Engagement Ratio on a Facebook page influences organic search results.

By Gregory Panos, Founder, The nGage Company, Inc.

I was putting together a presentation for a client when I noticed that the screenshots I was using gave a really clear example as to how the 'engagement ratio' (number of people 'talking about this' divided by number of 'likes') of a FB page affects organic search.

My presentation was for a manufacturer of baby cribs, and they were concerned as to why, even though they were spending 4 figures a month on google ad words, were they not showing up on the first several pages of organic search. First of all, Google has issued several statements about this very issue, and they all state the same thing, "Adwords customers do not get special organic ranking".

So I used an example and did a Google search of the word 'cribs'. Below is the first page of results.

Looking down the results, the first true 'manufacturer' of cribs is www.babysdream.com. I then clicked on their link, and came to their page:

As you can see, they have a nice array of social media platform links in the lower right hand corner of their homepage. I then clicked on the Facebook link and was taken to their Facebook page:

Using my 'engagement' equation, we see that Baby's Dream has a very robust ER (engagement ratio) of 37%. 

To put this in perspective, let's look at Nike. Nike has over 12 million fans, and over 127,000 talking about them. 

This equates to a 10.4% ER. Actually this is very good, as in comparison, Baby's Dream's engagement ration of 37% is really extraordinary. Other well-known brands fall within the 8 -15% ER, with Coca Cola at 15%, Pepsi at 11.8%, and Toyota at 8.4%. 

So now that we have a bit of background information as to engagement ratios, lets get back to the Google search for cribs.  I went through the next several page of search results before I came to my next manufacturer, Summer Infant. 

This is 'page 4' of the results. So let's examine Summer Infants FB page engagement ratio.

Here we have a 4.4% ER. The next manufacturer to show up in results was Munire Furniture, which made their presence on page 5.

Looking at their Facebook page ER, we see that it is about 1%.

I would be remiss if I didn't disclose that FB page ER alone will not determine where your company shows up in organic search results. There are a lot of other factors that can contribute to your ranking, including optimizing your social media platforms for search with the use of keywords, links, alt tags, etc.  That being said, search algorithms used by all the major search engines have placed a high importance on social engagement on all social media platforms. That is because if people are 'talking about it', there is a high probability that it is relevant to the person searching for that keyword/term. 

The Take-Away: 

Create engaging posts that are relevant to your audience, and you will improve your organic search rankings.