What can social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI, we get many of these inquiries from customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. Social media is a fast growing marketing channel that most companies have only just begun taking advantage of in the last couple of years, yet it’s vital to take advantage of it – especially if you’re investing funds into SEO. Making and managing social media accounts are extremely essential to aid in SEO initiatives, but the benefits may not be immediately obvious. Below are five reasons why social media is important for 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. Social engagement occurs when people like, comment or share tweets on a piece of content. The more social interactions a piece of content receives, the more social signals you send to your site. Social signals are utilized by search engines to rank content. It’s a way to measure the quality of content that people are able to use in comparison to what their algorithm determines to be top-quality. If something has a high amount of social shares the content can be classified.
2) Link Building
Long gone are the days of going out and asking for websites to add links to your site. In the wake of Google’s Panda and post1535336 Penguin algorithms SEOs are now forced to build links using the old-fashioned method and create content of high-quality that is worthy of linking. How do you get in touch with websites willing to link to your content , if you ask them directly, which is an “unnatural” link building method? Social media can help. Social media can help you put your content in front of people who are interested and could be influenced to link to it if it’s worth linking to. People who connect your content to their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.
3) Content Amplification
It doesn’t matter how good your content is, it’s unlikely to be popular without amplification. Marketing via email is an excellent method of amplifying content but it’s only going to be able to reach the people on your list of marketing contacts. Social media allows you to reach new audiences with your content. After you have shared your content, the people who follow you will also share it with their following if they find it useful. This will cause them to be able to share it with their followers which will increase the reach of your content. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic through inbound linking, social signals, and brand recognition These are used by search engines to determine content quality evaluation.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Awareness and Signals
Search engines may use your brand’s name and reputation to determine the quality of your site and how reliable it ought to be when they rank it in their algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content Social media can also create brand awareness. This is what Google calls a co-citation. Co-citations can be created through social media to improve Google’s trust as well as aid with branded searches.
5.) Social Indexing
Since the search engines are able to index social media profiles these profiles are now showing on search results pages. This allows your business to show up in search results for specific queries that aren’t only restricted to your business’s website. It gets even better. Individual tweets from Twitter were at one time indexed and displayed in search results as well providing another method to ensure your content’s ranking in the search results. The program was only temporary, however the deal was ended when Google shut it down after few months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.