What do social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. While social media has become an increasing marketing channel in recent times, many companies have not yet started to make use of it. This is especially true for companies that are investing in SEO. While the benefits of using social media are not immediately apparent, they are crucial for SEO support. Out of the numerous reasons why you should consider social media as a part of your online strategy, here are 5 reasons why it is essential to SEO.
1.) Social Media Signals
It’s not a secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines make use of online dialogue in their algorithm for ranking. If people tweet, share, like or comment on a piece of content, this is called a social engagement. The more the number of social interactions that a piece content gets, the greater social signals you can build for your website. Social signals are utilized by search engines to rank content. This is a method for search engines to decide the content that people are most interested in and what their algorithm deems as high-quality. If something has a high amount of engagement on social media, it can be instantly classified.
2.) Link Building
Long gone are the days of going out and soliciting websites to add links to your site. With the emergence of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms SEOs have to perform link building in the old fashioned way by creating high-quality content that is link-worthy. But how do you reach websites that are willing to link to your website if asking them directly is thought to be an “unnatural” link building technique? Social media can help. Social media can help you present your content in front of relevant audiences that may be influenced to link to it when it’s worthy of linking to. They will also be able to share your content with their friends which increases the power of your content.
3.) The amplifying of content
You can create all the high quality content you want however it will not gain an enormous amount of attention without amplification. Sure, email marketing is a great way to amplify content, but it can only reach the people in your database of marketing. You can reach new audiences through social media. Once you share your content, your followers will share it with their following should they find it valuable. These people will then promote your content to their followers, increasing your reach. As a result, you get lots of relevant traffic, inbound links, brand recognition and social signals – all of which are utilized by search engines to determine the quality of content.
content amplification lifecycle
4) Brand Sensibilization and Brand
Search engines will use your brand’s name and reputation to determine the credibility of your website and how trustworthy it must be within their ranking algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content social media can also help to increase awareness of your brand. Google refers to this as co-citation. These co-citations can be built by using social media to boost Google’s trust and help with branded searches.
5) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing social media profiles for a number of years now, which means they now appear on search result pages. This lets your company’s brand be listed in search results on branded queries that are not limited to your company website. But it gets even better than that. Tweets on their own from Twitter could be indexed and included in the search results. This allowed your site to rank higher on search. This was just temporary for Www.geocraft.xyz/index.php/User:JulianeHeagney4 a couple of months before Google took the decision to end 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.