As a small business owner,your primary marketing activity is to attract new customers or clients to your website. One of the ways of doing this is through SEO or Social Media but with limited time and resources, this can be a difficult decision to make. So which do you choose? Educating yourself on the Pros and Cons of Social Media and SEO could help with this.
Advantages of SEO for marketing
1. Creating content you can re-use
Constant content generation is the most important part of SEO. Writing optimized content on its own is fantastic, it’s a great way to see a gain in traffic. If you’re creating new content at a relatively good rate for SEO purposes, it can have an almost synergistic effect on other unrelated forms of marketing. Things like lead nurturing, email marketing, lead generation, even social media are all greatly strengthened by having repurposable content.
2 Long term, quality content never stops helping your SEO drive.
Upon creating a web page, it is indexed in search engines like Google and will return as a result on their page for years to come. So if you write a quality blog post for a few hours, your content can actually be a source of traffic for a very long time after the initial posting, particularly if you find a good keyword that isn’t completely inundated with other pages fighting for the top spot.
Disadvantages of SEO for marketing
1. SEO can take a long time.
No matter how good or fast your content creation is, it can become something of a disadvantage for marketers. If you want the content to be consistently quality, and not just some moderately relevant content with keywords peppered occasionally over the webpage, it takes a lot of time. When you’re trying to have a good flow of content, remember it can take up more time than it’s worth!
2. You still need to invest in technical optimization
While constant quality content creation as an optimization strategy will get you far, it has its limits. The technical aspects of optimization can be many, even for someone who considers themselves quite tech savvy. Things like 301 redirects, site structuring, and 404 configurations can be lost on the lay person. Not only will you hit a hard cap in SEO success without good technical optimization, but various unknown technical issues could mar your efforts.
Advantages of social media for marketing
1. Social media improves your SEO
Social media can help your search engine ranking on it’s own! Google’s algorithm looks at social media content , and the more attention something has, the higher it’s ranked! Think about it, the more people love your content, the higher Google will want you ranked. Investing in a strong social media strategy can actually help with more than just a social presence!
2. You’ll build strong personal relationships
Creating blogs links can get you some visitors, but sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to gain innumerable potential customers. Social media is a fantastic way to have a direct line of constant with you followers in a friendly and personable manner. You can keeping them updated on your internal operations, or just fun things you want to share with them!
Disadvantages of social media for marketing
1. Social media fails without content
Social media needs a strong flow of content. Your page can’t just send little text updates and share fun things, you need a stream of your own blogs, offers, etc. You can send as many updates as you want, but you need a way to link back to your website. All content creation takes dedicated resources, and it can be something of a strain to work on it all at once!
2. Success takes a long time
Growing a social media following doesn’t occur in an instant. It takes a long, long time to create a large and dedicated follower base enough to get you lots of traffic. The only real way to speed up the growth of your pages is to dedicate time and resources to a campaign specifically for your social media pages.
LIGHT BULB MOMENT – Social media and SEO both rely on quality content & work better together.
Regardless of what approach you use, you need content to drive things. Without it, there’s nothing for search engines to find. Social media lives and breathes by sharing content. If you don’t have your own, not only are you losing the Google war, but the social media one as well. Using both of these sources of traffic in conjunction is the absolute best way to attract new customers and clients via the web!