Five Reasons Why Social Media is Important for SEO

What the heck does social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI we hear this a lot from potential and current clients. Social media is a rapidly expanding channel of marketing that many companies have only just begun to take advantage of over the past couple of years, yet it’s crucial to make use of – especially if you’re investing funds into SEO. Setting up and managing social media accounts is important for supporting SEO efforts, though the benefits of social media aren’t always obvious. There are many reasons why you should consider social media as a part of your online strategy There are five main reasons why it’s crucial for SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals

It is no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines rely on online dialogue in their algorithm for ranking. When people share content via Twitter, Facebook, comment or share the content they like it is referred to as a social engagement. Content that has the highest number of social engagements will have more social signals. Search engines measure these social signals and use them as an element of quality when evaluating content. This allows search engines to decide the most popular content and what their algorithms consider top-quality. If something receives lots of social engagement, it can be instantly indexed.

2) Link Building

The days of soliciting websites to link to yours. With the emergence of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms SEOs have to perform link building in the traditional way to create quality content that is linked-worthy. How can you get your content to websites which are willing to hyperlink to your content, if they are considered “unnatural”? Social media can help. Social media allows you to place your content in front of people who are interested and could be attracted to link to it should it be worthy of linking to. These users will then share your content with others and increase your reach.

3) Content amplification

No matter how top-quality the content you publish, استضافة مواقع الكترونية (link web page) it will not gain traction in the absence of amplifying it. Email marketing can be an excellent method of amplifying the content you create, but it won’t be able to reach the people on your list of marketing contacts. Social media allows you to connect with new audiences through your content. When you share your content, your following will share it with their following when they are satisfied with the content. These people will then be able to share your content with their followers, thereby increasing your reach. You will also gain relevant traffic, inbound linking social signals, as well as brand awareness All of which can be utilized by search engines to determine content quality evaluation.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness & Signals

Search engines can use brand reputation and image to assess the quality of your site and how trustworthy it needs to be when they rank it in their algorithms. Alongside boosting your content social media can also help build brand awareness. This is what Google calls a co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media can improve Google’s trust in your web page and also assist with search queries that are personalized.

5.) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing social media sites for some time now which means that they appear in search result pages. This lets your brand appear in search results that include branded search queries , which is more than only your website. This is even better. Individual tweets on Twitter were once indexed and shown in search results too providing another method to get your content noticed in the search results. This was just temporary for a few months before Google made the decision to stop it , up to now. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.