5 Reasons Social Media is essential for SEO

What can social media have to offer SEO? At MWI, we get this a lot from potential and current clients. Social media is a fast expanding channel of marketing that many companies have only just begun using in the last couple of years, yet it’s very important to leverage when you’re investing resources in SEO. Creating and managing social media accounts is extremely essential to aid in SEO efforts, although the benefits may not be immediately evident. Here are five reasons why social media is important for SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals

It’s no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines use online conversation as part of their ranking algorithms. If people tweet, share, like, comment or share the content they like, this is called a social engagement. The more social engagements a piece of content is able to get, the more social signals you send to your site. Search engines analyze these social signals and consider it an element of quality when evaluating content. This allows search engines to know what content people consider to be most valuable and what their algorithm deems good quality. A piece of content could be quickly indexed in the event that it’s receiving lots of social engagement.

2) Link Building

It is long past the time when you could solicit links from other websites. With the advent of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs are now forced to build links the traditional way by creating high-quality content which is relevant to linking. But how do you reach websites that are willing to link to your site if asking them directly is thought to be an “unnatural” link building method? Social media is the answer. Social media lets you share your content with relevant audiences who may be willing to link to your content, when it’s worthy of linking to. They will also spread your content among others and increase your reach.

3) Content Amplification

The quality of the content you publish, it’s unlikely to be popular in the absence of amplifying it. Sure, email marketing is an effective way to boost the content, but it’ll only reach people within your marketing database. It is possible to reach new audiences through social media. Once you share your content, your following will also spread it to their networks should they find it valuable. These people will then recommend your content to their followers, increasing your reach. You’ll also get relevant traffic as well as inbound linking social signals, inbound linking, and brand recognition All of which can be utilized by search engines for content to determine the quality of your content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness & Signals

The brand’s identity and reputation can inform search engines a lot about the quality of your website as well as how much it should be respected in their ranking algorithms. Social media can help build an image for your business and also boosts your content. Google calls this co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media can help increase Google’s trust in your company website as well as helping with branded search queries.

5) Social Indexing

Since the search engines index social media profiles these profiles are now showing as search results. This lets your company’s brand be displayed in search results for branded queries that are 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 ensure your content’s ranking in search. The service was temporary for a couple of months until Google took the decision to end this feature, أفضل مواقع خدمات سوشيال ميديا which is still in effect. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.