5 things you should know about social media and SEO

In April 2019, Quicksprout updated a post with a great infographic on the state of SEO, illustrating how the field has evolved in recent years in response to updates to Google's game-changing algorithms and the steady rise in content as king. .

When looking at the infographic, one thing in particular caught my attention: the importance that companies and agencies give to social networks when they think about their SEO strategy.

In 2014, Matt Cutts, from Google (now with the U.S. Digital Service), released a video saying that social suggestions, metrics like Facebook likes and Twitter followers, indicate the authority and influence of a Profile does not affect rankings of research.

This statement launched sellers through a loop; they were operating under the assumption (understandably, more about that below) that social cues were included in Google's search algorithm as an indication of reliability and quality.

However, the results seem to show that while social media is not a direct factor, it certainly influences your SEO ranking.

A 2018 study by Hootsuite tested the SEO results of articles with and without social promotion. Your results? The pieces with the best social actions received an average increase of 22% during the duration of the experiment.

In this article, we will delve into what these conflicting views mean for the relationship between social media and SEO. In addition, we'll learn how SEO-focused marketers are thinking about social media now that social tips are out of the picture, at least for now.

Let's start with more basic information about social media and the SEO dialogue in recent years.

A little of history

As I mentioned earlier, Cutts' claim that Google doesn't observe social signals when determining the ranking of a web page was a big surprise for the online marketing industry. After all, in a video posted in December 2010, Cutts himself said that social tips were a factor in the ranking.

So you can understand why vendors were dismayed and a little irritated when, three years later, Google told them that no, sorry, folks, we actually didn't look at these things right now.

However, now, years later, does the evidence show that Google is again using social media tips for ratings?

I delved into the research on this topic and identified 5 main things every marketer should know about how social media affects SEO in 2019 and beyond.

My research also left me with a few questions, which I mention throughout the post; I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Social links may or may not increase your ranking in search

OK, the social tips related to the authority of a profile are out, but does Google consider links posted to social accounts as credible backlinks? When a blog post goes viral on Twitter, do these new links increase the post's search ranking?

While the 2014 Cutts video is clear about the absence of social cues from the search algorithm. But it says that Google crawls social networking sites for data the same way it would on any other site:

Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other page in our web index. So if something happens on Twitter or Facebook and we can track it, we can return it to our search results.

In the past few years, Google hasn't talked about it much more.

However, research seems to show that social media helps in SEO ranking. The research published by Optinmonster in 2019 coincides with the Hootsuite 2018 study: social popularity helps rankings on Google.

This leads me to think that, although the authority of a social account does not affect search ranking, links published on social networks can be marked as credible background links and therefore influence the ranking of a page.