5 Reasons Social Media Is Important For SEO

What the heck does social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI we hear this a lot from the current and potential clients. While social media has been a growing channel for marketing over the last few years, many companies haven't yet begun to profit from it. This is especially true for companies that are investing in search engine optimization. Although the benefits of social media are not immediately obvious, they are vital for SEO support. There are many reasons you should think about social media as a part of your online strategy Here are five reasons why it's crucial for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals
It's not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online conversations as part of their ranking algorithms for some time now. When people share content via Twitter, Facebook, comment or share an article that is known as a social engagement. Content with more social engagements is likely to have more social signals. Social signals are utilized by search engines to rank the content. It's a method of determining what content people find useful over what their algorithm determines to be of high quality. If a piece of content has a high amount of social interaction it will be immediately identified.

2) Link Building
It is long past the time when you could solicit links from other websites. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithms have forced SEOs to linkbuild by using the traditional method of creating high-quality content that is relevant. How do you reach websites that are willing to link to your website, even if asking them directly would be thought to be "unnatural"? Social media is your answer. Social media can help you present your content in front of relevant audiences that may be attracted to link to it when it's worthy of linking to. They will also be able to share your content with their networks and increase the reach of your content.

3.) Content Amplification
You could create any excellent content you'd like to however it will not gain any traction without amplifying it. Marketing via email is a great way of amplifying content but it will only get to those on your marketing list. Social media can help you reach new audiences with your content. If you share your content, the people who follow you will connect with their friends if they find it useful. This will cause them to share it with their following which will increase the reach of your content. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic as well as inbound linking as well as social signals and brand recognition and can be utilized by search engines for content to determine the quality of your content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals
Search engines use brand name and reputation to determine the credibility of your website and how trustworthy it should be for their ranking algorithms. Social media helps to build brand awareness and amplifies the content you publish. Google refers to this as co-citation. These co-citations are built via social media in order to increase Google's trust as well as aid with the search engine's branded searches.

5) Social Indexing
Since the search engines are able to index social media sites these profiles are now showing in search results pages. This allows your brand to appear in search results for specific queries that aren't limited to your company website. However, it's even more than that. Individual Tweets from Twitter were once indexed and shown in search results too providing another method for your website to be ranked in search. It was temporary, however, and Google stopped it after a couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it's important to leverage it for زيادة مشاهدات اليوتيوب getting your content ranked.