SEO vs. Social - which strategy attracts more clients?
Which marketing strategy should you be using?
The first point to make clear is that SEO work and Social Media Marketing are very different marketing tools.
We find that it is of vital importance to look at a particular business’s needs before advising a particular strategy (but we’ll give you a TL;DR - We’re probably going to suggest doing a bit of both…)
It might seem like marketers can’t make their minds up, and that’s because there isn’t a clear-cut answer to: ‘would SEO or social media marketing be the better option?’
Often, businesses hire an SEO expert or agency to increase search engine visibility without even thinking about how social media can increase website traffic. Similarly, there are those who focus their attention entirely on building a social media following without spending any time on SEO.
It’s pretty easy to work in a silo without realising how all of this marketing work interrelates.
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 and that is easily done on social.
Most platforms will allow you to create ads that specifically target people within a certain demographic who will be interested in your niche.
SEO isn’t quite as targeted. Although you can target those interested in your niche, you generally can’t target a specific demographic.
How Much Input is Required?
Time is money, so whether you’re spending your own time doing social media marketing or paying someone else to do it, it’s worth looking at the amount of time-input required to get a decent ROI.
If you’re posting to social, you’ll have to plan and post regular content on the various platforms. While there are tools available that can make this process easier, you still have to do this on a consistent basis. It requires discipline (or at least a good system!) and effort to produce valuable content on a consistent basis.
SEO also requires work. It’s not limited to basic onsite SEO (the metatitles and descriptions that you may only need to create once), you’ll also want to keep your website content fresh (Google loves an updated website) and keep your blog posts regular, and that’s without mentioning offsite SEO. If you’re doing your SEO work right, you’ll need to invest time and energy in ensuring that your listings are up to date, monitoring your rankings, acquiring backlinks, etc.
Which Content Should You Use?
Whether you are performing SEO or social media marketing, you’ll need to create content, and the type of content you create will influence the amount of traffic to your website 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 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?
It’s both (we did tell you…)
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 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!
Need help? Get in touch with our team today and see how we can help you with both your SEO and Social Media Marketing.
Licorne Agency was founded with one goal in mind:
To offer fully managed web and branding solutions that let SMEs focus on what they do best—running their business.
If you want us to look after your website or branding, please get in touch.
