5 Reasons Why Social Media is Important for SEO

What the heck does social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI, we get this a lot from the current and potential clients. While social media has become an increasing channel for marketing in recent years, most companies have not yet started to profit from it. This is crucial if you are investing in search engine optimization. Setting up and managing social media accounts are important for supporting SEO efforts, even though the benefits of social media aren’t always evident. Here are five reasons social media is vital to SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It’s not difficult to see that Google, Bing, and other search engines utilize online conversation as part of their ranking algorithms. A social engagement happens when people like, comment or share tweets about an article. Content that has more social engagements will be able to show more social signals. Search engines measure these signals from social media, and use them as an index of quality when ranking content. This allows search engines to know the most popular content and what their algorithm deems high-quality. If something is receiving lots of engagement on social media It can be quickly indexed.

2) Link Building

There are no more days of asking for websites to link to yours. With the emergence of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms SEOs must create links in the traditional way — create high quality content which is relevant to linking. How do you get in touch with websites that are willing to link to your content if asking them directly is considered an «unnatural» link building practice? Social media can help. Social media enables you to put your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be influenced to link to it in the event that it is worthy of linking to. Those people will also connect your content to their friends which will increase the impact of your content.

3.) Amplification of content

You can create all the excellent content you’d like to however it will not gain any traction without amplifying it. Sure, email marketing is a great way to amplify content, but it can only reach people within your marketing database. You can also reach new audiences via social media. If you send your content out to your followers, they’ll also share it with their personal followings in the event that they find it helpful. This will cause them to share it with their following which will increase the reach of your content. In return, you will gain an abundance of relevant traffic and inbound links, as well as brand recognition and social signals All of these are used by search engines to judge content quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals

Search engines use brand reputation and image to assess the quality of your site and how reliable it ought to be for their ranking algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content social media can also help create brand 500px.Com awareness. This is what Google refers to as a co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media can help increase Google’s trust in your website , and will also help with branded search queries.

5) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing the social media pages since a while, which means they now appear on the search results pages. This lets your brand show up in search results for branded search queries that are not limited to just your own website. But there’s more than that. Individual tweets from Twitter were once indexable and included in the search results. This allowed your site to be more prominent in search. The program was only temporary, however it was a short-term solution, and Google ended it after a couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.