What can social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our current and prospective clients. While social media has been an increasing marketing channel in recent years, the majority of businesses have yet to make use of it. This is especially true when you’re investing in SEO. While the benefits of using social media are not immediately obvious, they are crucial for SEO support. Here are five reasons why social media is vital to SEO.
1.) Social Media Signals
It’s not a secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines make use of online conversations as part of their algorithm for ranking. Social engagements occur when people comment, like, share, or tweet about a piece of content. Content that has more social engagements will have more social signals. Search engines analyze these social signals, and then use them as an element of quality when evaluating content. This is a way for search engines to identify what people find most useful and what their algorithm deems good quality. If a piece of content receives lots of social engagement, it can be instantly classified.
2) Link Building
Long gone are the days of asking for websites to add links to your site. Since the introduction of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm, SEOs are forced to do link building the traditional way – create high quality content that is linked-worthy. What is the best way to reach websites which are willing to hyperlink to your content, if they are thought to be “unnatural”? Social media is the solution. Social media can help you put your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be convinced to link to it in the event that it is worthy of linking to. Those people will also promote your content to their network which will increase the impact of your content.
3.) Amplification of content
You can make all the top-quality content you like but it’s not going to gain significant traction without the aid of amplification. Yes, email marketing is an excellent way to increase the reach of your content, but it’ll only reach those in your marketing database. Social media can help you connect with new audiences through your content. If you share your content, 22975 your followers will spread it to their networks in the event that they find it helpful. They will also recommend your content to their followers, thereby increasing your reach. You’ll also get relevant traffic as well as inbound linking social signals, as well as brand recognition These can be utilized by search engines to make quality evaluation.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Communication and Awareness
The brand’s identity and reputation can inform search engines many things about the quality of your website as well as how much it should be respected in their ranking algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content social media also aids in create brand awareness. This is what Google calls a co-citation. Building these co-citations through social media will help improve Google’s trust in your company web page and also assist with branded search queries.
5) Social Indexing
Since search engines index social media accounts these profiles are now showing up in search results pages. This allows your brand to be listed in search results on branded queries that are not limited to your company website. It’s even better. Individual tweets from Twitter were once indexed and shown in search results, too – enabling another way for your content to rank in search. It was only temporary for a few months before Google made the decision to stop this feature, which is still in effect. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.