With online marketing, there’s a debate raging among experts over which strategy is best to grow your business and your blog. There is so much information thrown around, it can be a little hard to work out what works best for you
Would SEO or social media marketing be the better option to help grow your blog?
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. Both options however can bring a lot of traffic to your site, when done properly.
Let’s compare both strategies to see which option is best.
Targeting an Audience
To bring in relevant traffic and sales, it’s important to be able to target a specific audience. It is definitely easier to target an appropriate audience on social media platforms.
Most social media platforms allow you to create ads that specifically target people within a certain demographic who will be interested in your niche. Building your brand on social media also helps you target the right people, after all, they wouldn’t be following you if they were not interested in your brand.
SEO is not quite 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 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. Many people tend to schedule a few weeks in advance, however, to be reactive, you do need to watch your social media on a daily basis. Good interaction is always helpful with building your presence on social media.
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, especially with places like Twitter. 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 big impact on your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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 the best you can and take advantage of both options.
