What do social media platforms have to offer SEO? At MWI, we get these questions frequently from our current and prospective clients. Although social media has been a growing channel for marketing in recent years, the majority of companies have not yet started to make use of it. This is especially true for companies that are investing in search engine optimization. Making and managing social media accounts is crucial to support SEO efforts, although the benefits are not immediately evident. Here are five reasons social media is important for SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals

It’s no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online dialogue in their ranking algorithms for quite some years now. A social engagement happens when people like, comment or share tweets about a piece of content. A piece of content that has more engagements on social media is likely to have more social signals. Search engines look at these signals from social media, and Wiki.lodgecompliance.com/index.php/5_Reasons_Why_Social_Media_Is_Important_For_SEO, index, use it as a quality factor when ranking content. It’s a method of determining the quality of content that people are able to use and what their algorithm determines to be of good quality. If something has a high amount of engagement on social media the content can be indexed.

2) Link Building

It’s been a long moment when you could simply get links from other websites. Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithms are forcing SEOs to link build using the old method: make top-quality content that’s relevant. What is the best way to reach websites that are willing to link to your content, when they are considered “unnatural”? Social media is the answer. Social media lets you post your content and share it with people who are willing to share it with others, when it’s worthy of linking to. These users will then promote your content to others increasing your influence.

3.) Amplification of content

It doesn’t matter how good your content is, it’s not going to get much traction until you amplify it. Sure, email marketing is an excellent way to increase the reach of your content, but it can only reach the people in your marketing database. Social media allows you to increase the reach of your content. Once you share your content, your following will spread it to their networks should they find it valuable. Then those people will be able to share it with their followers and increase your reach. In return, you earn lots of relevant traffic such as inbound links, brand recognition and social signals All of which are utilized by search engines in determining the quality of your content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals

Search engines will use your brand’s identity and awareness 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 create brand awareness. Google refers to this as co-citation. The creation of these co-citations via social media can improve the trust Google has in your website as well as helping by bringing in search queries that are branded.

5) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing social media profiles for a number of years now so they can now show up in results pages for search engines. This allows your brand to be listed in search results on brand-related queries, which aren’t limited to your company website. It’s even more effective. Individual tweets from Twitter were at one time indexed and displayed in search results too – enabling another way for your website to be ranked in search. However, it was only temporary the deal was ended when 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.