people, usually highly targeted audience in your social circles, which drives real, high-quality traffic to your websites.

6. Social media draws in mobile search users.

There are approximately 3.6 billion mobile Internet users, and more and more of those users are doing their social networking on the go. This means you can draw mobile traffic to your landing pages by encouraging social sharing. This is why it is important to have a responsive website. WordPress is the platform that can allow you to do develop a responsive site without hiring primadonna developers.

7. Positive reviews from social media. (Local Search)

Generating positive reviews from customers is important for businesses who maintain brick-and-mortar establishments, too, because reviews on Google Local and Yelp can boost your page in local search rankings.

8. Social + SEO can boost brand engagement.

Increasing customer engagement is known to improve brand-to-customer relationships, which means more loyalty, return customers and an increased bottom line. Repeat visits to your site are treated by the search engines as important metrics to positively rank a site in the organic search results, which will help your SEO efforts.

As you can see there is an abundance of reasons to incorporate social media into your online marketing strategies. Social media Impacts SEO and can be 100% free or paid, but however you decide to roll, it should be involved. Especially, if you want to improve your rankings. If that’s not enough, though, remember this bonus reason: social media will continue to grow more important to search engine rankings said by the man himself.

Did you find these social media and SEO facts useful? Do you have anything you would like to add? Feel free to ask any additional questions in the comments below. Share with someone you believe this can help too!

Do Social Media and SEO Impact Google Rankings?