SEO | October 27, 2015
Tweets Now Appear in 9% of all Search Engine Result Pages
The world’s most popular search engine has teamed up with the second largest social networking site to bring you improved SERPs that utilise real-time news to provide you with the most relevant content results possible. Find out what the deal between Google and Twitter means for the future of search here.
Tweets Now Appear in 1 in 10 Google Search Results
According to MozCast Feature Graphs, tweets now appear in around 9% of all search engine result pages (SERPs). The percentage of queries that result in tweets featuring in SERPs changes from day-to-day; however, with a rise of 2% in the past 30 days, we’re likely to see more and more tweets in our Google search results over the coming months.
The news of this deal and integration was first reported earlier this summer and searchers quickly noticed results beginning to list the latest and most popular tweets.
Check out tweets in SERPs for yourself by searching for any of the following keywords:
• Plants vs zombies
• Garmin
• Primark
• Ancestry
• Suntrust
• Royal Caribbean
• Raspberry Pi
Rewind… Tweets Appear in Google Search Results?
In summer 2015, Google and Twitter signed a deal that would result in making it ‘easier than ever to explore your interests across both Twitter and Google’. As a result, tweets in search results have now been rolled out to all English speaking users across the world.
Tweets appear in a carousel section of the main organic search results column when Google deems them to be relevant. And no, you don’t have to have a Twitter account to see or click on the results.
When, where and why certain tweets will appear is a much guarded secret. The only possible explanation comes from Google’s blog where a post states,
‘It’s a great way to get real-time info when something is happening. And it’s another way for organizations and people on Twitter to reach a global audience at the most relevant moments.’
Tweets can appear at the top of a page, half way down or not at all, which is presumably linked to a hashtag or topic trending on Twitter and its popularity at the time of the search.
Why Couldn’t Google Do This Alone?
But couldn’t Google have just crawled and indexed the tweets without making an expensive deal with the social networking sight? Well, yes, but that would have been a slow process that would likely restrict the number of tweets analysed.
This deal with Twitter provides Google with direct access to more than 6,000 tweets per minute, therefore speeding up the collection and indexation of tweets and improving the reactiveness of their display in SERPs.
How Will this Information Affect Digital Marketing?
We all know that there’s so much more to SERPs than a few blue links and MozCast Feature Graph is a great way of receiving free insights into major SERP features over a set period of time. With the latest data from across 10,000 Google SERPs updated every night, it is a handy tool to show the current state of search and how it is likely to grow in the near future.
And the data shown on Feature Graph is sure to continue to change over the next few months as Google continues to develop and improve its systems for analysing relevancy and ranking factors of these Twitter results.
So, what does this mean for us digital marketers? Well, social media is more important than ever! Not only is it a great way to interact with customers, gain client insights and release company news but now it is a way of helping clients climb up the results pages – even if it’s only for a short period of time. Our social media agency and Twitter adervtsing agency can help you will all your social platform needs.
Read our Twitter marketing tips for business to get more helpful information.