5 Reasons Social Media is Important for SEO

What does social media have to have to do with SEO? MWI gets the information frequently from prospective and current clients. While social media has become an increasing channel for marketing in recent years, the majority of companies have not yet started to make use of the potential of it. This is especially true if you are investing in SEO. The creation and management of social media accounts is extremely crucial to support SEO efforts, although the benefits are not immediately evident. There are many reasons you should think about the use of social media in your overall strategy to be online, here are 5 reasons it’s important for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It’s no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online dialogue as part of their ranking algorithms for quite some years now. When people tweet, like, comment or share the content that is known as a social engagement. The more social interactions a piece of content is able to get, the more social signals you send to your site. Search engines look at these social signals and post21046 [http://www.bmetv.net/blog/1642359] use it as an element of quality when evaluating the content. It’s a way to measure what content people find useful over what their algorithm determines to be of high quality. If a piece of content is receiving lots of social engagement, it can be instantly classified.

2.) Link Building

Long gone are the days of asking for websites to add links to your site. In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs must do link building the traditional way to create quality content that is linked-worthy. How do you reach websites that will link to your website, even if asking them directly would be considered «unnatural»? Social media is the answer. Social media allows you to expose your content to appropriate audiences that are willing to share it with others, should it be worth linking to. These users will then promote your content to others increasing your influence.

3) The amplifying of content

It doesn’t matter how good your content is, it’s unlikely to be popular unless you amplify it. Sure, email marketing can be an excellent way to increase the reach of your content, but it’ll only reach people within your database of marketing. Social media can help you expand your reach with your content. If you share your content, the people who follow you will connect with their friends if they find it useful. They will then share it with their following and increase your reach. In return, you gain many relevant visitors such as inbound links, social signals and brand awareness All of which are used by search engines to judge content quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Recognition and Signals

The brand’s identity and reputation can tell search engines many things about the quality of your site’s content and the degree to which it should be respected in their ranking algorithms. Social media is a great way to increase an image for your business and also boosts the content you publish. This is what Google refers to as a co-citation. Building these co-citations through social media can boost the trust Google has in your website as well as helping with branded search queries.

5) Social Indexing

Since search engines are able to index social media profiles, they are now showing up in search results pages. This allows your business to be listed in search results on brand-related queries, which aren’t restricted to your website. It gets even better. Tweets on their own from Twitter were once searchable and were displayed in search results. This allowed your site to rank higher in searches. However, it was only temporary the deal was ended when Google removed it after few months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.