What can social media have to offer SEO? At MWI, we get these questions frequently from our the current and potential clients. While social media has been an increasing channel for marketing over the last few years, many companies haven’t yet begun to make use of it. This is especially important to consider if you’re planning to invest in SEO. The creation and management of social media accounts are essential to aid in SEO initiatives, but 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 a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines are using online dialogue in their algorithm for ranking for quite some time. When people tweet, like, comment or share an article that is known as a social engagement. Content that has more engagements on social media is likely to have more social signals. These social signals are used by search engines to determine the quality of the content. It’s a way to measure what content people find useful and what their algorithm determines to be of high quality. If the content you’re looking at receives lots of engagement on social media It can be quickly identified.

2.) Link Building

It is long past the time when you could go out and ask for links from other websites. Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithms have forced SEOs to link build by using the traditional method of creating good quality content that is pertinent. But how do you reach websites willing to link to your content , if asking them directly is considered an “unnatural” practice for building links? Social media is the solution. Social media can help you place your content in front of relevant audiences that may be convinced to link to it in the event that it is worthy of linking to. People who spread your content among others and boost your authority.

3) Content Amplification

You could create any excellent content you’d like to, but it won’t gain an enormous amount of attention without amplification. Marketing via email can be a great way of amplifying content but it’s only going to reach people in your list of marketing contacts. Social media can help you connect with new audiences through your content. If you publish your content to your followers, they will share it with their own followings If they are satisfied with the content. Then those people will also share it with their friends, further increasing your reach. As a result, you get a lot of relevant traffic, inbound links, branding awareness and social signals – all of which are used by search engines to judge the quality of the content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals

Brand recognition and brand identity can inform search engines a lot about the quality of your website and https://wiki.remixthecommons.org/index.php/5_Reasons_Social_Media_Is_Important_For_SEO the extent to which it can be respected in their ranking algorithms. Alongside boosting your content social media can also help build brand awareness. This is what Google refers to as co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media will help improve Google’s trust and confidence in your web page and also assist with search queries that are personalized.

5) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing social media sites for some time now so they can now appear in search result pages. This allows your business to appear in search results for branded search queries on more than the site of your business. But it gets even better than that. Individual tweets from Twitter were once indexed and included in the search results. This allowed your website to rank higher on the search results. However, it was only temporary, and Google ended it after a couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.