Every business usually has a fixed budget for marketing, and they want to make the most of it. In today’s digital world, there are many different marketing channels available to businesses for getting leads and building their brand.
Two of the most important marketing channels when it comes to digital media include search engine optimization and social media marketing. Many businesses often want to know whether they should invest their marketing budget in social media or SEO to get the most value for their marketing dollars.
The article below will help you decide what is best for your business when it comes to digital marketing.
Benefits of Investing in SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing a website to get more targeted traffic from search engines by gaining high rankings for targeted keywords in the search engine result pages.
One of the biggest benefits of investing in SEO is that the search traffic is always increasing. Most people carry a smartphone these days, and they tend to find local businesses on their phone. Many research studies have shown that high search engine rankings also drive offline traffic to stores which mean even if a company does not sell a product or service online, they can still benefit by investing in search engine optimization.
Another big benefit of investing in SEO is that it is one of the most cost-effective ways to get highly targeted traffic to a website as compared to some of the other marketing channels. This is the reason that Google has become one of the most valuable companies in the world as almost everyone uses their search engine to find relevant products and services.
High rankings in search engines also help in increasing brand awareness as people trust the top search results. For instance, if you are a wedding photographer, and your website ranks high in the search engine result pages when someone searches for keywords related to wedding photography in your location, it creates a positive impression in the minds of the user even if they do not call you immediately.
In simple terms, high ranking websites are seen as more trustworthy by consumers.
Benefits of Investing in Social Media
The popularity of social media can be gauged from the fact that there are several social media platforms with hundreds of millions of users. In fact, the biggest social media platform, Facebook, has recently announced that they have over 2 billion members worldwide. In other words, you will be hard pressed to find someone who is not present on one or more social media platforms.
The biggest benefit of investing in social media is that potential consumers are already there, and you can take advantage of their presence by reaching them directly on various social media platforms.
Also, social media presence is ideal for building and enhancing your brand. Over the years, social media has also emerged as one of the best ways to bring high-quality traffic to your website.
Social Media and SEO Work Together
As far as choosing between social media and SEO is concerned, these two marketing channels complement each other. In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that SEO and social media drive each other. Therefore, it is important for businesses to invest in social media as well as SEO to reach the widest audience.
If your business maintains a presence on all the major social media platforms, it will become easier for your business to dominate the first page of search results for your brand. Major search engines such as Google as well as Bing index social media posts which mean if you include relevant phrases in the social posts, these may rank high in the search engine result pages and send more traffic to your business website.
Social media also helps with search engine optimization as informative posts on social media platforms tend to be shared by users which in turn drive high-quality links to your business website. Similarly, high ranking web pages on search engine result pages are shared by users on their social media profiles which drive more shares, and more traffic to your website.
Conclusion
Overall, your digital marketing strategy should be comprehensive and should include social media as well as SEO. Creative and well-crafted content will not enhance your social media presence by increasing shares but will also help your SEO efforts by getting more links from other authority domains.