5 Reasons Why Social Media Is Important For SEO

What do social media platforms have to offer SEO? At MWI, we get this a lot from current and prospective clients. Social media is rapidly expanding marketing channel that many companies have only just begun taking advantage of in the past couple of years, yet it's crucial to make use of - especially if you're investing funds into search engine optimization. While the benefits of using social media might not be immediately obvious, they are essential for SEO support. Here are five benefits of social media is vital to SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals
It's not a secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines utilize online conversations as part of their ranking algorithms. If people tweet, share, like, comment or share an article that is known as a social engagement. A piece of content that has the highest number of social engagements is likely to have more social signals. Search engines measure these social signals and then use them as a quality factor when ranking the content. It's a way of evaluating the quality of content that people are able to use over what their automated algorithm decides is of high quality. The content you've created can be quickly indexed if it's receiving a lot of social interactions.

2.) Link Building
It's long gone of going out and soliciting websites to link to your site. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithms are forcing SEOs to link build the old-fashioned way: write quality content that is relevant. But how do you reach sites that would be willing to link to your content if asking them directly is considered an "unnatural" link building technique? Social media can help. Social media allows you to place your content in front of people who are interested and could be attracted to link to it in the event that it is worthy of linking to. These people will promote your content to others, increasing your influence.

3) Content amplification
You can make all the high quality content you want but it's not going to gain any traction without amplifying it. Yes, email marketing is an effective way to boost content, but it'll only reach the people in your database of marketing. You can reach new audiences via social media. If you share your content, those who follow you will also share it with their following should they find it valuable. These people will then spread the word to their networks which will increase the reach of your content. You will also gain relevant traffic through inbound linking, social signals, and brand awareness and can be used by search engines for content assessment of quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Awareness and Signals
Search engines can use brand image and recognition to judge the quality of your site and how trustworthy it must be within their ranking algorithms. Alongside boosting your content Social media can also increase brand recognition. Google refers to this as co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media can improve Google's trust and confidence in your website as well as helping with search queries that are personalized.

5) Social Indexing
Since search engines index social media sites, they are now showing as search results. This allows your business to appear in search results for branded search queries that are not limited to the site of your business. However, it's even more than that. Individual tweets on Twitter were at one time indexed and displayed in search results as well providing another method to get your content noticed in search. It was only temporary for a couple of months, until Google decided to cease using it up until now. Google will once again show tweets in search results, alexa ترتيب المواقع so it's important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.