Social Media influence on SEO

It’s been happening for a while but it is taking time for a lot of companies to really get their head around it. Social media is the biggest influencer now on SEO performance and website rankings. Fact.

What we have seen in the last few weeks has been a significant impact that social media links are having on website rankings.

Many larger agencies are still caught in the rut of delivering volume and as expressed to the number of new clients that have signed with us already this month, that volume is not paying dividends. What is paying is lower quantity and high quality offpage that is centred around social media.

Of the top ranking websites we have analysed over the last 2 months we have found that 40% of their linking value is coming from social media sites.

We did some independent research around 2 years ago for a conference and found this figure to only be 8%.

Google have been saying since 2011 that social media is a ranking indicator.

One of the techniques that we have found to be very effective is social bookmarking, both in terms of link building but also for driving traffic. We have seen 100% increases in traffic for sites are using social bookmarks over the course of a 3 month period.

So this is a quick reminder for all those out there that social media should be integral to your SEO strategy, and particularly coupled with your blogging strategy.

If you are using a large and established organisation then don’t let the strategy they are delivering for you go stale – make sure you are getting value in your offpage and that they are thinking of ways to continually improve your performance. If you are getting 100s of directory submissions per month then seriously ask the question what value you are getting from them – find out what Page Rank, what domain authority and what Alexa rank they have – you may be surprised at the limited value you are getting for them. Furthermore, you may be surprised to find that a good proportion of them are not indexed by Google, raising a significant question about the quality and potential harm they may have for your site.

Have a review today and make sure you are getting quality off page and that social media is the backbone of your strategy.