Do Recent Instagram Posts Boost Ecommerce SEO Rankings for Products?

Do Social Media Posts Help SEO Rankings? Is there a real connection between how search engines perceive your brand and its social media posts

We investigated a popular and simple search term "Women`s Sports Shoes", to try and figure out whether recent posts about this search term had any correlation with search rankings.

Choosing a Search Term - Women`s Sports Shoes

Our search term is based on the following premises:

1. We choose a term that is basically a physical product - in this case, Women`s shoes
2. We want a search term where Google would likely show shopping results
3. The term should not be long-tail or too low volume

Women`s sports shoes - fits our requirements.

Top 10 results for this search term

We did a simple Google search for this term. Here are what the top 10 results looked like :

1. Myntra
2. Campus Shoes
3. Flipkart
4. Adidas
5. Ajio
6. Sketchers India
7. Amazon India
8. Tata Cliq
9. Nike

Each of these are popular ecommerce platforms, which normally get millions of hits per day. The interesting thing to note here was that Campus Shoes ranked second, above the likes of Amazon and Flipkart. But more on that later.

How Frequently Do They Post on Instagram About Women`s Shoes?

We decided to check recent social media posts for each of the top 10 results. We decided to check just their Instagram profiles - Only because Instagram tends to have the most frequent posts.

1. Myntra - Myntra`s Instagram handle regularly posts updates on their latest offers and products. The most recent post related to shoes/sports-shoes or women`s shoes was on the 4th of October. Here`s the post talking about how many people bought shoes in their latest sale.
2. Campus Shoes - This is a shoes only brand, so most of their social media posts are about - you guessed it - shoes!. They had a post dedicated to women`s shoes around 2 weeks ago.
3. Flipkart - Most of flipkart`s recent posts were about their big sale day. Even so they had a post about anti-puddle shoes around 3 months ago.
4. Adidas India - Had a post on their instagram page, around 2 weeks ago about different women`s shoes. This social post was a video post, and not a single image. Adidas being a shoes dominated brand, seems to post quite regularly on the subject
5. Ajio India - Ajio had a post dedicated to sneakers, just a week ago.

Conclusions

We Investigated only the top 5 results because click through rates drop precipitously after the top 5.

Brands that show up in the top few search results for an ecommerce product have regular and recent posts about that product or product category.

We doubt that this is the only factor in any search algorithm. But look at it from this point of view - if a brand has fresh updates or news or sales related to a product, it probably has something to unique and fresh to offer. Google rewards freshness and uniqueness and so picking up signals from social media to update or boost rankings may be a part of their strategy.

Google has said that social media posts may not directly affect rankings, but they use it as an additional source of information - just like regular search results.

Takeaway

If you`re selling online, having a few posts dedicated to each of your biggest product categories, may help your rankings.