5 Reasons Social Media Is Important For SEO

What the heck does social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our current and prospective clients. While social media has been an increasing channel for marketing in recent years, most businesses have yet to make use of the potential of it. This is especially important to consider if you're planning to invest in search engine optimization. Setting up and managing social media accounts is extremely important for supporting SEO initiatives, but the benefits may not be immediately evident. Here are five reasons social media is essential for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals
It's no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines use online conversations as part of their algorithm for ranking. If people tweet, share, like, comment or share an article, this is called a social engagement. A piece of content that has more social engagements will have more social signals. These social signals are used by search engines to rank the content. It's a way to determine the content that people consider useful over what their algorithm decides is good quality. A piece of content can be instantly indexed in the event that it's receiving lots of social interactions.

2) Link Building
It's long gone of going out and soliciting websites to add links to your site. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithms have forced SEOs to build links the traditional way: create quality content that is relevant. But how do you reach sites that would be willing to link to your website if asking them directly is considered an "unnatural" link building method? Social media is your solution. Social media allows you to expose your content to interested audiences who might be willing to link to your content, should it be worth linking to. They will also share your content with their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.

3.) Content Amplification
The quality of your content is, it's not going to achieve much success in the absence of amplifying it. Email marketing is a great way of amplifying content , but it can only reach those in your list of marketing contacts. You can reach new audiences through social media. If you publish your content to your followers, they will share it with their own followers in the event that they find it helpful. This will allow them to share your content with their followers, which will increase your reach. You'll also get relevant traffic as well as inbound linking social signals, as well as brand recognition All of which are used by search engines for content assessment of quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Awareness and Signals
Brand recognition and brand identity can tell search engines many things about the quality of your site's content and how much it should be considered reliable in their ranking algorithms. Social media is a great way to increase brand recognition and boosts the visibility of your content. This is what Google calls a co-citation. These co-citations can be built via social media in order to increase Google's trust and help with branded searches.

5) Social Indexing
Since the search engines are able to index social media accounts and display them up in search results pages. This lets your brand appear in search results for your branded searches on more than just your own website. This gets more effective. Individual tweets on Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results too giving another opportunity for شراء متابعين تويتر your content to rank in the search results. The service was temporary for a couple of months until Google made the decision to stop 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.