Five Reasons Social Media Is Important for SEO

What do social media platforms have to offer SEO? MWI gets this information a lot from both current and potential clients. Social media is an incredibly growing channel for marketing that most companies have only started to take advantage of over the past few years, but it’s crucial to make use of particularly if you’re investing funds into SEO. While the benefits of social media might not be immediately apparent, they are vital for SEO support. Here are five reasons social media is vital to SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It’s not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online conversations in their ranking algorithms for a long period of time. Social engagements occur when people like, comment or share tweets about an article. The more social engagements a piece of content has, the more social signals you can build for your website. Search engines evaluate these social signals and use them as an index of quality when ranking the content. This allows search engines to decide the most popular content and what their algorithm deems good quality. A piece of content could be quickly indexed if it’s receiving a lot of engagement on social media.

2.) Link Building

It’s past the moment when you could simply make a request for links from other websites. In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs are now forced to perform link building in the old fashioned way and create content of high-quality that is linked-worthy. How do you get in touch with websites willing to link to your website if asking them directly is thought to be an «unnatural» link building method? Social media can help. Social media lets you post your content and share it with relevant audiences who may be willing to link to it in the event that it’s worth linking to. They will also promote your content to their network which increases the power of your content.

3) Content amplification

You could create any high quality content you want however, it will not get much traction without amplification. Sure, email marketing can be an excellent way to increase the reach of your content, but it can only reach those in your database of marketing. The possibility of reaching new audiences is via social media. If you share your content with your followers, they’ll be sure to share it with their own followers if they find it helpful. This will cause them to spread the word to their networks which will increase the reach of your content. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic and inbound links social signals, inbound linking, and brand awareness These can be utilized by search engines to determine content quality evaluation.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Recognition and Signals

Brand recognition and brand identity can inform search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your website and how much it is believed to be in its ranking algorithms. Social media can help build an image for your business and also boosts the content you publish. This is what Google calls a co-citation. Co-citations can be created via social media in order to increase Google’s trust as well as aid with branded searches.

5) Social Indexing

Since search engines index social media websites these profiles are now showing on search results pages. This enables your brand to be displayed in search results that include branded searches on more than the site of your business. But there’s more than that. Tweets on their own from Twitter were once indexed and included in the search results. This allowed your website to be more prominent in searches. It was only for 33094 a short time, however it was a short-term solution, and Google stopped it after a few months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.