Social Media is a metric in Google’s search relevancy ranking algorithm. For some businesses,  Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can make a measurable improvement to the flow of business prospects and leads. These social networks are now valid search engine optimisation (SEO) tools and should be part of any full-service business website design package. Facebook can make a difference to your web site traffic volume, generate more enquiries, and some potential purchasers of your products and services. Social Media network traffic will register on the web server traffic log files in the “referring sites” section.

Google Does Social Bigly

During the last few years, social networking has steadily developed into an important component of both personal communications and corporate website ranking.

When Google began including social data as a signal in search of their relevancy calculations, the search paradigm shift was immediate!

To it put an old-fashioned way – “If you ain’t part of the steam roller, you must be part of the road!“

Regardless of your personal lack of interest or outright antipathy towards Social networking, if you are in business on the WWW,  you decline to adopt Social connectivity at your own risk.

It makes sense to do anything mainstream to generate more leads and additional potential buyers of your products and services. To do so, you need an understanding of;

• Social media marketing and networking from an end-user viewpoint
• Ensuring that Social Media use is optimised to give you an advantage over competitors
• How to use the latest plugins, widgets and connectivity

If you use a modern CMS such as WordPress, technical support is easier, and new functional components simply plug in!

To a large degree, SMO (Social Media Optimisation) is a non-measurable portion of the search engine optimisation algorithm. Google remains inscrutable and divests few facts on the importance they place on Social data – except to say that it’s a key indicator… Therefore, you will never know how much your Social Media presence contributes to your SERPs and rankings…

Traffic from individual SM networks is another matter, as this will get counted in the webserver traffic log files in the “Referring Websites” area. That means you do have a ruler to measure SM visitor statistics.

It’s important to understand the distinction between Social Media-influenced SERPs rankings on Google, versus the visitors Social Media networks send to you. These are vaguely related but vastly different measurement metrics.

If you’d to get your business profile raised on Social Media networks, get a free website audit today to learn how we can help.

Page last Updated on 1st October 2023 by the author Ben Kemp