There’s a debate raging among experts over which strategy is best to grow your business with online marketing.
Would SEO or social media marketing be the better option? Often, businesses will hire an SEO expert or agency to increase their visibility in the search engines without even thinking about social media and the traffic that it can bring to their business. Similarly, some focus their attention 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 essential to target a specific audience. It is easier to target an appropriate audience on social media platforms. Most social media platforms allow you to create ads that specifically target people within a particular demographic who will be interested in your niche. SEO is not quite as targeted.
Although you can certainly target those interested in your niche, you generally cannot target a specific demographic. 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. You’ll have to plan and post regular content on various platforms with social media. While tools can make this process easier, you still have to do this consistently.
Social media marketing is not something you can rely on to work without your efforts.
Each post you make will only have a short shelf life, so you’ll need to make an effort each day. On the other hand, SEO will require work, but there will be less ongoing work once you start to rank your web pages.
Which Content Should You Use?
Whether performing SEO or social media marketing, you’ll need to create content. The type of content you create will significantly impact your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not.
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.
Images and videos will work best for social media and be shared across the community if they resonate with the audience. When this occurs, and your content starts to be shared, you’ll also see increased traffic to your website.
So, Which is Better – SEO or Social Media Marketing?
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 exciting and valuable.
Search engines nowadays use social media as a ranking factor, so it’s worth building your social media presence to help SEO. Building traffic via SEO to your website will also help people engage on social media.
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: do both!