What can social media have to offer SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our potential and current clients. While social media has been a growing channel for marketing over the last few years, many companies haven’t yet begun to make use of the potential of it. This is especially true when you’re investing in search engine optimization. Making and managing social media accounts is extremely important to assist in SEO initiatives, but the benefits may not be immediately obvious. Below are five reasons why social media is essential for SEO.
1) Social Media Signals
It’s no secret that Google, Bing, and forum.sit.earth other search engines utilize online dialogue in their ranking algorithms. A social engagement is when people comment, like on, share or tweet on a piece of content. Content that has more engagements on social media is likely to have more social signals. Search engines look at these signals from social media, and then use them as an element of quality when evaluating the content. It’s a way to determine what content is popular with users in comparison to what their algorithm determines to be top-quality. If a piece of content receives a lot of engagement on social media the content can be indexable.
There are no more days of soliciting websites to add links to your site. With the emergence of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms, SEOs are forced to create links in by hand by creating high-quality content which is relevant to linking. How do you get in touch with websites willing to link to your content if asking them directly is thought to be an «unnatural» practice for building links? Social media can help. Social media allows you to publish your content to people who are willing to link to it in the event that it’s worth linking to. People who connect your content to their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.
3) Content Amplification
No matter how top-quality your content is, it will not be popular until you amplify it. Sure, email marketing is an effective way to boost content, but it’ll only reach people within your marketing database. Social media allows you to expand your reach with your content. After you have shared your content, the people who follow you will also be able to share it with their followers in the event that they find it helpful. These people will then promote your content to their followers, thereby increasing your reach. In return, you gain an abundance of relevant traffic and inbound links, as well as social signals , and brand awareness All of these are utilized by search engines in determining the quality of the content.
content amplification lifecycle
4) Brand Communication and Awareness
Brand identity and awareness can tell search engines a lot about the quality of your site’s content and how much it is trusted in its ranking algorithms. In addition to boosting your content social media also aids in create brand awareness. Google refers to this as co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media will help improve the trust Google has in your website , and will also help by bringing in search queries that are branded.
5) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing the social media pages for a few years now so they can now show up in results pages for search engines. This lets your company’s brand appear in search results for search queries that are branded and not restricted to your website. It gets even more effective. Individual Tweets from Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results, too which gave another means for your website to be ranked in search. The program was only temporary, however, and Google shut it down 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.