Five Reasons Why Social Media Is Important for SEO

What does social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. While 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 particularly important for companies that are investing in search engine optimization. While the benefits of using social media are not immediately apparent, they’re crucial to SEO aid. From the myriad of reasons you should think about social media as a part of your online strategy, here are 5 reasons it’s important to SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It’s not a secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines rely on online conversation as part of their algorithm for ranking. Social engagement occurs the time when people share, alexa ترتيب المواقع like, comment, share, or tweet about a piece of content. A piece of content with more social engagements is likely to have more social signals. Search engines look at these social signals, and then use them as an indicator of quality when ranking the content. It’s a way to determine what content people find useful in comparison to what their algorithm decides is top-quality. A piece of content can be immediately indexed in the event that it’s receiving lots of social interactions.

2) Link Building

It’s long gone from the period when you could just get links from other websites. Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithms have forced SEOs to build links in by using the traditional method of creating quality content that is relevant. 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 method? Social media can help. Social media lets you present your content in front of people who are interested and could be attracted to link to it if it’s worth linking to. People who promote your content to others increasing your influence.

3.) Content Amplification

You can write all the high quality content you want but it’s not going to gain an enormous amount of attention without amplification. Email marketing can be a great way of amplifying content but it’s only going to reach people in your list of marketing contacts. Social media enables you to expand your reach with your content. If you publish your content to your followers, they’ll share it with their own followers in the event that they find it helpful. These people will then be able to share your content with their followers, increasing the reach of your content. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic through inbound linking social signals, inbound linking, and brand awareness All of which can be used by search engines to determine content assessment of quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Awareness & Signals

Brand identity and awareness can inform search engines many things about the quality of your website and how much it should be believed to be in its ranking algorithms. Social media is a great way to increase brand awareness and amplifies the quality of your content. This is what Google refers to as a co-citation. The creation of these co-citations via social media can improve Google’s trust in your website as well as helping with branded search queries.

5) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing social media accounts since a while, which means they now appear in results pages for search engines. This lets your company’s brand show up in search results for specific queries that aren’t exclusive to your site. It gets even better. Tweets on their own from Twitter were once searchable and displayed in the search results. This allowed your website to be more prominent in search. That was only temporary for a few months until 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.