5 Reasons Why Social Media is Important for SEO

What can social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our current and prospective clients. While social media has become an increasing marketing channel over the last few years, many businesses have yet to benefit from it. This is especially true when you’re investing in SEO. While the benefits of social media might not be immediately apparent, they’re essential for SEO aid. Below are five reasons why social media is essential for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It’s not a secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines use online conversation as part of their ranking algorithms. Social engagements occur when people like, comment or share a tweet on a piece of content. Content that has more social engagements will be able to show more social signals. Search engines analyze these social signals and consider it an index of quality when ranking content. This is a method for search engines to identify the content that people are most interested in and what their algorithms consider high-quality. If the content you’re looking at has a high amount of social engagement the content can be identified.

2) Link Building

It’s past the time when you could make a request for links from other websites. With the advent of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs have to perform link building in the traditional way – create high quality content that is linked-worthy. But how do you reach websites willing to link to your website if asking them directly is considered an “unnatural” practice for building links? Social media is your answer. Social media lets you expose your content to of relevant audiences that may be convinced to link to it in the event that it is worthy of linking to. These people will promote your content to others increasing your influence.

3.) Content amplification

It doesn’t matter how good your content is, it’s not going to get much traction unless you amplify it. Email marketing is great method to boost the content you create, but it won’t be able to reach the people on your marketing list. You can reach new audiences through social media. If you publish your content to your followers, they will spread it to their own followings if they find it helpful. They will also be able to share your content with their followers, increasing the reach of your content. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic as well as inbound linking, social signals, and brand awareness and are used by search engines for content assessment of quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals

Brand identity and awareness can tell search engines many things about the quality of your website and the extent to which it can be respected in their ranking algorithms. Social media is a great way to increase brand recognition and boosts the visibility of the quality of your content. This is what Google refers to as a co-citation. These co-citations are built by using social media to boost Google’s trust as well as aid with search results that are branded.

5) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing social media profiles for some time now so they can now appear on results pages for search engines. This allows your brand to show up in search results for search queries that are branded and not limited to your company website. However, it’s even more than that. Individual tweets on Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results as well – enabling another way for your content to rank in the search results. This was just temporary for a couple of months before Google decided to discontinue it , up to now. Google will once again show tweets in search results, https://dohabb.com/index.php?page=user&action=pub_profile&id=4410645 so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.