What do social media platforms have to offer SEO? At MWI we hear many of these inquiries from current and prospective clients. Social media is a rapidly growing marketing channel that most businesses have only recently begun to take advantage of over the past couple of years, yet it’s very important to leverage in particular if you’re putting funds into SEO. Setting up and managing social media accounts are essential to aid in SEO initiatives, but the benefits may not be immediately obvious. Of the many reasons to think about social media as part of your online strategy, here are 5 advantages of it 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 algorithm for ranking for a long time. When people share content via Twitter, Facebook or comment on the content it is referred to as a social engagement. Content that has more engagements on social media will have more social signals. Search engines look at these social signals, and use them as a quality factor when ranking the content. This is a way for search engines to determine the content that people are most interested in and also what they consider to be high-quality. If an article has a high amount of social engagement the content can be indexable.

2.) Link Building

It’s long gone from the time that you could get links from other websites. Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithms have forced SEOs to linkbuild using the old method: make quality content that is relevant. But how do you reach sites that would be willing to link to your content , if asking them directly is thought to be an “unnatural” link building technique? Social media is your solution. Social media allows you to publish your content to relevant audiences who may be willing to link to your content, in the event that it’s worth linking to. People who share your content with others, increasing your influence.

3) Content Amplification

It doesn’t matter how good the content you publish, it won’t gain traction until you amplify it. Yes, email marketing is a great way to amplify content, but it’ll only be able to reach people who are in your database of marketing. The possibility of reaching new audiences is via social media. If you share your content, your followers will share it with their following in the event that they find it helpful. Then those people will share it with their following and increase your reach. In return, you will gain a lot of relevant traffic, inbound links, branding awareness and social signals These are all utilized by search engines to judge the quality of the content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Recognition and Signals

Brand identity and awareness can inform search engines a lot about the quality of your site and how much it should be respected in their ranking algorithms. Social media helps to build an image for your business and also boosts the content you publish. Google calls this co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media can help increase the trust Google has in your website as well as helping with branded search queries.

5.) Social Indexing

Since search engines are able to index social media websites and display them on search results pages. This enables your brand to be displayed in search results that include branded search queries on more than the site of your business. This gets more effective. Individual Tweets from Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results too providing another method to ensure your content’s ranking in search. It was only for a short time, however the deal was ended when Google stopped it after a few months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.