5 Reasons Social Media is important for SEO

[Lelia Arroyo]

What can social media provide in terms of SEO? MWI receives the information frequently from prospective and current clients. While social media has become a growing channel for marketing over the last few years, many companies have not yet started to profit from it. This is particularly important when you're investing in search engine optimization. Setting up and managing social media accounts is extremely important for supporting SEO efforts, although their benefits aren't immediately obvious. Below are five reasons why social media is important for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals
It's not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines are using online dialogue as part of their ranking algorithms for quite some period of time. When people share content via Twitter, Facebook, comment or share an article, this is called a social engagement. The more social engagements your content gets, the greater social signals it will bring to your website. Search engines measure these social signals and use it as a quality factor when ranking content. It's a method of determining the content that people consider useful over what their automated algorithm decides is of high quality. A piece of content could be immediately indexed whenever it's attracting a significant amount of social interaction.

2.) Link Building
It's long gone from the time when you could solicit hyperlinks from other sites. With the advent of Google's Panda and ​Penguin algorithms SEOs are now forced to perform link building in the traditional way and create content of high-quality that is link-worthy. How can you get your content to websites who are willing to link to your website, even if the request is thought to be "unnatural"? Social media can help. Social media enables you to put your content in front of the right people, who could be in a position to influence them to link to your content should it be worthy of linking to. These users will then share your content with others and boost your authority.

3) Content Amplification
You could create any top-quality content you like but it's not going to gain much traction without amplification. Yes, email marketing is an excellent method to amplify content, but it will only be able to reach people who are in your database of marketing. You can also reach new audiences via social media. If you publish your content to your followers, they will spread it to their own followings when they find it useful. These people will then be able to share your content with their followers, increasing the reach of your content. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic and inbound links, ​https://zenwriting.net/smileporter98/interested-in-web-design-read-no-further social signals, and brand awareness All of which are used by search engines to determine content quality evaluation.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals
Search engines can use brand reputation and image to assess the credibility of your website and how trustworthy it needs to be for their ranking algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content, social media also helps to increase awareness of your brand. Google calls this co-citation. These co-citations can be developed via social media in order to increase Google's trust and assist with branded searches.

5) Social Indexing
Since the search engines index social media accounts, they are now showing up in search results pages. This enables your brand to show up in search results that include branded search queries on more than just your company website. This gets better. Tweets on their own from Twitter were once searchable and displayed in search results. This allowed your site to rank higher in the search results. It was only for a short time, however it ended 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.