Diminishing are the days when social media and SEO are mutually exclusive aspects to Internet marketing. In the context of SEO, leveraging social media is essential to better the visibility (and linkability) of your awesome content.

And when awesome content is digestible, dense with value, and somewhat keyword relevant, the outcome can be outstanding (i.e. fast, hard rankings.) To shed light on why SEO is so madly in love with social media these days, below I explain three particular cases why this relationship is so strong.

1. Exposure is Everything

Incase you didn’t know, traffic is an actual ranking factor that’s part of Google’s search engine algorithm. And not only is Google concerned about how many people are visiting your site, but it also cares about how long they hang out. This is otherwise known as “bounce rate,” and it’s kind of a big deal.

If people are coming to your site, and they bounce within 10 seconds, clearly something is off. But before we go down a deep rabbit hole of “why usability and engaging content is critical to succeed,” just be aware that the overall presentation of your content (i.e. design, structure, look and feel, etc.) can actually influence its potential to rank in the search results. In short, when engagement is weak, SEO is weak.

Social media platforms offer a particularly easy way to expose your content in front of new audiences. As a result, you drive more in-market traffic to your site’s SEO’d content. But beyond just sharing your content and calling it a day, leveraging advertising features like boosted posts on Facebook, promoted Tweets on Twitter, and sponsored pins on Pinterest, you can magnify content by leaps and bounds.

Related: Your Brand Story and Content Strategy: How Should They Correlate?

 2. Index Faster. Rank Harder.

In this next point, there may be some speculation and ideas up for debate. Mostly because Google continues to deny any impact social signals have on rankings; that is, Facebook Likes, Tweets and Retweets, Pins, +1’s, etc. But based on my own observations and experiments using services like Social Llama, I believe these social indicators to indeed have an influence on SEO.

How? Similar to links pointing to a new page, social signals seem to help get content indexed faster. In other words, Google tends to crawl and index heavily shared content quicker. Further, really awesome content that’s shared thousands of times over and over tends to rank hard as a result.

Let me give you a quick example to put this into perspective. I regularly write for a few specific health and sports blogs. For the posts that don’t see a lot of shares, it often takes several days before they appear in Google’s search results. And when they do, they’re typically not in the top 50.

However, the posts that do succeed in racking-up a high volume of social shares (whether naturally or via tests with Social Llama) are often indexed in less than a day. Further, these posts can often rank higher right out of the gate, sometimes into the top ten depending on the keyword query.

Of course the popular posts could be getting a few links from all the exposure, thus contributing to quicker rankings. Nonetheless, these are notable observations that I’ve witnessed time and time again when leveraging social media strategies for SEO.

3. Improve Linkability

I must admit, I love the word “linkability.” It’s a subjective measurement of defining just how awesome and linkworthy a piece of content is. Like a newly published scientific study that unveils a remarkable new discovery, content that earns attention and gets people excited is likely to be linked to from other bloggers, publishers, and webmasters.

From a SEO perspective, social media is a healthy supplement to improving the linkability of your content. In addition to sharing your content on social mediums, using latter mentioned advertising opportunities can greatly aid in earning links.

For instance, you can target specific demographics and psychographics when promoting your content on social media. This way your content can gain exposure from certain types of individuals who may be more likely to share, engage with, or link to your work.

When it’s all said done, social media outlets are critical to making the most of your SEO’d content. It’s super easy to use, too. Just trying investing $10 in boosting each epic piece of content you produce. You’ll more than likely be surprised by the amount of engagement it receives.

This article was written by Tyler Tafelsky at http://captivateseo.com/