What do social media platforms have to offer SEO? MWI gets this information a lot from prospective and current clients. Although social media has been an increasingly popular channel for marketing over the last few years, many companies have not yet started to take advantage of it. This is crucial if you are investing in SEO. The creation and management of social media accounts is extremely important for supporting SEO efforts, though the benefits are not immediately apparent. Here are five reasons social media is vital to SEO.
1) Social Media Signals
It’s not difficult to see that Google, Bing, and other search engines utilize online conversations in their ranking algorithms. A social engagement is when users like, share on, share or Sustainabilipedia.org/index.php/User:AngelinaStonge tweet about a piece of content. Content with more social engagements is likely to have more social signals. Social signals are utilized by search engines to rank the content. This is a way for search engines to decide what people find most useful and what algorithm they believe to be good quality. If an article receives a lot of social shares it will be immediately identified.
2) Link Building
It is long past the time that you could get hyperlinks from other sites. Since the introduction of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs must do link building the traditional way to create quality content that is linked-worthy. But how do you reach sites who are willing to link to your content if asking them directly is considered an “unnatural” link building technique? Social media is the way to go. Social media allows you to expose your content to interested audiences who might be willing to share it with others, when it’s worthy of linking to. People who connect your content to their friends which increases the power of your content.
3) Content Amplification
You could create any high quality content you want, but it won’t gain much traction without amplification. Sure, email marketing is a great way to amplify content, but it can only be able to reach people who are in your database of marketing. You can also reach new audiences via social media. If you send your content out to your followers, they will be sure to share it with their own followings when they find it useful. This will allow them to recommend your content to their followers, increasing your reach. You’ll also get relevant traffic as well as inbound linking as well as social signals and brand awareness All of which can be utilized by search engines to determine content assessment of quality.
content amplification lifecycle
4) Brand Communication and Awareness
Search engines can use brand image and recognition to judge the credibility of your website and how trustworthy it needs to be in their ranking algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content social media also aids in increase brand recognition. This is what Google refers to as co-citation. These co-citations are built through social media to improve Google’s credibility and aid in the search engine’s branded searches.
5) Social Indexing
Since the search engines are able to index social media profiles, they are now showing up in search results pages. This allows your brand to be displayed in search results for branded queries that are not only restricted to your business’s website. It gets even better. Individual tweets on Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results, too providing another method to ensure your content’s ranking in search. The service was temporary for a few months until Google decided to cease using it , up to now. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.