Social Media brings instant, short-term traffic. SEO is more long-term and will establish your position in search rankings for the long-term.
It takes weeks, even months, for SEO adjustments to your website to be reflected in search results. Social Media on the other hand can be used to immediately drive traffic to your website. Once a visitor arrives at your site, if you have an engaging interface that encourages visitors to explore additional pages, they will click through your website. This engagement demonstrates to Google that your content is relevant to a particular type of visitor and search. Google takes note and boosts your ranking for those types of searches and visitors. For this reason, it is important to consider social media and SEO as working together.
Fact: Social Media can bring instant traffic, but if you stop posting, traffic stops. SEO takes longer to increase traffic but also sustains traffic longer.
What Is A Better Investment:
Social Media or SEO?
New Business: If you are a new business with limited funds and you need to generate revenue in order to move forward, use Social Media to drive traffic to your site for sales. Using that revenue, then invest in an SEO strategy that works with your Social Media profiles for long-term growth.
Established Business: If you are a more established business, invest in a full assessment of your web presence. Use SEO best practices on your existing website and social media platforms. Utilize social media campaigns to drive traffic back to your site, and then monitor engagement, making changes to your site content as needed over time.
Our Method
Our method typically entails first ensuring that a website is using all of the best practices for SEO such as using key words, key phrases, meta tags and image alt tags, fast site speed & SSL. Put simply, we get your house ready for visitors. Then we use Social Media to drive traffic to your site, which, as mentioned above, is faster than getting SEO results. We use heat maps & analytics to see how visitors interact with your site, and then modify the site content, organization and layout for achieving your engagement goals. By the time this has been executed, which takes a couple of months, Google will have started to reflect modifications to your site, and your pages may begin to appear in searches that you have targeted.
Over time, we then use Google Search Console to even more closely fine tune your site for search results based on what searches your site is appearing in, and how you rank in those searches. As an example, by looking at Search Console, we could see that Future Bright was appearing in searches for SEO professionals in our home town of Mill Valley. We created a landing page specifically for that search, optimized it, and now that page is beginning to appear for that same search, and visitors who click on the site will see a page created especially for them. You can view the page here.
After about six months have passed, a clear picture emerges of which social media platforms are most suitable for your business, what search terms are being used to find your business, and what type of content is most engaging. Using that information, you can continue to create content with confidence, and with the tools that are in place, monitor the success of that content, and adjust as your audience interest shifts.
Conclusion:
First ensure that your site is using best practices for SEO and also has Google Analytics and a Facebook pixel installed. Then use Social Media to drive traffic to your site. Monitor engagement on your site with a heat map, and adjust for user experience. Utilize Google Search Console to learn how you are doing with searches for your keywords, and adjust or add new content based on those results.
How To Make Social Media & SEO Work Together
- Install Analytics Tracking Onto Your Website
- Create social media profiles on relevant platforms
- Identify key words to use in your content
- Write content on your website
- Share your content on your social media platforms to drive traffic back to your website
- Use good layout and internal links (UX) to encourage visitors to look at multiple pages & convert
- Read your analytics reporting to learn what is/not working
- Adjust, refine, repeat
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