It’s no secret that word-of-mouth is one of the most effective types of marketing and that consumers trust other consumers more than they trust brands. According to Forrester Research, 70 percent of consumers trust reviews shared by friends on social media or elsewhere, while only 43 percent said they trust natural search engine results. 

But search is changing, and as social media continues to become a crucial part of brand discovery, search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving to reflect an emphasis on good content and social engagement. 

Google’s SEO algorithms aren’t what they used to be. The search engine giant has gone back and forth on whether social signals, such as retweets and Facebook likes, directly affect page rankings. In 2010, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, said the company was taking social signals into account, but he had a different take earlier this year. 

“Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our Web index, so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results,” he said in a recent Webmaster help video. “But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say ‘you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook,’ to the best of my knowledge, we don’t currently have any signals like that in our Web search ranking algorithms,” he added.

Still, experts maintain that social media has always had an impact on SEO, and that its impact is only growing. Since the introduction of Google’s Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird search algorithms, which affect roughly 90 percent of online searches, rankings have gotten more sophisticated. In the early days of SEO, quantity trumped quality, and sprinkling irrelevant links or redundant keywords on a site could place a page higher up in the search results. Today’s algorithms protect consumers from that type of ranking manipulation. 

“Google has always valued good content, but the metrics that determine what constitutes good content have changed,” Nate Elliot, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, says. “Today, if a piece of content performs well on social media and gets lots of shares or goes viral, that’s a good indication that it’ll rank highly in search results as well.” 

Google hasn’t denied this correlation, Elliot says. Rather, Google doesn’t want to suggest that just because a brand has a million followers on Twitter, its content will automatically rank higher than another brand’s.

Though the company rarely discusses its algorithms, experts believe that roughly 2 percent to 10 percent of Google’s SEO recipe is made up of social signals, regardless of whether Google refers to them as such. Engagement is a crucial metric of viable content, and few things measure engagement better than social media, says Justin Emig, search marketing manager at Web Talent Marketing. 

“Google constantly tests its search results to determine engagement, and natural ‘virality’ is playing a major part there. There’s simply no way that a piece of content can go viral on Facebook without Google picking up on it,” Emig says.

When it comes to brand discovery, the connection is even deeper, because Google’s biggest competition isn’t Yahoo or Bing anymore. It’s Facebook. With its highly targeted advertisements and sponsored stories, Facebook often serves as the consumer’s first point of interaction with a brand. Searching for brands on Google is secondary. And even if that initial introduction does happen through Google, Facebook will “still have something to say about it,” Emig says. 

Facebook has had its eye on search for a long time, and though it’s currently no match for Google, the company is determined to become a key player in search. During Facebook’s July earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “search for Facebook is going to be a multiyear voyage.” Currently, Facebook is testing a tool that will enable users to search for posts using keywords on mobile devices. 

“It’s no doubt that as search and social media become more intertwined, Google is going to have to continue making adjustments to its algorithms in order to deliver valuable content, and marketers are going to have to continue making adjustments to their SEO strategies,” Emig says. 

“Social absolutely has had an impact on how SEO is evolving,” he adds, “and marketers are now realizing this.” 

As proof, 88 percent of companies now integrate SEO with content marketing, and 74 percent integrate SEO efforts with social media marketing, according to a recent study from Econsultancy. 
—Maria Minsker