5 Reasons Why Social Media is crucial for SEO

What do social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI, we get this a lot from potential and current clients. Social media is a rapidly expanding marketing channel that many companies have only started taking advantage of in the last few years. However, it’s essential to utilize it – especially if you’re investing funds into search engine optimization. Setting up and managing social media accounts is essential to aid in SEO initiatives, but the benefits of social media aren’t always evident. Of the many reasons why you should consider social media as a part of your overall strategy to be online Here are five reasons why it is essential for SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals

It’s not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online dialogue in their algorithm for ranking for some years now. A social engagement is when people comment, like, share, or tweet about content. The more social engagements your content receives, the more social signals you send to your site. Search engines analyze these social signals and use them as a quality factor when ranking the content. It’s a method of determining what content people find useful over what their automated algorithm decides is of high quality. A piece of content can be instantly indexed if it’s receiving a lot of social interaction.

2) Link Building

It’s long gone from the time that you could get hyperlinks from other sites. With the advent of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs are now forced to do link building the old fashioned way to create quality content which is relevant to linking. But how do you reach sites that would be willing to link to your website if asking them directly is thought to be an “unnatural” practice for building links? Social media is the answer. Social media lets you share your content with relevant audiences who may be willing to share it with others, in the event that it’s worth linking to. They will also promote your content to their networks, further increasing the influence of your content.

3.) Content Amplification

No matter how top-quality the content you publish, it’s unlikely to get much traction unless you amplify it. Marketing via email is great method to boost content but it will only reach people in your marketing list. Social media allows you to expand your reach with your content. If you share your content, those who follow you will spread it to their networks should they find it valuable. Then those people will be able to share it with their followers which will increase the reach of your content. In return, you will gain many relevant visitors, inbound links, brand recognition and social signals – all of which are used by search engines to assess the quality of the content.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Recognition and Signals

The brand’s identity and reputation can inform search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your website and how much it is trusted in its ranking algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content, social media also helps increase brand recognition. Google calls this co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media can boost Google’s trust in your company web page and also assist with search queries that are personalized.

5.) Social Indexing

Since search engines are able to index social media websites these profiles are now showing up in search results pages. This allows your business to be listed in search results on search queries that are branded and not only restricted to your business’s website. This gets better. Individual tweets on Twitter were once indexed and seo-in-abu-dhabi03289.creacionblog.com (a cool way to improve) shown in search results as well providing another method to ensure your content’s ranking in the search results. This was just temporary for a couple of months, until Google decided to discontinue 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.