Can social media help with SEO? Before we answer that question, a quick glossary of common search engine optimization terms for readers who may not be SEO experts.
Glossary of SEO terms
- SERP: Search engine results page
- Search rank: The position a URL holds on a SERP for a particular keyword
- Search visibility: A metric used to calculate how visible a website or page is on a SERP. If the number is at 100 percent, for example, that would mean the URL is ranking in the first position for a keyword(s). Search visibility is especially important when tracking the aggregate ranking of a website for a basket of keywords.
- Domain or page authority: The strength of a website or page on a particular subject in the eyes of search engines. For example, the Hootsuite blog is perceived by search engines to be an authority on social media marketing. This means we have a better chance to rank for keywords related to social media than a food blog like Smitten Kitchen.
Does social media help SEO?
The question of whether social media has any impact on SEO has been long debated. In 2010, both Google and Bing admitted to using social signals to help rank pages within their results. Four years later, that stance changed after Twitter temporarily blocked Google’s access to their social network. In 2014, Google’s former head of webspam, Matt Cutts, released a video explaining how Google can’t rely on signals that might not be there tomorrow.
That’s where the conversation stopped. Since 2014, Google has publicly denied that social has any direct affect on rankings.
But now it’s 2018. A lot has changed over the past four years. One noteworthy shift is that social networks started appearing in search engines at a much larger scale.
Facebook URLs ranking within the top 100 in Google.com (U.S.)
Twitter URLs ranking within the top 100 in Google.com (U.S.)
Notice the exponential growth of Facebook and Twitter pages making their way into Google’s results? Well we did, and thought it was time to analyze the relationship between SEO and social media with a series of tests.
Say hello to “Project Elephant,” an experiment named for the ‘elephant in the room.’ The elephant in this case being the long-asked-but-never-answered question: can social media help improve search rank?
How we structured our experiment
Representatives from Hootsuite’s inbound marketing, data analytics, and social marketing teams came together to develop a reliable and controlled test approach.
We organized our content—blog articles, for the purposes of this experiment—into three groups:
- The control group: 30 articles that received no organic publishing or paid promotion on social media (or anywhere else)
- Group A (organic only): 30 articles published organically to Twitter
- Group B (paid promotion): 30 articles published organically to Twitter, then boosted for two days with a budget of $100 each
To simplify the number of data points, we chose to run this first test on Twitter and built out a publishing schedule to keep ourselves on track.
But before launching the test, we needed to level the playing field. So, for a full week prior to the launch, none of the 90 articles chosen for the experiment were updated or promoted. This allowed us to establish a baseline of their search rankings.
Following this step, we promoted two posts per day from Group A and Group B over a two-week period and measured the results during the following week. Start to finish, the entire experiment took about a month to run.
Methodology
To ensure we covered all our bases, we recorded the following data points:
- Which keywords we were tracking
- Which URLs (blog articles) we were tracking
- The monthly search volume for each keyword
- The Google search rank of each article before the test began
- The Google search rank of each article 48 hours after the test began
- The Google search rank of each article one week after the test began
- The number of links pointing to each article before the test started (backlinks are the number one driver of search rank)
- The number of unique websites pointing to each article before the test began
- The URL rating (aHrefs metric, more on that in a minute) for each article before the test began
- The number of links pointing to each article after the test concluded
- The number of unique websites pointing to each article after the test concluded
- The URL rating (aHrefs metric) for each article after the test conclude
Going in, we understood the accepted position on the topic is: there is an indirect relationship between social media and SEO….
