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. Social media is an incredibly expanding channel of marketing that many businesses have only begun using in the last couple of years, yet it’s essential to utilize it in particular if you’re putting resources in SEO. The creation and management of social media accounts is extremely important for supporting SEO efforts, even though the benefits of social media aren’t always obvious. Out of the numerous reasons to think about social media as part of your overall strategy to be online Here are five reasons it’s important for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It is no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines use online conversation as part of their ranking algorithms. Social engagement occurs when users like, share on, share or discuss tweet on a piece of content. The more social engagements a piece of content is able to get, the more social signals it will bring to your website. Social signals are utilized by search engines to determine the quality of content. This is a method for search engines to decide the content that people are most interested in and what their algorithm deems top-quality. Content can be instantly indexed whenever it’s attracting a significant amount of social interactions.

2.) Link Building

There are no more days of going out and soliciting websites to link to your site. Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithms are forcing SEOs to linkbuild using the old method: make good quality content that is pertinent. How do you get in touch with sites that would be willing to link to your content , if asking them directly is considered an “unnatural” link building method? Social media is the answer. Social media allows you to publish your content to people who are willing to share it with others, if it is worth linking to. People who share your content with their networks, further increasing the influence of your content.

3) Amplification of content

It doesn’t matter how high-quality the content you publish, it will not get much traction without amplification. Sure, email marketing can be a great way to amplify content, but it can only reach people within your database of marketing. Social media can help you increase the reach of your content. Once you share your content, your followers will connect with their friends when they are satisfied with the content. These people will then also share it with their friends, further increasing your reach. You will also gain relevant traffic through inbound linking social signals, as well as brand recognition, all of which can be used by search engines for content quality evaluation.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Sensibilization and Brand

Brand image and recognition can tell search engines many things about the quality of your website as well as how much it should be considered reliable in their ranking algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content, social media also helps increase brand recognition. Google calls this co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media will help improve Google’s trust in your company website as well as helping with branded search queries.

5.) Social Indexing

Since search engines index social media profiles and display them on search results pages. This allows your business to be displayed in search results for search queries that are branded and not exclusive to your site. But there’s more than that. Individual tweets on Twitter were at one time indexed and displayed in search results, too giving another opportunity for your website to be ranked in search. It was temporary, however it ended and Google removed it after couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.