Experts are divided over which online marketing technique is best for expanding your business, with SEO vs Social Media Marketing as the main point of contention.

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.

In contrast, there are those who concentrate their attention solely on growing a social media following without investing any time in SEO. SEO or Search Engine Optimization helps Google, and other search engines, know what is important on your website.

After all, there is no point in getting your business website to rank highly on Google if you don't have any traffic visiting it. Conversely, having a large social media following without the site rankings necessary to pull them in is like shouting into an empty room (i.e., no one's listening). So what should you do?

All too often business owners convince themselves that they know nothing about SEO. They hear words like link, meta, url, optimize, links, and search queries and they decide to just hire a pro. While I don't disagree with hiring someone skilled in SEO, it is important to know enough about the subject that you can understand what the data is telling you, if your provider is performing well, and if there is a ROI on your investment.

Let's compare the two methods to determine which one is superior, and how you can modify your marketing strategy.

Targeting An Audience

It's critical to be able to target a certain audience in order to bring in relevant traffic and sales. On social media sites, it's much easier to target an appropriate demographic.

Most social media platforms allow you to create ads that specifically target people within a certain 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.

Targeting is also very different if you are a local brick and mortar store looking to attract clients within your area, or if you are an ecommerce brand shipping across the nation.

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 various platforms. While there are tools available that can make this process easier, you still have to do this on a consistent basis. There are so many social media platforms, each requiring their own strategy.

Repurposing content with a tool like Aroara means you can post in multiple places efficiently, however it is still time consuming to respond to comments and connect with your audience.

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.

Of all the social media platforms, Pinterest, has the longest shelf life for content. This is because it is actually a search engine not a social media platform. You can read more on Pinterest and its unique strengths in this article.

SEO, on the other hand, will require work, but once you start to rank your web pages, there will be less ongoing work involved. The effort is very front loaded, but you won’t need to worry about the ongoing process of content creation and promotion. Instead, good SEO starts with good keyword research. There are a number of SEO tools on the market, a great comparison article here describes many differences. At Service Based Business Society blog we love Surfer.

Which Content Should You Use?

Whether you are performing SEO vs social media marketing, you’ll need to create content. The type of content you create will make a big impact on your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not.

If you want to use social media marketing, it’s important to create content that is educational and engaging. People won’t spend their time learning from a boring article or poorly-designed infographic. The best content will be useful and offer value to the user.

SEO, on the other hand, requires information that will help you rank. This means keyword-focused articles like guides, ebooks and downloads. Make sure to use all relevant keywords in your post titles, tags and URLs too. This content will ensure your site shows in search results when your audience is searching the web.

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 word caption.

For social media, images and videos will work best and will 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.

SEO and Site Structure

When preparing content for your site it is important to remember that your site structure plays a key role in your SEO rankings. The content you create should be well-structured and consistent with the rest of your website pages. It is important that this is reflected in your URLs, alt text, titles and anchor text too.

Each page on your site should be optimized for a specific keyword and contain related keywords too. A high degree of coherence between your keywords and content will help Google understand the context of the pages on your website.

This is why it’s important to make sure that each search term you target has at least one or two pages targeted to this phrase as well as other relevant phrases.

Every page should be optimized for one or two keywords to ensure that your rankings are consistent and accurate across the entire site.

What Are Backlinks?

Ever heard the term backlink and wonder what on earth someone is talking about? Backlinks are the links to your website from other websites. This is crucial for SEO rankings, because Google looks at how many quality sites are linking back to you in order to determine whether your site should be displayed higher or lower in results.

A great way to get more backlinks for your website is through guest blogging on other publications and websites related to your industry. Guest blogging can help you improve traffic to your site and will also help you build relationships with other bloggers in your field.

Think of a backlink as the internet version of a friendly recommendation. Another site is saying your content is legitimate. In this Neil Patel article about getting backlinks he talks about building your links in a scalable way.

Best Practices For Images

We all know that images are super important for social media, but did you know that using an image can help your SEO also? The right image for your blog post or content can significantly improve your chances of ranking.

Images should be clear and optimized to load as quickly as possible. They should also be eye-catching and related to your subject matter, with a maximum width of 300 pixels. Furthermore, you should ensure that the file name of the image is related to the topic of your content.

Using keywords as file names can help you rank higher in search results for those specific terms. For example, if your keyword was cooking and you created an image with a file name like kenwoodcookmincer.jpg then this could help yourself rank higher for that term.

Meta Was Important Before The Metaverse

I know, too funny right? Before the metaverse there was something important called the meta tag.

It’s important that you optimize your meta tags correctly, including the description but also multiple keywords that relate to your content for Google and other search engines to discover. When optimizing your meta data it’s important to read about how these snippets work so you can craft the perfect meta tag to optimize your content.

Don’t Forget About Your Location

If you sell a product or service to your local area it is crucial that you include keywords related to your geographical location. This helps search engines determine the relevancy of your site and will help users find information they’re looking for when searching for businesses in their area.

You want to ensure that when your ideal audience is looking through their search results that you’re in a position where it is highly likely that they click on your website. This includes including the name of your location and related keywords to your pages.

Quality Over.... Everything

So creating content can be time consuming , but quality is most important. Your content should be high quality, engaging and written with your audience in mind.

You can use tools like TruRanker or Google Analytics to check up on your competition and see what type of content is ranking highly in the search results within your niche.

Content that is poorly written, keyword stuffed, and not relevant to your audience will not help your ideal audience get to know, like, and trust you and your brand.

While it may drive traffic in the short term, your audience will quickly realize that your content does not provide value.

Think of each piece of content as a billboard for your business, and ensuring that every piece of content - SEO or Social Media - is authentic, accurate, and relevant will ensure that not only will you rank well, but you will also be creating loyal followers that are eager to support your business. Research is the first step to both SEO and social media content creation.

So, Which is Better - SEO or Social Media Marketing?

You’ll see the most benefits from incorporating both search engine optimization 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. The larger your online presence is the more organic search traffic you will get to the site.

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!

A Few Things To Remember...

When creating content for SEO, focus on 1-2 keywords per page, make sure each page is optimized for these keywords and write with the user in mind. When writing content for social media marketing, think about how this will resonate with other people interested in similar topics .

It’s important that you remember that any content you post - no matter the platform - could ultimately affect the reputation of your business.

Interested in a free SEO audit? Book a call with Bottcher Business Management Agency to discuss your SEO strategy.

Keywords: search engine, SEO, search engine optimization, social media, google, links, external links, traffic, content, mobile, content, google, organic search, link.