Social Media & SEO
There has been a lot of hype surrounding social media and its ability to help you rank in Google search. The truth of the matter following extensive testing is that it still isn’t a key SEO factor, but it can have an impact is several ways.
Links from social media in themselves don’t have any effect on SERPs results, but and it’s a big BUT….. if lots of people are discussing and recommending your web content via Faceook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn etc then that chatter will provide trust signals that help to increase your websites trustworthiness.
In itself we haven’t seen any evidence of any sites that have achieved top rankings on the basis of Social media popularity alone, but where two sites are in a broad tie for position #1, the one with the social media popularity and positive footprint will rank first.
Crowd Power
Google uses testimonials and reviews to measure the quality of the business behind the website. While this isn’t an exact science, it is common to see Facebook pages with the most positive reviews climbing online & ranking highest.
If you are collecting reviews, then Google+ should be your first choice for ‘Free’ reviews as Google trust their own platform more than any other, followed by Facebook. Google even include Facebook reviews in your Google Maps listing on their results pages, reinforcing their impact and importance.
The Power Of Social Media
Your social accounts have the potential to drive a lot of traffic to your website and can be a great way to build a customer base for some business sectors, but the effect of successful social media pages on search engine optimization (see SEO³ for more) can be quite limited.
Your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ & LinkedIn accounts should be built and managed hand in hand with link building rather than instead of it.
Instead of having a traditional testimonials page on your site, link to external reviews sites that have reviews from your clients. If you need help implementing this, see DeehoSEO for assistance.
Reviews have the potential power to improve your conversion rate, increasing sales and profitability.