How SEO and Social Media Marketing Services Work Together
SEO and Social Media marketing services are often mutually exclusive.
I’d like to share the story that made me a believer on how SEO and Social work together.
The Story of SEO and Social
Last November we posted a blog about Banned Instagram Hashtags.
In mid-January, the post was shared 452 times on Facebook in the span of 3 days.
All of the social shares drove close to 8,000 visits to our website during a week-long period.
What happened next? Well, social media shares began to die down but SEO traffic began to ramp up.
In fact, flash forward 8 months and we see that Google has driven more than double the amount of traffic than Facebook.
There’s other major SEO benefits that came after a flurry of social media shares. Here’s a quick rundown of some impressive bullet points:
- Blog post ranks for 675 organic keywords
- #1 search result for “banned instagram hashtags”
- #3 search result for “banned hashtags”
- Attracted 22 backlinks from 17 referring domains, including X-Cart (Domain Rating: 82), G2 (Domain Rating: 81), and Louiseem.com (Domain Rating = 71)
Not bad for a single blog post. But wait, we are just getting started.
Related Content: How Social Shares Boosted SEO Traffic
Here’s the crazy part of the story. Once the social media shares happened, all content on our site pertaining to “social media” improved in terms of SEO ranking.
In other words, Google began to view our site as an authority on the topic of “social media” because of the Banned Instagram Hashtag blog post.
Here’s why we think that happened:
This graph captures all page views for social media content on our website. Before the social sharing, only 1 of our top 14 most visited pages was about social media.
After the social shares, 6 of our top 14 most visited pages were about social media.
Some of those pages included:
- Social Media Services page (#11 page)
- How to do hashtag research (#7 page)
- How to accept Facebook admin request (#4 page)
- Why is my Instagram account gone (#3 page)
What’s interesting about these pages is that all of them were published before the social media sharing activities began (November 2018). The “How To Accept Facebook Admin Request” post was published in August 2017, and is only five bullet points long.
Once Markitors.com was identified as an authority on social media (validated through social sharing activity), the rest of the content rose in the rankings. Even if that content was published more than a year ago. Even if that content wasn’t high quality.
What this means for SEO and Social Media Marketing Services
Needless to say, this is WILD to experience.
We believe recreating the Banned Hashtag post is the future of SEO and Social Media marketing services. It’s a combination of taking premium content from brands and promoting that content to influencers to share.
In other words, it will matter where information is being shared (for relevancy) who is sharing it (for quality) how often (frequency) and what is being shared (indexing).
Why would Google incorporate Social into SEO?
Google was founded on the premise of prioritizing hypertext, or links, in determining how to serve up satisfying search results.
Social shares are similar to links. Google needs to move away from 20+ years of valuing links, and social shares could add a nice complement to an algorithmic evaluation process.
What supports the incorporation of SEO and Social Media?
Google has a patent that determines influence in a social community.
Patent 9,632,972 outlines a process for identifying an influential user in a social community. Then, the patent describes how an influence score would be determined for a particular topic and their reach.
This patented concept could be used for a Google social media advertising network, similar to Google’s display network.
Or, it could also be used to attribute viral growth to certain individuals or a selected group, influencing search engine result pages based on a social graph.
Only select Google patents see implementation. However, this patent is interesting because the lead author of the patent leads the core search PM team at Google as a Senior Director of Product Management.
In other words, if the lead author spent a considerable amount of time thinking about social media influencers, and now leads the build of search results pages, there might be a crossover that supports the experience we’ve shared in this post.
What’s next for SEO and Social Media?
We believe social media influencers will matter more than they do today (isn’t that hard to believe given the amount of conversation around influencers?).
Influencers will play a role in a SEO and Social Media strategy in a similar way as backlinks from high Domain Authority websites.
We think the next new Google algorithm update is the “Social Index.” It will incorporate personalized SERPs based on social activity from your network.
Influencers are sites. Shares are links. SEO and Social, together at last.
So, please share this post on social media. 🙂
