Social networks have had such a profound influence on marketing departments worldwide, that they have led to the creation of new roles such as the ‘community manager’. While most marketers know that being present on social media is essential, many still ignore the social network that benefits brands the most in terms of SEO.
The US-based company TastyPlacement undertook an interesting experiment analysing the relationship between social media activity and organic search engine rankings, through content marketing techniques.
The study created 6 different websites and launched them in 6 US cities with similar sizes, promoting each site through 6 different social media sites during a month: Twitter Followers, Tweets & Retweets, Facebook Shares and Likes, followers to Google+ Business Page and Google +1 Votes to homepage.
Google likes Google
Surprisingly enough (or maybe not) results concluded that Google+ was the social media that improves more significantly a site’s SEO position. Researchers secured up to 100 followers to a linked Google+ business page and found that the site’s Google position had risen by an average of 14.63 places after a month.
Similarly, but not as meaningful as in the case of Google+ business page, 300 homepage votes on Google+ equalled to a rise of 9.44 positions in Google.
‘Facebook-wise’, the promoted site secured 70 Facebook ‘shares’ plus 50 ‘likes’ to a given page, which increased the site’s SEO by 6.9 positions in Google.
Finally, Twitter was the social network showing the lowest impact in terms of SEO. Securing up to 50 tweets and retweets linking to the given website resulted in a 2.88 rise in Google ranking.
Surprisingly, obtaining 1,000 Twitter followers in the sixth promoted website did actually lead to a decrease of -1.22 positions in Google.
Finally, the report also monitored the results obtained on a website which did not undertake social networking activity at all. This proved to produce no meaningful change, only reducing the SEO Google ranking by -0.11.
With the relatively new introduction of Google+ by the most popular search engine only a few months ago, it is interesting to see how being present in Google’s social network can significantly improve a site’s chances of being empowered by popular search engine. When in Google, do what Google does.
