Just How Important Is Your Social Media Strategy
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Social media - some hate it, some love it; but what is its significance to ecommerce businesses, and how could it be affecting your website's search engine rankings? Find out just how your social media campaign could be affecting your SEO results in this handy guide! One thing is for sure, social media does have an influence on your SEO efforts, whether it's indirectly or not!
Five years ago Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, went on the record to say that Google's algorithm does, in fact, use social signals as a ranking factor in search results. In other words, the more likes and followers accumulated by your company's social media profiles, the higher you'd rank in the SERPS. However, in January 2014, he announced that social signals were no longer a part of the algorithm rank factor – it, he said, became too difficult to organise and quantify, and therefore, Google does not and will not include it.
With billions of social media profiles out there, and even more by the day, it's impossible for Google to crawl and index each one frequently enough to keep up with their ever-changing follower and like counts. Because of this, they simply monitor the on-page elements that they're able to crawl. With this in mind, don't pay for likes or followers on Facebook or Twitter – they have zero SEO value and will tarnish your credibility as a brand.
So what does this mean for your social media marketing strategy exactly?
There are many benefits to using social media and growing your company's social audience, and whilst the number of likes and followers your company's social media accounts have might not have a direct impact on your SEO efforts, social media and SEO do overlap. The content and the rate in which this content is posted (your activity) matters.
As Google and other search engines become ever more advanced at interpreting search intent, delivering relevant results, and fighting organic spam, the SEO tactics of yesterday simply no longer cut it. To understand what is relevant, popular, and reliable, the search engines are turning to social media - brands must also do the same.