What the heck does social media have to do with SEO? At MWI we hear these questions frequently from our potential and current clients. While social media has become an increasing marketing channel in recent years, most firms haven’t yet begun to benefit from the potential of it. This is especially true when you’re investing in search engine optimization. While the advantages of social media may not be immediately obvious, they are essential for SEO support. Here are five reasons why social media is vital to SEO.
1) Social Media Signals
It’s no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines utilize online conversations as part of their ranking algorithms. Whenever people tweet, like or شراء متابعين تويتر comment on the content, this is called a social engagement. The more social engagements your content gets, the greater social signals you can build for your site. Social signals are utilized by search engines to determine the quality of the content. This is a way for search engines to know what people find most useful and also what they consider to be high-quality. If an article is receiving lots of engagement on social media it will be immediately identified.
2) Link Building
It’s been a long time when you could go out and ask for hyperlinks from other sites. With the emergence of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms SEOs have to perform link building in using the old-fashioned method and create content of high-quality which is relevant to linking. How do you get in touch with websites that are willing to link to your website if you ask them directly, which is an «unnatural» practice for building links? Social media can help. Social media allows you to expose your content to relevant audiences who may be willing to share it with others, in the event that it’s worth linking to. Those people will also be able to share your content with their networks which increases the power of your content.
3) Content Amplification
It doesn’t matter how high-quality the content you publish, it’s unlikely to be popular without amplification. Email marketing is an excellent method to amplify content, but it’ll only reach people within your marketing database. Social media enables you to connect with new audiences through your content. If you publish your content to your followers, they will be sure to share it with their own followers if they find it helpful. This will allow them to share your content with their followers, thereby increasing your reach. You’ll also get relevant traffic, inbound linking as well as social signals and brand recognition and are used by search engines to make to determine the quality of your content.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Awareness and Signals
Search engines may use your brand’s reputation and image to assess the quality of your site and how trustworthy it must be for their ranking algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content social media can also help build brand awareness. Google calls this co-citation. These co-citations can be built through social media to improve Google’s trust and assist with branded searches.
5.) Social Indexing
Since search engines index social media accounts which means they show in search results pages. This enables your brand to show up in search results that include branded search queries that are not limited to just your company website. This gets more effective. Individual tweets from Twitter were once indexed and included in the search results. This enabled your content to rank higher in searches. The service was temporary for a couple of months, until Google decided to cease using 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.