With online marketing, there’s a debate raging among experts over which strategy is best to grow your business.
Would SEO or social media marketing be the better option?
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.
Similarly, there are those who focus their attention entirely on building a social media following without spending any time on SEO.
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.
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 the various platforms. While there are tools available that can make this process easier, you still have to do this on a consistent basis.
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.
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.