What the heck does social media have to do with SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. While social media has become an increasing channel for marketing in recent years, most businesses have yet to take advantage of it. This is especially important to consider if you’re planning to invest in SEO. Making and managing social media accounts is essential to aid in SEO efforts, although the benefits may not be immediately obvious. Below are five reasons why social media is crucial for SEO.
1.) Social Media Signals
It’s not difficult to see that Google, Bing, and other search engines make use of online dialogue in their algorithm for ranking. Social engagement occurs the time when people share, like, comment or share a tweet about a piece of content. A piece of content with more social engagements is likely to have more social signals. Search engines look at these signals from social media, and consider it an element of quality when evaluating content. This is a way for search engines to identify the content that people are most interested in and what their algorithms consider good quality. The content you’ve created can also be indexed instantly whenever it’s attracting a significant amount of social interaction.
2) Link Building
Long gone are the days of going out and soliciting websites to link to your site. Since the introduction of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs are now forced to do link building by hand to create quality content which is relevant to linking. How do you reach out to websites which are willing to hyperlink to your website, even if you ask them directly, which would be thought to be «unnatural»? Social media is your answer. Social media can help you put your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be attracted to link to it should it be worthy of linking to. These people will be able to share your content with other people, increasing your influence.
3.) Content Amplification
It doesn’t matter how high-quality the content you publish, it’s not going to get much traction in the absence of amplifying it. Sure, email marketing can be a great way to amplify content, but it can only reach people within your database of marketing. It is possible to reach new audiences through social media. If you post your content to your followers, they’ll share it with their own followings if they find it helpful. These people will then be able to share your content with their followers, increasing your reach. In return, you gain lots of relevant traffic such as inbound links, social signals and brand awareness All of these are utilized by search engines to determine content quality.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Recognition and Signals
Brand identity and awareness can tell search engines a lot about the quality of your website as well as the extent to which it can be considered reliable in their ranking algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content social media can also help to increase awareness of your brand. Google refers to this as co-citation. Co-citations can be created through social media to improve Google’s trust as well as aid with brand-name searches.
5.) Social Indexing
Since search engines index social media accounts these profiles are now showing in search results pages. read this post from socialwb.com lets your company’s brand show up in search results for search queries that are branded and not exclusive to your site. It’s even better. Individual tweets on Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results too – enabling another way to get your content noticed in search. However, it was only temporary, and Google removed it after couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.