5 Reasons Social Media is essential for SEO

[Debra Reichstein]

What does social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI, we get many of these inquiries from customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. While social media has been an increasing ​marketing channel in recent years, most firms haven't yet begun to profit from the potential of it. This is especially true to consider if you're planning to invest in SEO. The creation and management of social media accounts are crucial to support SEO efforts, although the benefits are not immediately evident. Below are five reasons why social media is important for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals
It's no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines make use of online conversation as part of their ranking algorithms. Whenever people tweet, like, comment or share the content they like that is known as a social engagement. The more social engagements your content is able to get, the more social signals you can build for your website. Search engines analyze the social signals they receive, and use it as a quality factor when ranking the content. This is a way for search engines to determine the content that people are most interested in and what algorithm they believe to be good quality. A piece of content can be instantly indexed when it's getting a lot of social interactions.

2.) Link Building
It is long past the moment when you could simply go out and ask for hyperlinks from other sites. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithms are forcing SEOs to build links the traditional way: create good quality content that is pertinent. But how do you reach sites who are willing to link to your content if asking them directly is thought to be an "unnatural" practice for building links? Social media is the way to go. Social media allows you to post your content and share it with people who are willing to link to it if it is worth linking to. People who share your content with others, increasing your influence.

3) The amplifying of content
The quality of your content is, ​https://public.sitejot.com/slopearea49.html it's unlikely to gain traction until you amplify it. Marketing via email can be an effective method to increase the reach of your content , but it can only reach people in your list of marketing contacts. Social media lets you connect with new audiences through your content. After you have shared your content, your followers will also spread it to their networks should they find it valuable. They will also recommend your content to their followers, which will increase your reach. In return, you earn a lot of relevant traffic, inbound links, social signals and brand awareness - all of which are used by search engines in determining the quality of content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Recognition and Signals
Search engines use brand reputation and image to assess the quality of your site and how trustworthy it needs to be for their ranking algorithms. In addition to boosting your content, social media also helps to increase awareness of your brand. Google calls this co-citation. These co-citations can be developed through social media , which can help improve Google's trust as well as aid with the search engine's branded searches.

5) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing social media accounts since a while so they can now appear in search result pages. This allows your business to be displayed in search results for brand-related queries, which aren't limited to your company website. But there's more than that. Individual tweets from Twitter were once indexed and shown in search results, too providing another method to get your content noticed in the search results. It was only for a short time, however, and Google ended 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.