What the heck does social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI we hear this a lot from customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. Social media is a fast expanding marketing channel that many businesses have only recently begun taking advantage of in the past few years. However, it’s very important to leverage in particular if you’re putting resources into search engine optimization. While the benefits of social media are not immediately apparent, they are essential for SEO aid. Here are five reasons why social media is crucial 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 ranking algorithms for quite some period of time. A social engagement is the time when people share, like, comment or share tweets about an article. The more social engagements your content is able to get, the more social signals you build to your website. Social signals are utilized by search engines to rank content. This is a method for search engines to identify what content people consider to be most valuable and also what they consider to be as high-quality. A piece of content could also be indexed instantly if it’s receiving a lot of engagement on social media.
2.) Link Building
Long gone are the days of asking for websites to add links to yours. Since the introduction of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm, SEOs are forced to perform link building in the old fashioned way – create high quality content that is link-worthy. How can you get your content to websites who are willing to link to your content, when you ask them directly, which would be thought to be “unnatural”? Social media is the answer. Social media lets you post your content and share it with appropriate audiences that are willing to link to it, when it’s worthy of linking to. They will also be able to share your content with their friends which will increase the impact of your content.
3) Content Amplification
The quality of the content you publish, it’s not going to achieve much success unless you amplify it. Marketing via email is a great way of amplifying content but it will only reach people in your marketing list. Social media allows you to reach new audiences with your content. If you post your content to your followers, they’ll spread it to their own followings if they find it helpful. They will also promote your content to their followers, thereby increasing your reach. In return, you gain a lot of relevant traffic such as inbound links, augusthjfzq.blogthisbiz.com brand recognition and social signals – all of which are utilized by search engines in determining content quality.
content amplification lifecycle
4) Brand Awareness & Signals
Brand image and recognition can tell search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your site’s content and the extent to which it can be trusted in its ranking algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content, social media also helps increase brand recognition. Google refers to this as co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media can boost Google’s trust in your website as well as helping with search queries that are personalized.
5.) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing social media profiles for some time now, which means they now appear in results pages for search engines. This lets your company’s brand show up in search results for branded queries that are not limited to your company website. It’s more than that. Individual tweets from Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results too – enabling another way to ensure your content’s ranking in the search results. The program was only 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 getting your content ranked.
