Five Reasons Why Social Media Is Important For SEO

What the heck does social media have to do with SEO? At MWI we hear this a lot from current and prospective clients. Although social media has been an increasingly popular channel for marketing in recent years, most firms haven't yet begun to profit from the potential of it. This is particularly important if you are investing in SEO. The creation and management of social media accounts are important for supporting SEO initiatives, but the benefits are not immediately evident. Here are five reasons social media is crucial for SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals
It's no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online chat in their ranking algorithms for some time. A social engagement is the time when people share, like, comment or share a tweet about a piece of content. A piece of content that has the highest number of social engagements will have more social signals. These social signals are used by search engines to rank the content. This allows search engines to determine the most popular content and what their algorithm deems high-quality. A piece of content could also be indexed instantly if it's receiving a lot of social engagement.

2.) Link Building
There are no more days of soliciting websites to add links to yours. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithm has forced SEOs to linkbuild the old-fashioned way: write top-quality content that's relevant. How can you get your content to websites which are willing to hyperlink to your content, when they are considered "unnatural"? Social media is your solution. Social media lets you place your content in front of relevant audiences that may be in a position to influence them to link to your content in the event that it is worthy of linking to. These people may also share your content with their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.

3) Amplification of content
No matter how top-quality your content is, it's unlikely to get much traction without amplification. Marketing via email is a great way of amplifying content but it's only going to be able to reach the people on your list of marketing contacts. Social media can help you connect with new audiences through your content. If you publish your content to your followers, they will also share it with their personal followers in the event that they find it helpful. This will cause them to be able to share it with their followers which will increase the reach of your content. In return, you gain an abundance of relevant traffic such as inbound links, brand recognition and social signals All of these are used by search engines in determining content 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 website and the extent to which it can be believed to be in its ranking algorithms. Social media helps to build brand awareness and amplifies the quality of your content. This is what Google refers to as a co-citation. Building these co-citations through social media can improve Google's trust in your company website , and will also help with branded search queries.

5) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing social media sites for a few years now and this means that they show up in search result pages. This lets your company's brand appear in search results for brand-related queries, which aren't limited to your company website. This gets better. Individual tweets from Twitter were previously indexed and شراء متابعين تويتر appeared in search results, too - enabling another way to get your content noticed in the search results. It was only for a short time, however the deal was ended when Google shut it down 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.