New Study Reveals Best Social Media for Search Ranking
Courtney Rubin
Business Writers
April 30, 2012
There are entire businesses—and literally hundreds of thousands of
web pages—devoted to improving your Google search ranking. Optimize
keywords! Get some backlinks! Hit up social media!
But which social media outlets are most effective? Search engine optimization (SEO) company TastyPlacement put the networks to a not-totally-scientific but still revealing test, pitting Google+, Facebook and Twitter against each other.
The Austin-based company created six websites based in six
similarly-sized U.S. cities and let them sit for 10 months. Then the
researchers spent a month promoting five of the websites in one of five
ways: Twitter followers, tweets and retweets, Facebook shares and likes,
followers to the site's Google+ business page and Google+1 votes to the
homepage. The sixth site received no promotion to act as a control.
At the end of the month, the company measured how each site's search
engine ranking changed for a set of keywords. The changes over the month
ranged from dropping 1.22 results to a rise of 14.63 rank
positions—suggesting that social media does have an influence on search
results.
The Winners
Perhaps not surprisingly, Google+ had the greatest effect. The
website linked to a Google+ business page with 100 followers, yielding a
14.63 rise in search position. The website that had 300 Google+ votes
rose 9.44.
Observed TastyPlacement: "It's probably not surprising that Google's
plan to cut out the crowdsourcing middleman by enticing users to
directly vote on a site's relevancy would positively affect rankings."
Facebook promotion had a small but demonstrable effect on the
rankings. After 70 Facebook shares plus 50 "likes," the test site here
rose 6.9 in the rankings.
A Tweet Defeat
Twitter made a poor showing, at least in this study. After 50 tweets
(and some retweets)—some original and some from the company—the linked
site rose just 2.88 in the rankings. The truly bad news for fans of
Twitter promotion is that the Twitter-promoted site actually did worse
than the site with no promotion at all, falling 1.22 in the rankings,
versus the no-promotion site dropping only 0.11.
Although the data shows some interesting trends, the company admits
that the study "isn't statistically ideal," noting that it was meant to
be a rough comparison over the effect of social media promotion versus
none at all. The researchers added that "Regardless of individual
results, this study is another confirmation of the growing consensus
that any well-rounded SEO strategy will have to embrace an element of
social media signals."