One thing SEOs have followed, gauged, studied, wondered and lost sleep over is what effects do Twitter trends have on SEO?

Are they positively affecting them? Are they negatively affecting them? Is Google affecting Twitter or vice versa?

Thoughts of chickens and eggs come to mind, but we’ll leave them back on the farm where my great grandmother told me they belong.

With the interconnectivity of Web interactions nowadays, it’s important to know the effect social sites like Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or Pinterest have on your rankings and the number of searches conducted for your specific keywords and terms. We’re focusing mainly on Twitter in order to correlate changes in numbers of searches conducted versus when a search term is trending on Twitter i.e. if #ShiaLabeouf is trending on Twitter, do the number of searches for that specific and corresponding terms escalate as a direct result? Let’s dive in.

Back on June 26th of 2011, a movie called “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” was gearing up to be released – you may have heard of it. If not, don’t worry, you’re not missing much. On this date, June 26th, Google Trends shows that searches on Google for the term “Shia Labeouf” went through the roof. The searches conducted for his name were higher than they’ve been since, well, ever (we’re tracking back to 2004). If you go back and look at Twitter trends for that week, one of the top trends was the hashtag #ShiaLabeouf. It was among other hashtags such as #Transformers and #DarkOfTheMoon – all focused on the release of the new movie and its star actor.

Google Trends report for the term “Shia Labeouf”:

You can see where the spikes happened mid-2011 when he was trending on Twitter. The actor has enjoyed large spikes in search numbers throughout his career, but you can see when he was a trending topic on Twitter, as he also was in June of 2009, when the second Transformers movie came out, the number of Google searches for his name went astronomically high. There may not be a direct line of causation, saying that Google caused Twitter to spike or vice versa, but there is certainly a correlation between his Twitter trending times and how heavily his name was Googled.

I poured over past trending Twitter topics in order to find topics that would be popular and obscure enough to see spikes in activity. Choosing a topic like #JustinBieber wouldn’t have worked as well due to the fact that he trends A LOT, and searches for his name are very high on a very consistent basis. While Shia Labeouf is popular, he’s certainly no Biebs.

Another trending celebrity case comes in the form of Paul McCartney. Sir Paul, of ye olde Beatles fame, has enjoyed a mass amount of popularity throughout his career. The amount of traffic he gets as a search term on Google has remained fairly steady and high throughout history. On June 4th of 2012, Mr. McCartney played a concert called the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert in front of Buckingham Palace. To say it was a huge event would be underselling the word “huge.” When the concert happened and #PaulMcCartney became a trending Twitter topic, the amount of Google searches conducted on his name and other terms like “Sir Paul” went 4 times higher than normal, and were double the highest amount he had ever been searched on Google before.

See for yourself: Google Trends report for “Paul McCartney” and “Sir Paul.” “Paul McCartney” is in red:

That’s an enormous jump in number of searches conducted. Regardless of which officially came first, when there was a Twitter trending topic mentioning a celebrity, the number of searches for that celebrity’s name multiplied.

I also ran a correlate search for the term “Love & Hip Hop Atlanta” and it was a Twitter trending topic on June 19th, the day after it aired its season 1 debut on VH1. Here’s what the Google Searches show:

Google Trends Report for Love & Hip Hop Atlanta:

You can see the huge spike on June 19th, the same day it was a trending topic on Twitter.

Of course, I’d be remiss in not pointing out that there is one main type of Twitter topic that has absolutely zero effect on Google – phrases. I don’t mean things like “YOLO” or “Git ‘r’ done,” which are larger phrases and staples of cultural language, I mean when people are coining a phrase about an event. There was a brief trending topic titled #ThankYouSara back in June. This hashtag was a way people said thank you to Sara Ganim, the reporter who broke the story of Jerry Sandusky, and who also won a Pulitzer for her work later. Google showed zero impact from this trending topic. None. You can’t even find any reference to the hashtag if you search Google. It took me over thirty minutes just to find out who or what it was even referencing. This is also a mild point of evidence in indicating that it may not be trending topics that are just influencing Google. It could be the other way around. These kinds of phrases and brief trends do nothing to Google searches, and should be steered very clear of when trying to impact your SEO by way of trending topics.

If you’re talking about a person, place or a thing, placing a Twitter trending topic can have some possible valuable impact on your search term. I and other SEOs will continue to analyze the effect this area of the Internet has on our business. There’s definitely a correlation, there just isn’t any concrete way to pinpoint exactly comes first. In this SEO’s perspective, it depends on the topic. There’s no real rule to define it, but knowing that they do in fact correspond to each other in a sometimes drastic manner is cause enough to consider Twitter’s trending topics for your next SEO project.

About The Authors:

Gerard Kelly heads up all internet marketing for the ISI Group of companies under their marketing company OnPageOne, with a focus on content marketing, UX and Social Media.

Jeremy Pendleton also works at OnPageOne, working directly under Gerard Marketing Campaigns. You can find out more at his blog.