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 rapidly growing channel for marketing that most companies have only started to take advantage of over the past few years, however it’s essential to utilize it – especially if you’re investing resources in SEO. Creating and managing social media accounts are extremely essential to aid in SEO efforts, even though the benefits may not be immediately obvious. Here are five reasons social media is crucial for SEO.
1) Social Media Signals
It’s no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online conversations as part of their ranking algorithms for a long time. Whenever people tweet, like, comment or share an article it is referred to as a social engagement. Content that has the highest number of social engagements is likely to have more social signals. Search engines evaluate these social signals, and socialwb.com consider it an index of quality when ranking the content. This is a way for search engines to identify what people find most useful and also what they consider to be top-quality. If the content you’re looking at receives lots of social shares it will be immediately indexable.
2.) Link Building
There are no more days of going out and soliciting websites to add links to yours. Since the introduction of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs are now forced to create links in by hand and create content of high-quality that is linked-worthy. How can you get your content to websites who are willing to link to your content, if they are thought to be «unnatural»? Social media can help. Social media lets you place your content in front of relevant audiences that may 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
No matter how top-quality your content is, it will not achieve much success without amplification. Email marketing can be an excellent method of amplifying content , but it can only get to those on your list of marketing contacts. Social media enables you to expand your reach with your content. After you have shared your content, your following will also spread it to their networks when they are satisfied with the content. They will also share your content with their followers, thereby increasing your reach. In return, you gain many relevant visitors and inbound links, as well as branding awareness and social signals All of these are used by search engines in determining content quality.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Awareness and Signals
Brand recognition and brand identity can tell search engines much about the credibility of your website and how much it should be believed to be in its ranking algorithms. Social media aids in building an image for your business and also boosts the quality of your content. This is what Google calls co-citation. These co-citations are built through social media to improve Google’s credibility and aid in search results that are branded.
5.) Social Indexing
Since search engines are able to index social media sites, they are now showing up in search results pages. This lets your company’s brand show up in search results for brand-related queries, which aren’t exclusive to your site. But there’s more than that. Tweets that were individual from Twitter were once indexable and were displayed in the search results. This allowed your website to be more prominent in search. It was only for a short time, however, and Google stopped it after a few months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.