There's a debate among online marketing experts over which strategy is best to grow your business.
Is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or social media marketing better for growing your business online?
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 entirely on building a social media following without spending any time on SEO.
Both online marketing strategies have their advantages, but which is better?
You cannot be everything to everyone. Therefore, it's essential to target your specific customer to bring in relevant traffic that can lead to sales.
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 the cost and how much effort is required to promote your content via social media and SEO.
With social media, you'll have to determine which platform(s) your audience "lives on", and plan and regularly post content on those platforms. 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 effort. Each post you make will have a short shelf life, so you'll need to determine how often you post to be most effective.
SEO, on the other hand, will require work, but once you start to rank your web pages, there will be less ongoing work involved.
Whether performing SEO or social media marketing, you'll need to create content. The type of content you create will impact your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not.
When writing content for your website or blog, long-form content will work best, meaning that you need to write articles rather than a couple of sentences.
For social media, images and videos work best to encourage engagement. If a post resonates with the audience it may be shared across the community and on others' pages. When this occurs, you may also see an increase in traffic to your website.
The answer is that you'll see the most benefit from incorporating 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 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 drive people to your social media to engage.
So, while SEO and social media marketing are different, they help the other, and the end goal is the same - to increase traffic to your website, products, or services to sell and grow.
The answer is easy: do both!
We're here to help you. If you're ready for a new website for your business or looking for a team of professionals to help drive more traffic to your website with SEO and social media contact us!
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