When it comes to digital marketing for small businesses, there are many different avenues you can take to get the word out about your company.
We are often asked, “would SEO or social media marketing be the better option?”
Often, small businesses will hire an SEO expert or marketing agency to increase their visibility in search engines without thinking about social media and the traffic it can bring to their business.
Similarly, some small businesses will focus 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
If you want to bring in relevant traffic to your website and sales, it’s essential to be able to target a specific audience. It is easier to target an appropriate audience on social media platforms.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to create ads that specifically target people within a specific demographic who will be interested in your niche.
SEO is not entirely as targeted. Although you can certainly target those interested in your niche, you generally cannot target a specific demographic.
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 through social media and SEO.
With social media, you’ll have to plan and post regular content on various platforms. While tools can make this process easier, you still have to do this consistently.
Social media marketing is not something that you can rely on to work without your own efforts. Each post you make will only have a short shelf life, so you’ll need to make an effort each day.
SEO, on the other hand, will require work, 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 content. The type of content you create will make a significant impact on your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not.
When writing content for your website or blog, long-form content usually works best. This means you may need to create articles of a few thousand words rather than a couple of hundred.
For social media, images and videos will work best 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 an increase in 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, 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. In addition, 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 to help increase traffic to your website, products, or services.
The answer is easy: do both!
If you are a small business that doesn’t have the time or money to dedicate to SEO and social media marketing, reach out to Your Media Squad. Our mission is to help small business owners with their marketing strategy so they can focus more on getting more sales.
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