Five Reasons Why Social Media is important for SEO

What does social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our the current and potential clients. Although social media has been an increasing channel for marketing in recent years, most companies haven’t yet begun to take advantage of the potential of it. This is especially true when you’re investing in SEO. While the benefits of using social media may not seem immediately apparent, they’re crucial for SEO help. Below are five reasons why social media is essential for SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals

It’s no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines are using online dialogue in their algorithm for ranking for quite some years now. When people tweet, like or comment on a piece of content it is referred to as a social engagement. The more social engagements your content gets, the greater social signals you build to your site. These social signals are used by search engines to rank content. This is a method for search engines to know the most popular content and also what they consider to be top-quality. If an article receives lots of engagement on social media the content can be indexable.

2) Link Building

It is long past the period when you could just solicit hyperlinks from other sites. Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithm has forced SEOs to build links the traditional way: create quality content that is relevant. But how do you reach websites willing to link to your website if they are not directly approached as an «unnatural» link building method? Social media is your answer. Social media can help you present your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be influenced to link to it if it’s worth linking to. People who be able to share your content with their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.

3.) Content Amplification

The quality of your content is, it won’t achieve much success without amplification. Email marketing can be great method to boost content but it will only get to those on your list of marketing contacts. Social media allows you to expand your reach with your content. After you have shared your content, the people who follow you will also spread it to their networks if they find it useful. They will then spread the word to their networks and increase your reach. In return, you gain an abundance of relevant traffic and inbound links, as well as brand recognition and social signals All of which are used by search engines to determine the quality of the content.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Awareness & Signals

Brand image and recognition can inform search engines a lot about the quality of your website and the extent to which it can be considered reliable in their ranking algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content social media also aids in increase brand recognition. This is what Google refers to as co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media can help increase Google’s trust in your site, as well as aiding by using branded search terms.

5.) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing social media sites since a while and this means that they show up in the search results pages. This lets your company’s brand show up in search results for search queries that are branded and not restricted to your website. But there’s more than that. Individual tweets from Twitter were once indexed and shown in search results as well giving another opportunity to get your content noticed in search. That was only temporary for a few months, موقع تزويد مشتركين until Google decided to discontinue the service, and it’s still in place. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.