The evolution of SEO rankings through social media

SEO rankings have benefited tremendously through the use of social media platforms, but have you ever wondered what evolutionary steps were taken to get where we are at today?

With Google as the content king, there is a major need to ensure that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a priority in order to ensure that your site has the required traffic. This article will look into the evolution of SEO via the use of social media.

SEO rankings through social media now

Today, companies as well as agencies place social media as a priority when getting an SEO strategy. Based on a study done in 2013 known as the “State of Search Market Report 2013”, 74% of all companies surveyed mentioned that social media was a major part of their SEO strategy. Additionally, 82% of agencies interviewed concurred with this view. They chose to integrate social media to their SEO strategy in order to increase traffic organically.

However, after the release of these statistics by Econsultancy, Matt Cutts mentioned in a video that the said social signals had no influence on the search rankings on Google. This meant that marketers who had all the while assumed that social signals were important to their marketing endeavors were wrong. The said, social signals were not factored into the algorithm of Google’s search engine.

Neil Patel, who is the founder of Quick Sprout, mentioned later that the marketers should not discount social signals on SEO. Here are the reasons why any marketer should be keen when it comes to using social impact on SEO.

Social links can boost your search rank

For most marketers, links are a major boost to their ranking. Social media accounts do provide traffic to websites after the links are shared. According to Brian Honigman, placing links to your LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, or Twitter accounts helps search engines in showing the credibility of various keywords that you use for marketing purposes.

An interview that Danny Sullivan did with Google and Bing in 2010 proved that Bing does incorporate data that has been shared on social media. Google initially mentioned that they do not incorporate this data in the search rank algorithm. However, they later mentioned that they did.

Essentially, Google does crawl social signals for data in the same manner that any other site would do. Naturally, this shows that your data shared on social media is considered when it comes to ranking on Google. When it comes to the web index, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are treated like other web pages.

Therefore, social media does indeed affect the search rank for sites that marketers are using. Links used via social media are credible backlinks that influence the rank of a webpage.

Social media profiles help rank in search engines

Naturally, social shares have no influence on a webpage’s position insofar as search listings are concerned. Nonetheless, social media profiles feature in the top results for listings and brand names in search engines. For instance, if you search “General Electric” in the search engine Google, the companies Pinterest and Instagram appear among the results as the fifth and sixth listing with twitter as the eighth result.

Additionally, Google will display the Google+ result on the right hand side of the results page. Essentially, social channels do have a more personal feel when compared to web pages. They are the best way to test a company’s personality. When researching a company, it is always good to go to their Twitter or Facebook page in order to get the personal feel of the said company. Therefore, when results show social media accounts, most users of the search engine are likely to click on the social media account as opposed to the web page presented in the results.

Therefore, there is no doubt that social profiles are considered by Google. It is true that it would be more fun to get to know about a company via a social media account compared to the web page. You get to know the brand as well as what it stands for as a company. Therefore, it is always wise to ensure that you update your social media account in order to get more traffic online.

Social media channels considered search engines

Today, social media channels are also used as search engines. According to Patel, social media is a major part of search engine optimization. For instance, if your company is active on Twitter, chances are that people realize your product or services are high. In addition, they will also discover your updated content. Similarly, those brands that have high visual content benefit from marketing their content through Instagram and Pinterest by using hash tags for those posts on social media.

It is imperative to note that you need to categorize your content well before you pin a new image. Most people will go to social media channels in order to find out what kind of presence you have. The greater the presence, the more traffic you will gain from Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.

Possibility for Google to rank social media channels in the future

The fact that Google does not provide search rank for social signal does not mean it never will. The necessity of social media to search engines will not dwindle any time soon. Therefore, it is important for marketers to heighten their endeavors insofar as social media is concerned. They need to use any social media tool for marketing now in order to ensure that in the future, there will be results in terms of traffic, ranking, and web index results. Use Instagram or Pinterest for photographs, use Facebook, and Twitter for updates and use YouTube or Google+ for videos and other marketing updates. This way, when Google considers social signals in web index results, marketers who have been using it will be ahead of the pack.

Finally, never forget search engines such as Bing when updating your webpage content. You can use social media to increase traffic to your site and gain better results.

Jacob Baadsgaard is a world-renowned guru in social media marketing. Additionally, he has helped in creating the site instamacro.com. He has helped many marketers in improving their marketing endeavors using social media. There are numerous articles online about this social media and marketing.