Every online business needs to invest in rigorous marketing to become successful. Whether you own an ecommerce business or not, you will need to rely on various forms of digital marketing to make your brand known. But when it comes to increasing website traffic and improving search engine ranking, you cannot do without SEO and SMM. While SEO or search engine optimization has been around for a long enough time, SMM or social media marketing is a relatively new concept.
It needs no telling that social media has a lot of influence on buyers today. With the growing popularity and reliance on the various social media sites, it became crucial for businesses to make their presence known on these platforms. It makes sense. With the help of social media marketing, you can influence your target customers directly. You can communicate with them, and post important brand message where everyone will be able to see it.
While most marketers are already familiar with the potential of social media marketing, a lot of them are still not able to dedicate enough time or money into it. The reason is juggling both SEO and SMM with the same intensity may become difficult. What to do in situations like these? Is social media marketing overshadowing the importance of SEO? Let’s find out:
Know the difference between SEO and SMM:
Before you simply decide to go with one and discard the other, make sure you know both your options well. Your online marketing efforts are worthless if they fail to raise awareness and increase visibility of your brand. One of the reasons customers may pick you over your competitors is because your website appeared higher on the search results, or they had heard a lot about your brand. SEO strategies are mainly designed to improve your search rankings and to draw more and more people to your website.
SMO, on the other hand, may be a part of your overall online marketing strategy, but it manages to influence people who came to know about you through some post, or directly searched for you on the social media platform. Even if you have the highest ranking on Google, you would still miss out on a large number of potential customers if you ignore social media marketing.
SMM is now more important than ever:
Google has released a number of important algorithm updates over the past few years and they have changed the game significantly! Same thing happened with the launch of the Hummingbird update back in 2013. This precise and speedy algorithm not only changed some of the most significant components of SEO, but it also redefined the way Google interprets search queries. It was also made clear that the search engine giant prefers user experience above all else. Whoever offers the best user experience gains the upper hand.
That is why a brand’s social popularity is counted as a major factor. The more likes and shares your brand’s social profiles get, the more people will get to know about you. To achieve such loyal followers and fans on social media, you must put a lot of thought into the posts. Posting meaningful, informative and useful content is essential to gain recognition. The more your contents get shared, the higher value you will gain, which will help you in ranking as well!