What does social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI we hear lots of questions from our customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. While social media has been an increasingly popular channel for marketing in recent years, most businesses have yet to profit from the potential of it. This is particularly important when you’re investing in SEO. Setting up and managing social media accounts are important for supporting SEO initiatives, but the benefits of social media aren’t always apparent. Here are five benefits of social media is important for SEO.
1) Social Media Signals
It’s no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines use online conversations as part of their algorithm for ranking. If people tweet, share, like or comment on a piece of content that is known as a social engagement. Content that has more social engagements will be able to show more social signals. Search engines look at these social signals, and use it as a quality factor when ranking the content. It’s a way of evaluating what content people find useful in comparison to what their algorithm decides is of high quality. If a piece of content is receiving lots of engagement on social media it will be immediately identified.
2) Link Building
The days of going out and soliciting websites to link to your site. In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm, SEOs are forced to do link building by hand and create content of high-quality which is relevant to linking. But how do you reach websites that are willing to link to your website if you ask them directly, which is an “unnatural” link building method? Social media is the answer. Social media allows you to place your content in front of people who are interested and could be influenced to link to it should it be worthy of linking to. They will also be able to share your content with other people and boost your authority.
3) Content Amplification
You could create any top-quality content you like however it will not gain much traction without amplification. Sure, email marketing can be an excellent way to increase the reach of your content, but it will only reach the people in your marketing database. It is possible to 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. These people will then recommend your content to their followers, increasing your reach. In return, you earn a lot of relevant traffic such as inbound links, social signals and socialwb.com brand awareness – all of which are used by search engines to determine the quality of the content.
content amplification lifecycle
4) Brand Recognition and Signals
Search engines use brand identity and awareness to determine the credibility of your website and how trustworthy it should be in their ranking algorithms. Social media can help build brand awareness and increases the quality of the quality of your content. This is what Google calls co-citation. Co-citations can be created through social media to 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 sites since a while which means that they appear on results pages for search engines. This allows your business to appear in search results for specific queries that aren’t only restricted to your business’s website. It gets even better. Individual Tweets from Twitter were initially indexed and included in search results, too which gave another means for your website to be ranked in search. However, it was only temporary it was a short-term solution, and Google shut it down after couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.