What can social media provide in terms of SEO? MWI gets this information a lot from both current and potential clients. While social media has become an increasingly popular channel for marketing in recent times, many firms haven’t yet begun to take advantage of it. This is especially true for companies that are investing in search engine optimization. Making and managing social media accounts is essential to aid in SEO efforts, even though the benefits may not be immediately obvious. Here are five reasons why social media is vital to SEO.

3 months ago1) Social Media Signals

It’s no secret that Google, post283102 (helpful hints) Bing and other major search engines are using online dialogue as part of their algorithm for ranking for some period of time. Social engagements occur the time when people share, like, comment, share, or tweet about an article. The more social engagements a piece of content gets, the greater social signals you build to your site. Search engines evaluate these signals from social media, and use it as a quality factor when ranking content. It’s a way to determine the content that people consider useful and what their algorithm determines to be of good quality. Content can also be indexed instantly if it’s receiving a lot of social engagement.

2.) Link Building

There are no more days of going out and asking for websites to add links to yours. With the advent of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms SEOs must do link building the old fashioned way to create quality content that is link-worthy. But how do you reach sites that would be willing to link to your content , if asking them directly is considered an “unnatural” practice for building links? Social media is the answer. Social media allows you to present your content in front of relevant audiences that may be attracted to link to it in the event that it is worthy of linking to. Those people will also be able to share your content with their friends and increase the reach of your content.

3.) Content Amplification

You could create any high quality content you want however it will not gain much traction without amplification. Email marketing can be an effective method to increase the reach of your content but it will only be able to reach the people on your marketing list. Social media lets you reach new audiences with your content. Once you share your content, those who follow you will also be able to share it with their followers when they are satisfied with the content. These people will then share your content with their followers, increasing the reach of your content. You will also gain relevant traffic through inbound linking social signals, as well as brand awareness, all of which can be utilized by search engines to determine content quality determination.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Communication and Awareness

Brand recognition and brand identity can inform search engines a lot about the quality of your website and how much it is respected in their ranking algorithms. Aside from amplifying your content social media can also help to increase awareness of your brand. Google calls this co-citation. These co-citations are built through social media , which can help improve Google’s trust as well as aid with search results that are branded.

5.) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing social media sites for a few years now which means that they appear in results pages for search engines. This allows your business to be displayed on search results when you type in branded search queries on more than just your own website. This gets more effective. Individual tweets from Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results too – enabling another way to get your content noticed in the search results. It was only temporary for a few months, until Google took the decision to end it , up to now. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.