The question whether social media has an impact on SEO is something that has been long debated over. Many top companies have showed data proving that their social media did impact their SEO but many did disagree with it. Few years back, Google itself released a statement denying any affect of social media on their social rankings. But now as the years have passed, the impact of social networks have changed and become more impactful. In fact, in the year 2018, more social networks started appearing on the search engine.
Exponential growth has been noticed on Facebook and Twitter pages that now show in the Google results. This has completely altered the way SEO worked in the past and has definitely proved the positive affect of social media on SEO.
So there is the question: can social media help improve the search rankings?
There were proper tests conducted to find out the answer to this question. To ensure that the readings are accurate, some important data was collected, which included:
- The keywords that were going to be tracked
- The URLs that would be tracked
- The monthly search for the keyword
- The ranking of the article before the test
- The ranking of the article 48 hours after the test
- The ranking of the article one week after the test
- The number of links related to the article before the test
- The number of websites that related to the article before the test
- The number of links related to the article after the test
- The number of websites that related to the article after the test
- The URL rating after the test
After the remark from Google, they people started believing that there is an indirect relationship between social media and SEO. So it goes like this, content that is good and performs well on the social platform would get more backlinks and hence its ranking in the search engine would improve.
This relationship also affects helped in articulate if the traditional domain played any role in the change of the rank. Page authority metrics is based on the SEO programme that searched the webpages and then collects the data to find out its relationship with the website.
After the experiment it was seen that the rankings did change and with the improvement in the keywords and the social media performance, the rankings had improved. This proved that there was a strong connection between the social activity and rankings.
However, when the study was checked thoroughly, it was seen that the relation was strong but it did not stick to the content that did good. Meaning, if a particular content has been boosted on social media and did good, it alone cannot improve the ranking of the website. The rank, when observed within the 48 hours of posting, did not notice any sudden boost in the performance. It is also the social engagement that affects the overall ranking. As it is said, the organic and boosted perform in favor of the rankings when they work as a control group, together. Otherwise, the rankings eventually fall.
Social engagement is a very important factor that determines the ranking. The test also found that there is a positive relationship between the number of social engagements and the changes in rank. Better engagement means there would be more and much frequent leads and that it would eventually improve the rankings.
It was concluded that social presence can be helped with SEO and vice versa but what the marketers have to keep in mind is that this relationship doesn’t give them the power to spam people’s feed. If they do so, it can cost them their followers and you do not want to risk the number of followers while focusing on the ranking.
The rate at which you post does affect the feed and the ranking but it would be useful in the long run only if you offer them something worth reading. If you do post a lot of content but none of it is important then your followers will not respond to the posts after some time and if will all be worthless. So if you want to make sure that the followers stick to you and stay loyal so that you can focus on improving the rank, you too have to value them. Offer them something that is worth their time. Something that they are willing to see and read.
Backlink is just one way to improve your reach. If you offer your viewers content that is worth reading, they might share the link and this reach would also improve your rankings.
Social media consulting services help you get both the quality read and the reach you demand. So as you focus on everything, the link between the social and SEO stays and it important, until the things offered are focused on quality and not quantity.
