If you're not using an SEO strategy and planning your social media posts, your marketing strategy is falling behind.
How do you determine which parts of your marketing strategy deserve the most attention? It can be tough to strike a balance between developing new content, analyzing data, and keeping up with current trends. For example, should more time go towards SEO or social media campaigns?
Let’s compare the two strategies and find out which one is best for your business.
Reach
SEO has the potential to reach a much larger audience than social media. This is because search engine results are seen by users regardless of their location, profile, or other criteria that would limit the pool of viewers for a particular post on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram.
Cost
Social media campaigns are usually cheaper than SEO campaigns due to their low barrier-to-entry and high ROI potential. Furthermore, you can easily measure the success of your campaigns through metrics like engagement, page visits, and conversions. With SEO however, you must invest some time in order to achieve results as it takes time for search bots to crawl and index your content.
Quality
SEO focuses on high-quality, relevant content that is tailored to the user’s search intent. This means that the audience you reach will be more likely to engage with your content or take some kind of action as it answers their query directly. With social media campaigns, you may use tactics like boosting posts in order to increase visibility, but often times this results in low-quality traffic due to users not being interested in what you are promoting.
Organic vs Paid
SEO involves creating organic search rankings through technical optimization and link building while social media advertising relies heavily on paid promotion strategies. The advantage of organic ranking over paid promotions is that you don’t need to put money into it for the content to rank, making it a more cost-effective solution in the long run.
Relationships
With SEO you are targeting users who already have an interest in your product or service and what you offer. This means that there is already some kind of relationship between you and the customer as they are actively looking for answers to their query. On social media, on the other hand, you may be engaging with potential customers who do not know much about your brand, which can make it harder to develop relationships due to a lack of familiarity or trust.
Long Term Impact
SEO efforts often take longer before they yield results while social media campaigns can produce results in a much shorter period of time. However, when it comes to long-term impact, SEO tends to be the better option as its effects are more sustainable and can last for years.
Measurement
Social media campaigns are very easy to monitor due to their use of analytics and metrics such as click-through rates or conversion rates. SEO is slightly trickier because, although you can measure certain performance indicators like organic traffic, website ranking, and keyword rankings, these take longer to analyze accurately.
Scalability
Both SEO and social media have the potential for scalability but SEO tends to scale better as it doesn’t rely on advertising budgets or other resources that might limit growth in the future.
Targeting
With SEO, you can target specific keywords related to your products or services, thus increasing the chances of reaching potential customers. On social media, however, it is harder to reach users who are genuinely interested as there are many variables such as location and audience demographic that can affect reachability.
Consistency
SEO and social media campaigns require different levels of consistency; while SEO needs to be constantly updated in order to stay relevant over time, a few posts per day on social media usually suffice for keeping your profile active.
Taking into account all these points, it’s clear that both strategies have their pros and cons when it comes to marketing and growing your business online. Choosing the right one for your company depends on a variety of factors such as budget, target audience, and goals. However, in order to ensure success it’s important to use both SEO and social media in tandem as they complement each other nicely in digital marketing. By combining the two strategies you can maximize your reach and engage with customers more effectively.
Ultimately, which strategy is better for your business depends on what you want to achieve and what resources you have available – but whatever you choose make sure that it aligns with your overall marketing objectives.