How Social Signals Impact Search Engine Rankings

Just because Facebook and Twitter aren’t driving you a ton of sales doesn’t mean you shouldn’t leverage them. Why? Because both Google and Bing use data from social sites in order to determine how high to rank your website.

For example, Moz started to rank on Google for “Beginner’s Guide” after Smashing Magazine tweeted out the guide. Shrushti moved from page 400 to page 1 of Google due to social media.

To show you how social media impacts your search rankings, I decided to create a gifographic (animated infographic) that explains the correlation.

Conclusion

Whether you love or hate social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you have no choice but to use them. Social sites, especially Google Plus, impact your search engine rankings.

Just look at the data in the gifographic above. As you can see, when one of the sites got a hundred Google Plus followers, its rankings jumped by 14.63%. That’s a huge lift.

If you wanted to increase your rankings, but you don’t have time to leverage all of the social sites, spend your time on Google Plus as the data shows it impacts rankings more than Twitter and Facebook.