Five Reasons Why Social Media Is Important For SEO

What can social media have to offer SEO? At MWI, we get these questions frequently from our potential and current clients. While social media has become an increasing channel for marketing in recent times, many companies have not yet started to make use of the potential of it. This is crucial if you are investing in SEO. Making and managing social media accounts is extremely important to assist in SEO initiatives, but their benefits aren't immediately obvious. Here are five reasons social media is vital to SEO.

1) Social Media Signals
It's not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online chat as part of their algorithm for ranking for a long time. Social engagement occurs when people like, comment or share tweets about an article. The more social interactions a piece of content has, the more social signals you can build for your website. Social signals are utilized by search engines to rank the content. It's a method of determining the content that people consider useful in comparison to what their algorithm determines to be of good quality. A piece of content could also be indexed instantly in the event that it's receiving lots of social interactions.

2.) Link Building
It's long gone from the time that you could go out and ask for links from other websites. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithm has forced SEOs to link build the old-fashioned way: write good quality content that is pertinent. But how do you reach websites that are willing to link to your site if you ask them directly, which is an "unnatural" link building technique? Social media is your answer. Social media can help you place your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be influenced to link to it when it's worthy of linking to. People who promote your content to others and increase your reach.

3.) Amplification of content
You can write all the excellent content you'd like to, but it won't gain much traction without amplification. Marketing via email can be an excellent method of amplifying content but it will only get to those on your marketing list. Social media enables you to reach new audiences with your content. Once you share your content, your followers will also spread it to their networks should they find it valuable. They will then share it with their following, further increasing your reach. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic through inbound linking as well as social signals and brand recognition, all of which can be used by search engines to determine content to determine the quality of your content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness & Signals
Search engines can use brand name and reputation to determine the quality of your site and how trustworthy it needs to be when they rank it in their algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content Social media can also build brand awareness. This is what Google calls co-citation. Co-citations can be created by using social media to boost Google's trust and help with brand-name searches.

5) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing social media sites for a few years now, which means they now appear on results pages for search engines. This lets your company's brand be listed in search results on search queries that are branded and not only restricted to your business's website. It's even better. Tweets on their own from Twitter were once indexed and included in the search results. This allowed your site to be more prominent in the search results. It was only for a short time, زيادة متابعين تويتر however the deal was ended when 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.