What do social media platforms provide in terms of SEO? At MWI we hear many of these inquiries from customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. Social media is a rapidly expanding channel of marketing that many businesses have only begun to take advantage of over the past few years. However, it’s vital to take advantage of it in particular if you’re putting resources in SEO. While the benefits of using social media may not be immediately obvious, they are vital for SEO help. From the myriad of reasons why you should consider the use of social media in your overall strategy to be online, here are 5 reasons why it is essential for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It’s no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online chat in their algorithm for ranking for quite some period of time. Social engagements occur the time when people share, like, comment or share tweets about an article. Content with more social engagements is likely to have more social signals. Search engines analyze these social signals and use it as an index of quality when ranking the content. This is a way for search engines to know what people find most useful and what their algorithm deems top-quality. If the content you’re looking at receives a lot of social engagement the content can be indexable.

2.) Link Building

It’s past the moment when you could simply make a request for links from other websites. With the advent of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms, SEOs are forced to create links in by hand to create quality content that is link-worthy. How can you get your content to websites which are willing to hyperlink to your content, when you ask them directly, which would be thought to be “unnatural”? Social media is the answer. Social media lets you share your content with interested audiences who might be 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.) The amplifying of content

No matter how top-quality your content is, it’s not going to gain traction without amplification. Marketing via email can be an effective method to increase the reach of your content but it will only reach those in your list of marketing contacts. Social media allows you to connect with new audiences through your content. If you publish your content to your followers, they will also share it with their personal followings when they find it useful. This will cause them to also share it with their friends, further increasing your reach. As a result, you get lots of relevant traffic and inbound links, as well as social signals , Wiki.lynthornealder.com/index.php?title=User_talk:RebekahArmytage (enquiry) and brand awareness These are all utilized by search engines in determining the quality of the content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Recognition and Signals

Brand image and recognition can inform search engines many things about the quality of your site’s content and how much it is respected in their ranking algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content Social media can also create brand awareness. This is what Google refers to as a co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media can boost Google’s trust in your company website as well as helping by using branded search terms.

5.) Social Indexing

Since the search engines index social media profiles, they are now showing on search results pages. This allows your brand to show up in search results for specific queries that aren’t only restricted to your business’s website. This gets better. Individual tweets on Twitter were initially indexed and included in search results as well – enabling another way to get your content noticed in search. It was only for a short time, however it was a short-term solution, and Google stopped it after a couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.