Regarding digital marketing and ensuring your business gets exposed to a local or wider audience, two marketing strategies: SEO & Social Media. It’s a constant debate between business owners and social media specialists about which strategy should be paid more attention.
SEO and social media management are both innovative strategies to achieve your brand objectives. However, because of the debate, you might wonder which one is better suited for your needs. Let’s take a look at their purpose.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is about your web pages appearing on search engine results when specific queries are searched. For SEO, it all depends on your search engine result pages (SERPs) ranking to drive leads and conversions to your landing pages.
Optimizing your website requires you to insert configurations into your web copies, code, structure, and web design so that search engines can crawl through them easily. When they understand what the web page is all about, the greater your chances of ranking higher and smashing those brand goals.
On the other hand, social media management deals with building a strong community and developing relationships with your target audience and followers on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and many more.
Beyond making friends, businesses take advantage of social media platforms to promote their services and products. You’d have to build a reputation on those platforms, establish your business as a trustworthy brand, and boost your revenues while at it.
This article will dive deeper into the SEO vs social media marketing debate and identify the relationship between them.
SEO vs Social Media
In the previous section, we explored the purpose of SEO & social media. But how do they perform when placed against some metrics?
Content
Content is King. As businesses and corporations constantly battle for supremacy, what separates your business from others is the content you have. We look at how content influences social media SEO strategy.
SEO
When it comes to ranking higher on SERPs, content is super important. People hop on search engines such as Google and Bing to research and learn about a product or service. Thus, if your website content is informative and engaging, Google will always place it above others.
High-quality content includes how-to guides, definitions, tutorials, or answers to popular questions. You need to understand that when writing content for SEO, you should provide all the required information about that subject so they don’t have to visit other websites for more information.
They want fast answers, and they’d leave when your web pages don’t provide that. Thus, you must provide interesting and comprehensive information with optimized keywords to achieve the best results for SEO.
Social Media
Content for social media search is a tad different from SEO. You’d have to properly relate with your audience and connect to their emotional side. That’s why content focused on happiness, anger, anxiety, or drama drives engagement.
People use social media to connect with their friends and know what’s happening. You can use social media to spin content that will relate to them. For instance, a Facebook post containing photos generates 53% more likes than other types of content.
Some of the best content includes short posts, compelling headlines, and visuals.
The bottom line is you need to understand how social media helps SEO, as they’re both crucial in promoting your digital content. Content for SEO & social media can supplement each other. You can create a visual on social media with a link to your website.
Audience
Your audience is essential to your digital marketing – whether through search engine optimization vs social media marketing. How do you pull it off?
SEO
Creating your web content for users takes a long time. As part of your digital marketing strategies, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your potential audience and imagine what they’d be looking for.
It will also give you an idea of their behavior and how to suitably tend to their needs. You can also track their behavior using Google Analytics. The web analytics tool can provide information about the web pages receiving the most clicks and sessions. You can then optimize your content to get the best results.
Social Media
Targeting your potential audience on social media is quite simplistic. Most social media platforms feature in-built targeting for your campaigns. You get to see the demographics of people who engage more on your posts.
According to research, 74% of social media users use these platforms to influence their purchase decisions. Thus, you can use social media to connect with your target audience seamlessly.
So, what is the relationship between social media and SEO? You can use social media to find your customers and re-target them with SEO for your website.
Success Rate
The metric is quite different if you consider the success rate of SEO vs social media marketing. We explore them below:
SEO
You cannot achieve overnight success with SEO. It’s a slow, gradual process of publishing high-quality content and optimizing them to rank higher on SERPs. When done right, SEO boosts more conversions compared to social media marketing.
SEO helps you generate visitors and subscribers to your website, ranking it for targeted keywords. A web analytics tool can monitor your website activity after it is launched.
Social Media
If brand awareness and engagement are what you’re looking for, social media can make it possible. When your content is engaging, people tend to share it with their friends, who will also engage with it.
You must develop a habit of posting regular content to achieve excellent social media marketing campaign results. You need to consider when your audience is most active and post content so they can engage with them.
You can use social media to promote your website. As long as your content is engaging, people want to learn more about your brand and will visit your website.
What Is the Relationship Between Social Media and SEO?
What ties SEO & social media together is content marketing. They can be both used to target your potential audience and generate results. You can use your social media handles to promote your website and generate more conversions.
You can also plug in your social media handle in your blog posts to get your website visitors to connect with your content when they use those platforms.
Social media for SEO are intertwined, as they can be utilized to achieve the same marketing strategy.
How Social Media Helps SEO
Social media goes a long way in improving your SEO. When you post engaging content on your social media pages, your audience will go the extra mile to learn about your brand by visiting your website.
When more people visit your website, Google sees it as a sign that it is trustworthy and may rank it for particular keywords above other websites. Part of your digital marketing for your SEO should include social media marketing.
Do You Need SEO for Social Media?
If you want to create a wholesome campaign for your brand, you’d need both SEO and social media. Social media extends your blog content reach to your target audience using those platforms.
Your brand is perceived as trustworthy when it has a social media page attached to your website. Social media helps you collect insights on your potential audience, which you can create unique content for on your website. That’s exactly how to improve SEO with social media.
On the other hand, SEO can be excellent in building your community on social media. If your website is an authority for specific topics, visitors will go through your web pages and look for your social media handles to follow.
So, yes, you need social media for SEO and vice versa.
Do You Need Help Deciding on SEO vs. Social Media?
It’s difficult to decide which is better between SEO vs social media. Both of those strategies have their benefits. While SEO focuses on optimizing your web content for search engines, social media marketing deals with building a community of audience that will engage your content online.
If you’re still indecisive about social media best SEO practices, you can contact us to help you out.
Conclusion
SEO & social media are digital marketing strategies you should consider to reach your brand goals. Thankfully, we’ve explored their relationship and differences in this article. Take advantage of their unique opportunities today.