{Infographic} Testing Social Media Signals and Search Rankings

Have you been wondering how social media activity impacts your search ranking? Who hasn’t? The simple and understood truth is that of course social media activity has an effect on rankings; the more difficult part is trying to figure out what that may be.

TastyPlacement, Inc. did a study on five websites and five social media sites (plus a control) to try to gauge exactly how a company’s ranking was impacted after a social media campaign. They created six websites in six different (yet similarly-sized) U.S. cities, observed their rankings after 10 months, and then began five separate social media campaigns.

The Results

Perhaps not so surprisingly, Google+ activity yielded the most improved rankings, while the website promoted through a Twitter campaign ended up with a slight drop in rankings (-1.22). The two websites that secured Google+ followers and votes saw significant change (14.63 and 9.44 respectively), with the Facebook-promoted site just right behind. Totally unsurprisingly, the control (no social media activity at all) had no change.

Now what?

While the experiment showed no end-all or conclusive  findings, the causal relationship between increased rankings and certain social media activity is compelling enough to take seriously. It does clearly show that any solid SEO strategy will need to pay attention to social media signals and activity.

If you are looking to improve your organic search ranking with targeted social media activity, first consider what you are doing on Google+ and Facebook. Write and record blogs and video blogs, and promote them and your business or nonprofit across all your social media accounts. Most importantly, the goal of any social media activity or marketing is to create a community around your product, and you can see that grow in likes, shares, and votes. Check out our recent post that discusses how to use social media to tell a compelling story.

Many Thanks to: Tasty Placement Inc.