Linda posted on August 05, 2009 11:06
A few weeks ago, I presented a seminar on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. One of the questions that came up had to do with the effect of this kind of activity on your site's search results.
While where your site ranks in the search results is clearly important, I find it to be a difficult thing to achieve without some assistance from an SEO expert. Since links I post to the KI site through social media are generally no follow links, they don't give a boost to our search rankings. But that is not to say that I don't view these sites as beneficial.
What I can say without a doubt is this - between June and July traffic to the KI Technology Group website increased by over 23%, as measured by the number of unique visitors to the site. Since I wasn't focused on SEO in July, and since our web stats also show me that most people who get to our site from a search are actually searching on our company name, Google and Bing obviously did not get these visitors for me.
So what did?
I attribute the increase to the increased amount of activity I was generating on Twitter and Facebook. Unless you have just run across my blog, you are no doubt aware that, in July, we moved our office and store across the parking lot. I was talking about it so much that one of my friends asked if this was the longest move on record! He can laugh at me if he wants to, but the numbers tell me that I was completely successful in communicating news of our move to the community, and that I got about 175 more people to visit the KI website in July than visited it in June. And it is summertime when a lot of people are out of town on vacation, particularly in light of the Independence Day holiday weekend.
Now I can't prove that any of those visitors turned into customers, but I am determined to work on that next! If you want to see how I am using Twitter, follow @kitechgrp, @ljlynch and @tomconway.