Five Reasons Why Social Media Is Important For SEO

What exactly does social media have to relate to SEO? At MWI we hear these questions frequently from our current and prospective clients. While social media has been an increasingly popular channel for marketing in recent years, the majority of companies have not yet started to take advantage of it. This is especially true for companies that are investing in SEO. Creating and managing social media accounts is crucial to support SEO efforts, even though their benefits aren't immediately evident. 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 search engines make use of online conversations as part of their ranking algorithms. Social engagement occurs when people like, comment or share tweets on a piece of content. The more social interactions a piece of content receives, the more social signals you can build for your site. Search engines analyze these signals from social media, and then use them as an indicator of quality when ranking the content. It's a way to measure the content that people consider useful in comparison to what their algorithm decides is of high quality. A piece of content can be immediately indexed when it's getting a lot of engagement on social media.

2.) Link Building
It is long past the period when you could just solicit links from other websites. With the emergence of Google's Panda and Penguin algorithms SEOs are now forced to do link building the old fashioned way and create content of high-quality that is worthy of linking. How can you get your content to websites that are willing to link to your website, even if you ask them directly, which would be considered "unnatural"? Social media is the answer. Social media allows you to present your content in front of the right people, who could be attracted to link to it should it be worthy of linking to. These people will share your content with others and boost your authority.

3) Amplification of content
It doesn't matter how high-quality your content is, it's not going to get much traction until you amplify it. Marketing via email is an effective method to increase the reach of your content but it's only going to reach people in your marketing list. Social media enables you to connect with new audiences through your content. If you share your content with your followers, they will also share it with their personal followings if they find it helpful. They will also be able to share your content with their followers, increasing the reach of your content. In addition, you'll gain relevant traffic through inbound linking social signals, inbound linking, and brand recognition, all of which can be utilized by search engines to determine content to determine the quality of your content.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Awareness & Signals
Search engines use brand identity and alexa ترتيب المواقع awareness to determine the credibility of your website and how trustworthy it needs to be when they rank it in their algorithms. Social media helps to build an image for your business and also boosts the quality of your content. This is what Google refers to as co-citation. These co-citations can be developed by using social media to boost Google's trust and help with search results that are branded.

5.) Social Indexing
Since the search engines are able to index social media sites and display them as search results. This allows your business to be displayed in search results for search queries that are branded and not restricted to your website. But there's more than that. Individual tweets on Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results, too which gave another means to get your content noticed in search. The service was temporary for a couple of months, until Google made the decision to stop the service, and it's still in place. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it's important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.