Why You Need SEO and SMM To Be Successful

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at one point was as simple as stuffing keywords throughout a piece of content and the page would rank. Before the rise of social media, it was one of the only ways to build traffic to your website and was the primary focus of marketers. Then came the creation of Social Media Marketing (SMM) to help marketers build more of a connection to their audiences. SEO and SMM work together to create a complete digital marketing strategy.

So let’s take a closer look at how businesses can use them both to draw in more traffic and convert visitors into customers, and how to keep those customers coming back for more.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of making it easier for search engines to find and index your website. This in turn makes it easier for people to find you when they conduct relevant searches. Over the years it has evolved from throwing keywords around to a much more complex system involving a collection of on-page and off-page tactics to improve ranking.

On-Page SEO

This refers to the SEO tasks you do on your website – the ones you have the most control over. Even if your on-page SEO is perfect, however, there’s no guarantee of a solid ranking. On-page SEO includes these components.

Off-Page SEO

This refers to everything you to enhance your ranking that doesn’t happen directly on your website. A lot of people think it is only about building links to your site, but it is more than that. It includes things such as:

Off-page SEO gives Google an indication of how other users and websites perceive a website. If a lot of people are talking about it and linking to it, then obviously, they find it valuable and useful in some way, so Google will adjust the rankings accordingly. The higher your ranking, the more traffic you’ll get. Though the data is from 2013, one study showed that websites in the number one ranked position receive nearly 33% of the search traffic. The second spot gets 17.6%, while the tenth spot gets only 2.4%.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

SMM refers to the way you market your business across social media. As such, you may be doing some social media optimization (SMO), or working to enhance your company’s presence across social media channels. You’ll have a business page on the social media networks where your customers are most likely to be found. As tempting as it can be to be everywhere, it can be difficult to maintain a quality social media presence and weaken your strategy if you focus on too many networks.

Something worth mentioning is that while social signals – the number of likes and shares content gets – can affect your ranking, simply being on social media, in general, isn’t going to positively affect your ranking. It takes more than creating a page or a profile. If signing up for an account was all it took, many websites would automatically rank higher, but we’d also be dealing with an even bigger spam problem. According to Facebook, up to 11.2% of their active monthly users, or 137.76 million accounts, are fake or duplicate accounts. This is just a 2014 estimate, however, because they really don’t know how many are fake or duplicate. Based on that number, it’s clear why just having a profile doesn’t mean better ranking.

Social helps boost your ranking because the activity and sharing on social platforms help increase visibility, and hopefully, links to your website. It is the increase in links that boosts your ranking in the search engines – so long as whatever is shared and linked to is valuable to your audience in some shape or form.

Before you begin the SMM process, make sure you’ve built your website with a solid foundation, covering your on-page SEO to the best of your ability. Only after that, you should move to off-page SEO and SMM efforts.

One Without the Other is Pointless

If you do SEO without any kind of SMO or SMM, you’re missing out on a huge potential avenue for connecting to the customers of your website. You can use SMM to direct people back to your website, which helps boost rankings through additional traffic and social signals.

But if you do SMM without any kind of SEO – you’re making it hard for people to find you organically outside of social media. It’s kind of like pizza without cheese. You can get it, and it’s all right, but when you put together, the results are magical. Unfortunately, however, there’s no one right way to combine the two into the winning strategy for your business.

Let us help you setup a complete digital marketing strategy and that incorporates both SEO and SMM. Schedule a discovery call to learn more.