What do social media have to in relation to SEO? At MWI, we get these questions frequently from our the current and potential clients. While social media has been a growing channel for marketing over the last few years, many firms haven’t yet begun to make use of it. This is crucial for companies that are investing in SEO. The creation and management of social media accounts are extremely important for supporting SEO efforts, although the benefits of social media aren’t always apparent. Of the many reasons why you should consider 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 no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online conversations in their ranking algorithms for quite some time. A social engagement happens when people like, comment or share tweets about a piece of content. Content that has more social engagements will show higher social signals. These social signals are used by search engines to determine the quality of content. This allows search engines to identify what content people consider to be most valuable and view details what their algorithms consider top-quality. A piece of content can also be indexed instantly if it’s receiving a lot of social interaction.
2.) Link Building
The days of going out and soliciting websites to link to your site. With the advent of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm, SEOs are forced to build links the old fashioned way to create quality content that is worthy of linking. How do you get in touch with sites who are willing to link to your content if asking them directly is considered an “unnatural” link building method? Social media is the way to go. Social media allows you to expose your content to people who are willing to share it with others, in the event that it’s worth linking to. Those people will also share your content with their network which increases the power of your content.
3) Amplification of content
You can write all the excellent content you’d like to however, it will not get an enormous amount of attention without amplification. Marketing via email is great method to boost content but it will only be able to reach the people on your list of marketing contacts. You can also reach new audiences via social media. When you share your content, those who follow you will also connect with their friends should they find it valuable. The people who share it will recommend your content to their followers, increasing your reach. You will also gain relevant traffic as well as inbound linking as well as social signals and brand awareness These can be used by search engines to make quality determination.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Recognition and Signals
Brand identity and awareness can inform search engines many things about the quality of your website and how much it should be considered reliable in their ranking algorithms. In addition to boosting your content Social media can also build brand awareness. Google calls this co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media can improve Google’s trust in your site, as well as aiding 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 appear on search result pages. This allows your business to show up in search results for branded searches on more than the site of your business. It’s more than that. Tweets on their own from Twitter were once searchable and included in search results. This allowed your site to be ranked higher in the results of a search. 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.