To increase brand awareness and drive more quality traffic to their websites, marketers should invest in search engine optimization.

Marketing teams use SEO to increase a website’s visibility when people search for products or services. Most people use search engines to find what they need, and they are more likely to buy from or engage with a brand that shows up high on search engine ranking pages (SERPs). When done correctly, SEO can help marketing teams rank higher on SERPs and see increases in traffic and its quality.

Marketers have myriad ways to work on a website’s SEO, including access to various channels and tools. However, to improve the chances of showing up on SERPs, marketing teams need a good content strategy in place.

Blog content, links to internal and external sources, optimized meta descriptions and social media can help improve SEO. Social media is critical to a brand’s content strategy, as it serves as a channel to share content, connect with an audience, build awareness and drive traffic to a website.

Explore how an organization can incorporate social media into its overall SEO strategy.

How does social media affect SEO?
Social media does not directly contribute to how SERPs rank content. However, link sharing across social media platforms increases brand exposure and influences SEO.

Social media can indirectly increase search visibility and organic search rankings through social metrics and signals. Metrics like shares, likes and comments help build trust, customer loyalty and brand awareness. Additionally, these metrics indirectly elevate online visibility and traffic, which search engines look for to evaluate a brand’s online reputation and influence SERP rankings.

Effective search requires a marriage between content and context. Search engines see sites as reputable if they have an SEO strategy and traffic driven to them regularly from various sources, including social media platforms.

Read more: How to incorporate social media into SEO strategies