Every marketing strategy is unique and tailored to the specific company. So, is SEO or social media marketing a better choice?
We know the importance of SEO and social media marketing and how they can boost brand awareness. Both types of marketing will also give you a competitive edge, boost credibility, and help drive revenue. However, putting more effort into either SEO or social media marketing might be helpful depending on how it fits into your overall marketing strategy.
Advantages of Search Engine Optimization
There’s a reason why SEO is so important. Let’s take a look at the 5 advantages of search engine optimization or more popularly known as SEO.
Boosts credibility
Focusing on SEO helps your website rank higher on search engines which helps you gain visibility and engagement. Websites that rank higher are more trustworthy and users will typically choose over other brands. Therefore, your credibility improves overall.
Gives your company a competitive advantage
You want to beat out your competition. By investing in SEO, your customers will be more likely to find you instead of your competitor. Focusing on building a website with good user experience, and quality content will give your audience what they want. This will give you a competitive edge and an increase in market share.
Drives traffic and conversions
Again, an SEO-optimized website will rank high which means that there will be more people clicking through and navigating your website. When you put out relevant content, your website will show up when potential customers are searching for you and this will drive more traffic to your site.
Increases reach to your audience
As long as you research your audience and tailor your content to what they will find valuable, you will continue to keep reaching more of the market. Using the right keywords and defining your niche in your local area will help you attract more organic customers.
Promotes user engagement
You want to make sure that your website is fast, easy to navigate, and understandable to provide a seamless experience. Providing backlinks, seamless transactions, and highly responsive pages will give the customer a great experience so they keep coming back.
Advantages of Social Media Marketing
90% of marketers claim that social media generates immense exposure for their company. That’s only one of its many advantages. Social media has taken the marketing world by storm and it’s here to stay. Here are the top 5 advantages of social media marketing.
Increases brand awareness
4.74 billion people are utilizing social media platforms worldwide. That’s nearly 60% of the population. To say the least, social media has the power to influence and reach an incredibly wide audience. Keeping your social media platforms up to date with optimized titles and descriptions, eye-catchy pictures, and videos will attract potential and loyal customers.
Helps gather audience data
With a business account, you can gather invaluable information on the demographics of your followers and the type of content that keeps your audience engaged. There are also new features to A/B test different types of content to see what performs best with your followers. It’s a valuable tool to learn more about your audience’s interests, so you can tailor your content strategy more to their liking.
Cost-effective
Opening a social media account and sharing content is, for the most part, free. Therefore it is a cost-effective way to start putting your brand out there. For more targeted exposure, you can pay a fee to advertise and sponsor your posts. You can choose how much you want to pay by setting a daily budget, so it’s a budget-friendly way to advertise and reach new target customers.
Ability to gain market insights
Social media platforms can also help you understand your competition better. You can gain insights into what’s trending in the market, plus how customers are responding to these trends. It’s a great way to identify gaps in the market, as well as showcase why people should pick your brand over your competition.
Boost sales
When you build your brand on social media you are building a whole persona. Your audience connects with this persona and makes them loyal to your brand. As you continue to showcase what makes your brand unique, you attract customers and boost sales. Additionally, once you show your value and credibility, your sales can increase because your audience trusts you.
SEO or social media marketing: Which is Actually Better?
Both SEO and social media marketing (SMM) are good for your brand and your company. While social media marketing is about utilizing social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook. TikTok, Pinterest, Youtube, and Twitter) to build trust and awareness, an SEO strategy helps to increase traffic to your website. While both have their own parts to play in a marketing strategy, utilizing both social media and SEO can prove to be highly beneficial.
While SEO and SMM have similar benefits of increasing brand awareness, growth, and visibility, they both play together to boost traffic, conversions and generate leads.
Social media helps to increase the visibility of the brand. With more shares of the company blog, pictures, and videos on social media platforms, your website gains visibility.
When you post your blog articles on social media, you can help your company pages get indexed on Google at a quicker rate.
Social media is a great way to find trending keywords and new content ideas for the blog and website.
The best part, SMM drives traffic through social posts while you’re waiting for your SEO strategy to kick in.
How Search Boosts Your Social Efforts
If you’re looking to integrate SEO or social media marketing, working together is the best way to optimize your marketing efforts. Here’s how you can get started.
Keyword Research for Social Media
People position themselves on social media depending on trending topics and what niche they identify themselves in. There are many tools to help you find popular hashtags, tags, and mentions. Using these specific tags will get your profile and posts noticed.
On-Site Optimization for Social Media
When filling out your bio, descriptions, and profile information, you want to optimize your words with keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, and other methods commonly used for SEO optimization to boost your visibility. Knowing these SEO strategies will help you tailor your profile accordingly and make your profile more visible when searched.
How Can Social Media Improve Your SEO
Having a social media presence will boost traffic to your website and get you the engagement needed to improve your rankings. Here’s how social media helps with SEO.
Social Boosts Local SEO
Posting on social has more benefits than making your feed pretty. Your social media posts can show up on Google searches! So if a potential customer is looking for a certain product or service, if tagged properly, your company could show up first. Additionally, if you focus on the social media platforms that best attract your target audience and are popular on search engines, you might have a winning formula for your brand.
Social Increases organic website traffic
Being active on social will help improve your website traffic so your audience can learn more or make a purchase. Your presence on social media is what builds trust and entices the user to take action by visiting your website. More traffic means improved page authority and higher rankings.
Social builds trust & brand reputation
A credible website is one that is trusted and has a good reputation. With a social media page, you have the power to talk to your customers and answer any concerns or questions they have almost immediately. With good reputation management and customer service, you can build trust and provide value with your content. A trusted brand will naturally generate loyal customers, which leads to more website traffic and sales.
Which social media channels are best for online search?
Each brand has customers that hang out in different parts of the internet. Your audience might be more active on Instagram than TikTok or your niche might be popular on Facebook.
However, as you tailor your marketing efforts to specific social media platforms, there are certain social media platforms that outperform others when it comes to online search. Chances are you’ve heard of some of them.
Facebook has more than 1.71 billion monthly users on the social media platform. Having your business on Facebook could generate shares and likes making your brand visible to thousands of new customers.
Youtube
Youtube has more than 1.5 billion active monthly users and is the second largest search online next to Google. Youtube also has a massive advertising potential of more than 2.5 billion. So, if your target audience is on YT you should strongly consider advertising opportunities here. Also, it’s a great hub for influencer marketing.
Practice making your point in a single sentence! But seriously. If you get retweeted, your brand could become a trending topic. It’s a quick-paced platform with a huge reach potential.
According to semrush.com, LinkedIn is the content marketing hub of 94% of B2B marketers. And almost 90% of marketers are using the platform for lead generation.
Medium
In 2020, Medium had an audience of almost 154M unique visitors a month, and an average of 258M visits per month.
20% of internet users also have an Instagram account. With the new addition of Reels and the ability to link your product shop directly into your posts, IG is a fantastic option for retail, products, and content creators. It’s also one of the best channels to find and utilize for influencer marketing. So, your brand needs to be on it.
TikTok
The trend-setting platform that boosted the popularity of short-form video content. Jump on the trend, if you dare. But, don’t forget to use trending hashtags because your account could go viral and generate hundreds of thousands of followers with even a 10-second clip.
People forget about Pinterest but it’s a powerful tool for businesses. Fun fact, users conduct over 2 billion searches per month on Pinterest. It also generates massive results for SEO by driving traffic to your website. It’s especially useful for service-based businesses or companies with blogs.
Pitting SEO and social media marketing together might not be the wisest move for your company. Investing in both is the answer and will benefit your brand the most when used together.
Conducting the right research, testing content, and finding the right channels can help make SMM and SEO work well together. It’s a fantastic solution for businesses that want to rank higher, and build trust, credibility, and authority, while also showing up first for their target audience.
