With online marketing, there’s a debate raging among experts over which strategy is best to grow your business.
Would SEO or social media marketing be the better option?
We have seen businesses will hire an SEO expert or agency to increase their visibility in the search engines without even thinking about social media. But social media do also drive traffic that it can bring to leads to business.
Similarly, there are those who focus their attention entirely on building a social media following without spending any time on SEO.
Let’s compare both strategies to see which option is best.
Targeting an Audience
To bring in relevant traffic and sales, it’s important to be able to target a specific audience. It is definitely easier to target an appropriate audience on social media platforms. Especially if it involves some kind of paid ads.
Most social media platforms allow you to create ads that specifically target people within a certain demographic who will be interested in your niche. But this can be very costly while the results may be a lot more immediate.
SEO is not quite as targeted and certainly not as fast to see results. Although you can certainly target those interested in your niche, you generally cannot target a specific demographic. And the wait time can be months
How Much Effort Is Involved?
To ensure a return on investment, you’ll want to consider how much effort is required to promote your content via social media and SEO.
With social media, you’ll have to plan and post regular content on the various platforms. While there are tools available that can make this process easier for you, it needs to be done on a consistent basis.
Social media marketing is not something that you can rely on to work without a lot of effort on your part. Each post you make often have a short shelf life. So you will continually have to find relevant things to post daily. This can be very time consuming especially if you are a one-man gang without a support staff that can handle that for you.
SEO, on the other hand, will require a lot of work and expertise up front, but once you start to rank your web pages, there will be less ongoing work involved.
Which Content Should You Use?
Whether you are performing SEO or social media marketing, you’ll need to create relevant content. The type of content you create will make a big impact on your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not. Remember, one of Google’s biggest goal is to bring back relevant information to their customers when the customer enters a search. If your content is not relevant, you will not rank high on Google searches.
When writing content for your website or blog, usually long-form content will work best. This means that you may need to create articles of a few thousand words, rather than a couple of hundred. If you are relying on SEO, writing fresh content every day will not be necessary unlike advertising on social platforms.
For social media, you have a lot wider range of content that you can use like, images and videos which will work best. Plus, they can be shared easily across the community if they resonate with the audience. When this occurs and your content starts to be shared, you’ll also see an increase in traffic to your website.
Whats our Recommendations?
You’ll see the most benefits from incorporating both SEO and social media marketing into your online marketing efforts.
Write long articles and embed images and videos into your content. Doing this will increase engagement and time spent on your website, therefore showing the search engines that your content is good and can be trusted. Plus, people will share content on social media that they find to be interesting and valuable.
Search engines nowadays use social media as a ranking factor, so it’s worth building your social media presence as it will help with your SEO. Building traffic via SEO to your website will also help people to engage on social media too.
So, while SEO and social media marketing are different, they each help the other and the end goal of both is the same – to help increase traffic to your website, products, or services.
The answer is easy: we at SENNONVILLAGE encourage our clients to do both. But because SEO is really a long-term strategy, our company focuses on building engaging websites powered by SEO fundamentals sprinkled with Social Media Marketing.
If you need help sorting it out, we offer a free analysis of your current situation and work with you to customize and implement the best strategy for your budget, goals and time frame.
