One of the most common misconceptions in online marketing involves social media and its relationship to search rankings. The common belief is that having a lot of social followers and posting regular updates also contributes to your SEO efforts. The truth is that it can potentially help your SEO, but only indirectly.
We here at Adult SEO Partners help a lot of adult brands with their social media campaigns, and through this have accumulated extensive data on the influence social has over SEO.
While merely having a large following on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media site won’t in itself boost your search rankings, the likelihood is that a fair portion of your audience on social media platforms can be convinced to visit your website, especially if you provide links or offer benefits that reward them for doing so.
But before we get into how your social media presence can indirectly grow organic traffic, let’s first take a look at how we know that social media activity in the form of followers, likes and links doesn’t directly help your performance in search. The evidence for this starts from a video addressing Google’s search algorithm where Matt Cutts, formerly of Google, stated their algorithm does not factor followers, likes or links from social media into the ranking performance of the sites being promoted.
Why doesn’t Google use Twitter followers or the number of Facebook friends for ranking purposes? The likelihood is that they are aware that these numbers can be easily manipulated, and thus steer away from them for that reason. Additionally, social media activity such as liking a post or page occurs so rapidly, changes on such a regular basis and can be purchased or otherwise incentivized, that these metrics are unreliable as ranking factors.
Ultimately, social media accounts can be controlled and manipulated, just as web pages can, and therefore Google doesn’t rely heavily on them as indicators of how well a web page should rank. Google cares more about what other people say about you and how often they recommend you (via links) than they care about what you say about yourself or how often you link your social accounts to your own web pages.
Social Media's Indirect Influence on SEO
While it is true that your legion of followers and your daily linking doesn’t directly help you rank better in search, it’s no coincidence that adult sites with large social media followings and an active presence also typically command the best rankings. Why is this? One reason is that some of Google’s big ranking factors are closely connected to activity that is likely to occur on sites that have popular and active social accounts.
Earning backlinks to a site, for example, has long been known to be a significant source of rankings mojo with Google. If your site generates a lot of social media interest, this increases the chances that it’ll generate interest and new backlinks to the site you use social to promote. Similarly, site traffic and time on a site are other known factors used in calculating rankings. If your site is attracting high levels of social media activity, it typically means that your followers are liking and responding to your content. These followers are both likely to be more inclined to visit your site and more interested in staying there longer than usual than would otherwise be the case (this is especially true with cam sites).
So, while your social media presence doesn’t directly increase your search ranking, it does provide you with the opportunity to indirectly improve your ranking by impacting three major factors that do figure prominently in search rankings:
- Increased backlinks
- Increased traffic from a variety of sources
- Visit duration
Increasing Backlinks Via Social Media
One of the most effective ways to improve your site’s rankings is to attract links from other sites, especially high authority sites within the industry. A high-profile social media presence that draws attention to your site from webmasters of other sites can help you accomplish this by prompting them to link to your page.
Doing this often involves more than maintaining a presence on social media. It typically requires contacting the webmasters directly to negotiate links, which a pre-established relationship on social can help with. What social media offers is a powerful way to inform people about your content, promotions and updates. This explains why so many of the sites that rank highly on social media platforms also rank highly in search. Their ability to present material that their audience likes generates both social media and search engine success. The former can propel the latter when it leads to increased backlinks.
Increased Traffic
There is a clear linkage between generating extensive social media activity and having high traffic to your website. If your social media audience is interested in interacting with and enjoying your content, they will naturally want to visit your website for more. Social media platforms make it easy to provide links from those sites to your pages. While merely having a large following on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media site won’t in itself boost your search rankings, the likelihood is that a fair portion of your audience on social media platforms can be convinced to visit your website, especially if you provide links or offer benefits that reward them for doing so. Increased website activity stemming from your social media presence is tracked by the search engines, helping to boost the ranking of your site and its pages.
Time on Page
The time spent by visitors to a website once they reach the site is another important factor in search rankings. Sites with a high bounce rate, where visitors immediately “bounce” away from the page after clicking on it, don’t rank as well as sites where visitors, due to the quality of the page’s content, stay a while as they browse photos, videos and profiles. Here again, social media can offer an indirect benefit by attracting people to your page who have been self-selected to have an interest in your content. If you have a genuinely large social media audience, it naturally creates a sizable pool of potential visitors to your website who are likely to spend a fair amount of time there.
Another factor in building a popular social media presence that can translate to boosting time on page is the need to produce a consistent stream of content. By regularly updating the content on your website, you can help increase the time visitors spend on your site as they browse the new content.
To maximize the search rankings impact of new content, many sites will utilize their social media presence to publicize the release of videos, models, cam shows, etc., thus enhancing the value of their social media activities while at the same time helping boost both traffic and time on page as visitors browse this content.
The Best Approach: Focus on Both
While your social media presence and activity may not directly improve your search rankings, as we have seen, it can indirectly boost them in a variety of ways. A comprehensive approach to SEO will take advantage of this and emphasize expanding your social media presence as well as performing traditional SEO activities such as seeking out backlinks, optimizing on-page site architecture and targeting the most viable keywords (those with the most traffic that you can compete for).
Adrian “Yo Adrian” DeGus is a 15-year adult industry veteran and founder of AdultSEOPartners.com, a professional adult SEO agency catering to large established adult sites. DeGus, who has provided advanced consulting services to many leading sites in the adult industry, also operates Adult SEO Training, a popular service that helps webmasters, program operators and affiliate managers to learn in-house SEO.
