SEO vs Social Media Marketing: Which is Right for You

We marketers love our acronyms. We’ve got acronyms for everything, and it can admittedly get too jargony. Today, we’re going to tackle two such acronyms: SEO and SMM—or search engine optimization and social media marketing. Digital marketing is increasingly reliant on both tactics, so to help you understand the role they play in your digital strategy, we’ve put together this guide that breaks them down and explains the differences and benefits of each.

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

SEO gets a lot of lip service these days. It’s a foundational pillar of digital marketing, but what is it exactly? Simply put, it’s a method for improving your website’s visibility on search engine platforms like Google. This visibility will contribute to organic traffic to your website—those are the users who didn’t end up on your website by clicking on paid ads.

There are three main components to any SEO strategy:

On-page SEO
This involves a combination of keyword research, high-quality and relevant content, as well as the use of HTML tags, meta descriptions and headings.
Off-page SEO
This involves actions external to your website like link building, which is the process of acquiring links from other websites pointing to your content from reputable sources to signal to search engines that your content is valuable.
Technical SEO
This is the process of improving the technical aspects of your website, such as load speed, mobile-optimization and implementing schema markup to help search engines understand your content better.

It’s important to keep in mind that SEO is a long-term strategy. When implemented well, you’ll see a steady and sustained increase in traffic to your website.

What is social media marketing (SMM)?

Social media marketing (SMM) is exactly what it says on the tin, which is to say using social media platforms to market your brand, products and services. As social media takes up an ever larger portion of internet use, no digital marketing strategy is complete without SMM.

Some key aspects of SMM include:

Engagement and relationship building
Social media facilitates two-way communication between brands and their target audience through comments, shares, direct messages and more.
Content creation
Creating relevant and engaging content tailored to your target audience is at the core of social media marketing.
Brand awareness and promotion
Being on social media allows brands to increase their visibility by participating in the conversation and posting content regularly to stay top-of-mind.
Analytics and measurement
Social media platforms have the benefit of built-in analytics tools that allow you to track engagement, reach and conversion rates.
Paid advertising
In addition to organic posts, SMM can also include paid ads that target a larger and more targeted audience.

Differing from SEO, social media marketing relies on more “ephemeral” content, but it will generate fast results so long as you are actively engaging in your marketing efforts.

SEO vs social media marketing: What’s the difference?

As we’ve laid out, SEO and SMM are two very different marketing tactics. Ideally, you would employ both, but if you’re just starting out or are working with budgeting constraints, you may not have the resources for both. In that case, as well as just generally, it’s helpful to understand how the two methods differ.

Purpose and approach

The primary domain of SEO is your website and landing pages. The goal is to increase the visibility of your website and to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. This is achieved by optimizing website content, structure and technical elements so that search engines better understand your content and improve your discoverability.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, focuses on your presence on the various social media platforms. The aim is to engage with audiences, increase brand awareness and facilitate relationship building.

Audience targeting

Audience targeting works very differently between the two. This is largely down to the differences in audience behaviour across the different contexts.

With SEO, users are actively seeking specific information, products or services using search engines. Therefore, rather than focusing on segmenting your audience, SEO tailors your content to best respond to user queries.

User behaviour on social media is more passive by comparison, in that most often people don’t open their apps with a specific plan in mind. This means that it’s much more important to rely on precise audience targeting. You can ensure that your content gets served to users based on demographics, location, interests and behaviours. This will help you reach the consumers who aren’t actively searching.

Results and timeframe

We’ve already touched on this, but SEO and SMM have very different timeframes for when you’ll see results.

SEO is a long-term strategy. Once you’ve done your SEO audit and optimized your website, you should start to see a steady increase in web traffic over the course of months. That increase will be sustained the longer your content ranks well, but you will see more gains as you continue to build out your content library. Likewise, it’s important to keep up with the changes being made to the algorithms that search engines use to rank webpages as they can impact your SEO efforts.

If your goal is a quick return on your marketing spend, SMM may be the way to go. As a strategy, it will net you quicker results in terms of engagement and visibility. The key here is consistency in posting. Content is much more ephemeral on social media and you can’t rely on users visiting older content on your profile. Social media marketing is ultimately an exercise in brand building. Over time, you’ll demonstrate brand stability, as well as create trust in your brand. And in the long run, your consistency and engagement will generate brand loyalty.

Key metrics

The ways in which we measure the success of SEO and SMM are also different. For SEO, we track organic search rankings, web traffic and conversion rates. With social media marketing, the focus is on engagement with key metrics being numbers of shares, comments, likes and follower growth.

SEO vs social media marketing: Which is better?

This is a trick question. SEO and SMM are both important pillars in digital marketing. They also apply to very different channels, which means you’re comparing apples and oranges by trying to rank them. At the end of the day, which is more important to your marketing strategy will be determined by the goals you’ve set. If you’re looking to hit short-term sales targets and KPIs, SMM can deliver fast results. If you’re willing to take a longer view, SEO will give you results that steadily increase over time.

What’s the takeaway?

SEO and social media marketing both have their place in a well-rounded digital marketing strategy. They might go about it in different ways, but at the end of the day both methods are about increasing your brand’s visibility and digital presence. If you don’t have to choose one over the other, you shouldn’t.

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