Should A Company Invest More In SEO Or SMO?

If you’ve been wondering whether a company should invest more in SEO or SMO, then you’ve come to the right place. Here, we will explore both search engine optimization (SEO), and social media optimization (SMO) techniques, as well as the differences between the various benefits you stand to gain from each. Afterward, we’ll discuss what sort of digital marketing strategy is worth investing in for a company or brand interested in both SEO and SMO methods. 

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is all about improving how search engines rank your website so that your business or brand will rise to the top of search results when a potential customer looks for a solution online. SEO focuses on using the best keywords, producing top-quality website content that is relevant, link building, and building an optimized website through on-page SEO. 

When done right, a business can expect their content to appear prominently on search engine results pages for a relevant search query, will receive more organic traffic to their website, and more importantly, a rise in conversions leading to more sales. 

Keyword Research And Website Content

Keyword research is about finding the search terms that people type into search engines like Google or Bing when they need to find an answer to a problem. What they’re looking for could be a product or service you provide. It could also be information provided through a helpful blog article. The keywords relevant to the topic can be tied to each page, and you can convey all of this to the search engines by including these terms in the metadata of the page. 

These keywords will also be strategically placed within the copy of the page, marking it as relevant content. The copy must be quality content since simply keyword stuffing no longer works on search engines which are always getting smarter. If you’ve done it correctly, your website will be crawled periodically by the search engines, and add your pages to their indexes. Next time they get a search query, they will consider the relevancy of your pages based on keywords, the quality of the content, and how authoritative your website is before deciding where to rank you amongst the rest of the search results. 

Link Building And Your Authority

Reputable websites that have proven their worth in a specific field will be given a high authority level by the search engines, which means they will naturally get higher rankings. If you have a new website, it will take some time to build your brand’s online reputation in your industry niche. As you continue to write content of much higher quality than your competitors, attracting more visitors to your website, keeping them engaged longer, and receiving quality backlinks from other reputable sites, your authority will grow.

Acquiring quality links from sites more credible than yours will be difficult. It requires delivering exceptional content on your website or guest blogging on theirs, and a bit of outreach on your part to convince them to provide the crucial backlink. Once established, these backlinks will drive traffic to your website directly, and convey to search engines that your content is being linked by industry experts, thereby improving your domain authority on the subject. 

A Great-Looking Functional Website

When your target audience does finally come across your website through effective SEO techniques, you need to make sure your website not only looks the part but is also easy to navigate. Visitors should be able to find the content, products, or services they’re looking for, and not get confused about what you’re offering. It also helps if your website loads fast and looks great on any device including smartphones. Finally, if you’re planning to do paid ads on a platform like Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), your landing page should also offer what you promised in the paid ads. 

What Is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

SMO stands for social media optimization. It is all about utilizing social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to share your content, and attract traffic to your website through social media links. The idea behind such social media marketing tactics is to keep your target audience engaged on social media channels, grow your loyal group of followers, increase awareness of your brand, and generate user interest in the products or services offered by your website. 

Create Shareable Content

Creating shareable content on social media platforms is one of the best ways to keep your audience engaged, and to reach an even wider audience when users reshare it with their friends or family. These posts that you’re sharing on social platforms need to be eye-catching, useful, and relevant, and invite users to like, comment, and reshare them. 

One of the social media optimization tips we can offer you is to use your existing blog content and turn these articles into social media posts. You can break down a concept or lots of statistics into bite-sized infographics. You can turn your guide article into a YouTube explainer video. The idea is to post useful content that attracts attention on social media networks, and content that users will want to share with their social communities. You could also utilize the power of social media campaigns, and boost your posts through advertisements. 

Building A Loyal Fanbase On Social Platforms

One of the great things about using social channels is that you will be able to interest directly with your target audience. Your social accounts need to respond quickly to any requests or questions users might have, and maintain a healthy relationship with your most loyal fans. This might be especially helpful for small businesses to quickly build a good reputation for being helpful by providing customer support. 

Social media also allows you to follow your fans, and even share user-generated content. Some might even make videos, images, and posts related to your products or services, further spreading the word about your brand. You can reward these users by sharing their content through your social channels and build goodwill within the community of fans loyal to your brand. 

Should A Company Invest More In SEO Or SMO?

Both SEO and SMO efforts are important to your digital marketing strategy. Depending on your business goals, and your budget, you might wish to focus on only one of these digital marketing tactics at the start. So let’s look at how SEO and SMO will differ to figure out which might suit your small business at this point. 

Increasing Organic Traffic

SEO is a great way of driving more traffic to your website by improving your search engine rankings. The downside is that this process can take quite a while before you start seeing results. It can take time for a search engine to index your web pages, and then, even more, to improve your rankings through activities like link building. 

SMO on the other hand is about driving traffic to your website through social media posts. Therefore you will notice more immediate results as social media users click on the shared link to arrive at your website. 

Connecting With Target Audience

In SEO, there are very few opportunities to connect directly with your audience, even when they do come across your content. You might have a comments section on your blog, where you can respond to readers, or have a chatbox on your website for visitors that wish to contact you directly. While your customers will appreciate your support and stick with your brand, these interactions don’t get much visibility as they do on social media. 

In SMO, you have plenty of opportunities to forge more personal connections with your audience. There are of course comment sections on social media posts where you can respond to users. You can pick a tone of voice that your target audience will find relatable, and aligns with your brand identity. If social media users find your responses helpful, polite, or simply entertaining, you may be able to convince them to follow you. 

You can also comment and like posts made by other users who create content about your brand, products, or services. You can reward your loyal followers with special discounts, and loyal fan badges they can display proudly on their accounts, and maybe even invite them to collaborate on your future content. 

Impressing Search Engines

Remember that in SEO, it is the search engine algorithms that decide which content is valuable and relevant to its users. You have to be good at producing content that appeals first to search engines which will then show it to your audience. To learn more about how search engines analyze your website content, read What Technology Do Search Engines Use To Crawl Websites?

You will need to hire specialists who are capable of performing website audits to find any technical SEO issues on your website like broken links, missing metadata, or loading problems. You will need content writers that understand how to optimize your blog and other website content with the relevant keywords. You will need to invest in link-building efforts to raise the credibility of your website. All of this takes significant resources that will cost you money.  

If you have these resources at your disposal, then great, you can benefit from SEO. Your SMO efforts can further benefit from having great website content that can be shared on social media with a few adjustments. Furthermore, as SMO brings in more traffic to your website, this will even boost your SEO, since the two can complement each other. 

If your budget is limited, however, you can start with more of a focus on SMO which is relatively cost-effective. There are plenty of free tools that you can learn to use by yourself to create great-looking social media posts. You can continue to build your loyal fanbase and engage with your audience as soon as your business is up and running. You can slowly bring up your SEO efforts as resources become available, and in time, be able to impress search engines with your website and content. 

Don’t Forget Search Engine Marketing And Social Media Advertising

SEO and SMO are not the only ways you can bring in traffic to your website. Another online marketing strategy would be to use pay-per-click (PPC) ads also known as display advertising. In addition to the organic traffic, your website will also benefit from paid traffic as search engine users discover your advertisements appear in the top sponsored section of the search results. This is called ‘search engine marketing’. 

You can also launch a paid campaign on social media where you can boost your posts to reach even more users. This is called ‘social media advertising’ and platforms like Facebook provide powerful tools to target and specify which types of users you want to reach. 

Looking For A Digital Marketing Expert In Search Engine Optimization And Social Media Optimization?

If you’re looking for an expert on SEO, social media marketing, or PPC advertising, then Inquivix is the digital marketing partner you’ve been looking for. We provide a comprehensive set of services that can help businesses big or small to improve their online presence, engage with their audiences, produce top-quality content, and bring in more traffic to their websites. To learn more about what we do, visit Inquivix today!

FAQs

What’s The Difference Between SEO And SMO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about bringing in website traffic by improving your search engine rankings. Social media optimization (SMO) is about posting engaging content and building a loyal fanbase on social media which will also bring in traffic to your website.

Which Is More Important SEO Or SMO?

Both SEO and SMO are important in your digital marketing efforts and in improving the long-term online presence of your website. SEO techniques will take longer to bear fruit since search engines have to index your website, and it takes time to build up your website’s authority to climb the search rankings. SMO will allow you to connect directly with your audience and receive traffic more quickly if your posted content is very engaging. SEO also requires experts who understand search engine algorithms and best practices, while posting content and engaging with the audience can be done by anyone.