Case study shows the SEO benefit of Twitter
I’m often interested in how social media and SEO fits together, and the eternal battle that seems to be going on between the two. A new case study however proves that maybe they can live happily together, showing the real SEO value of having a popular profile or link on Twitter. Jennita at SEOMoz wrote about an interesting, and unexpected experiment they found, when one of their articles ‘ A beginners guide to SEO‘ was suddently retweeted hundreds of times following a retweet from a popular account. What they found was that by the afternoon, they were ranking in number 4 for the search term ‘beginners guide’. A fairly generic (but useful) search term that they hadn’t previously been ranking for before.
I wanted to put this to the test with a recent post Niall had written that received over 200 tweets ‘ 5 fundamental trends from social media’. Now this was written a couple of days but still proves the case. I googled a fairly generic term from the headline instead of something specialist – ‘fundamental trends’. This returned the Simply Zesty site at position 2, but as we rank fairly well in Ireland I asked a friend in the UK to google the term and tell me the position they got (thank you @special_noodles) :
As you can see from the screenshot above, the Simply Zesty site is coming in even higher than in Ireland, at position 1. This may not be a complete test, but the fact that their case study provided the same results for the test I ran, goes a long way to proving the real SEO value of Twitter. To try this further I tried an equally generic term from a blog post I wrote that got a lot less, at just over 30 tweets titled ‘LinkedIn’s new company search’. Googling ‘company search’ returned no Simply Zesty result on the first page:
SEO and social can get on
Now I am not an expert in SEO so I want to talk about the implications of something like this from a social media point of view. First of all, being able to concretely prove the SEO value of social media is exciting. That’s not to suggest that you want the SEO strategy to dictate the social media strategy as they are two very different things, but being able to prove a further benefit of social media activity is positive. The real test comes in determining whether the authority of a Twitter account bears any weight, or whether it’s simply about the volume of tweets. Meaning that Twitter bots could be another way to get to the top of a search page. I don’t doubt that search engines are looking at this, and it’s likely something that Twitter is working hard on as well, as it affects the quality of their site.
Given Google’s recent announcement that they will take action against content farms as well, it means that Google search pages could start looking quite different to how they currently do. Both Google and Bing have admitted that Twitter & Facebook links do affect rankings and this test shows just how much weighting they have within search and more importantly, as do the amount of times a link is being shared. It may not mean that SEO and social media eventually become one and the same practice, but it does mean that one can’t exist completely independently of the other. It’s the real and popular content that’s going to win out.
