5 Things You Need to Know About Social Media & SEO

Google’s algorithm updates and the steady rise of content have come together to help the field of SEO evolve over the past few years. Quicksprout recently published a fantastic infographic on the state of SEO.
One thing has become clear, companies and agencies are placing increasing importance on social media when thinking about their SEO strategy.

Econsultancy’s State of Search Marketing Report 2013 they found that 74% of companies and 82% of agencies surveyed said that social media is either somewhat or highly integrated into their SEO strategy. This is reflected in the infographic.
In light of this, here are 5 things you need to know about SEO:



1. Your Search Rank May or May Not Be Boosted by Social
What does Google consider links published on social accounts to be credible backlinks? The general consensus is that links to your website via social media accounts do have a major impact on your rankings. So while the authority of a social account doesn’t impact search rank, links published on social media can influence a page’s rank and be considered as credible backlinks.

2. Do Social Media Profiles Rank in Search Engines?
Social media may or may not affect a webpage’s position, but social profiles are a big influence on the content of search results. Social media profiles are oftentimes the top results in search listings. This is because social channels feel more personal than websites and are a fantastic way to get a sense of the company’s overall feel.

3. Social Media Channels As Search Engines
Despite the popularity of Google and Bing, people are also now using social media channels to find what they’re looking for.
Just a few stats to show how much people are using social media to search:
As of 2010, Twitter handled 19 billion search queries a month (that’s more than 5x the queries handled by Bing!).
In 2012 Facebook said it got around one billion search queries per day.
As of March 2010, YouTube got roughly 3.7 billion search queries a month. Also, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, making it one of the largest content repositories on the web.

4. Just Because Not Now, Doesn’t Mean Not Ever
Even though Google says that social signals aren’t currently impacting search rank, that doesn’t mean they never will. Social media is going strong and will continue to become more important if recent trends are any indication.

5. Bing
While Google has changed their stance a few times on social, Bing never has. They have stated that they DO look at the social authority of the user.

So the takeaway is that the web is all about creating audiences, forming relationships, sharing ideas and finding identities. By nature it’s a social place and there’s no reason that SEO should not be a part of every aspect.

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