What does social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI we hear these questions frequently from our current and prospective clients. Social media is a rapidly expanding channel of marketing that many companies have only just begun to take advantage of over the past few years. However, it’s crucial to make use of in particular if you’re putting efforts in SEO. Creating and managing social media accounts is extremely important to assist in SEO efforts, even though the benefits are not immediately evident. Here are five reasons why social media is crucial for SEO.
1.) Social Media Signals
It’s no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online chat as part of their ranking algorithms for some time now. When people tweet, like, comment or share the content they like it is referred to as a social engagement. A piece of content that has more social engagements will have more social signals. Search engines measure these social signals, and then use them as an indicator of quality when ranking content. This is a method for search engines to identify the most popular content and what algorithm they believe to be good quality. If an article receives lots of social engagement it will be immediately indexed.
2) Link Building
It is long past the time when you could go out and ask for hyperlinks from other sites. Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithms are forcing SEOs to build links using the old method: make high-quality content that is relevant. How do you reach out to websites that are willing to link to your content, if asking them directly would be thought redirect to www.ted.com be “unnatural”? Social media is the solution. Social media enables you to expose your content to of relevant groups of people who may be influenced to link to it if it’s worth linking to. These users will then share your content with others increasing your influence.
3.) Content Amplification
No matter how top-quality your content is, it will not achieve much success until you amplify it. Yes, email marketing is a great way to amplify content, but it can only reach those in your marketing database. The possibility of reaching new audiences is via social media. After you have shared your content, your followers will also share it with their following if they find it useful. This will cause them to spread the word to their networks, further increasing your reach. In return, you will gain lots of relevant traffic and inbound links, as well as brand recognition and social signals These are all utilized by search engines in determining content quality.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Awareness & Signals
Brand recognition and brand identity can tell search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your website and the degree to which it should be believed to be in its ranking algorithms. Social media can help build brand awareness and increases the quality of the quality of your content. Google refers to this as co-citation. These co-citations can be developed by using social media to boost Google’s trust as well as aid with brand-name searches.
5.) Social Indexing
Since search engines are able to index social media accounts and display them as search results. This allows your brand to appear in search results for brand-related queries, which aren’t restricted to your website. It’s more than that. Individual tweets from Twitter were initially indexed and included in search results, too giving another opportunity to ensure your content’s ranking in the search results. It was only for a short time, however, and Google removed it after few months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.