Where should you focus your online marketing efforts, social or search?
Which channel is best for increasing your content’s visibility? In the past organic search has been the primary focus for many online marketers. The idea was that you would create good content for your target audience, post it on your blog, optimize the post with SEO best practices and then hope that people found it through Google or other search engines. It was content creation as a central position within SEO.
While that is still a fundamentally sound practice, recent reports show that social media is becoming increasingly important in terms of driving traffic to your content – more so than organic search. For the first time, we’re seeing definitive data demonstrating that more people are likely to find your website content (blog posts, news articles, etc.) via social media than via online search.
Danny Wong from Shareaholic talked about the relationship between content traffic and social media in a recent Marketing Land article. The article points out that social media sites are starting to drive more traffic to content while search engines are becoming less effective:
“Over the past 15 months, there have been a number of changes in web (and mobile) users’ behaviors, with respect to how they discover content and arrive at different sites across the web. The most interesting finding IMO is how quickly and dramatically the numbers have shifted to favor social. Looking at the figures from Sept 2013 and Sept 2014, Social’s share nearly doubled while Search’s share shrunk by nearly one-third.”
This news backs up the approach that SMO Pros has been promoting for more than two years now. The best way to increase your brand visibility on the Internet is to produce good content on a routine basis, and feature it as a primary element of your digital marketing strategy. It’s not enough to just write some brilliant blog posts and put them out there, hoping people stumble upon them in the vast expanse that is today’s Internet. Even with superlative SEO, your content is still just a single star in a nearly limitless galaxy of online choices. So, to promote your content, to get people to your site to read your position on things, you need to extend your reach through as many channels as possible. Social media provides excellent avenues for this promotion. Think of each social media site as a community website filled with millions of potential customers. When you post links to your content on those sites, you’re creating new routes for people to find your website, like little online referrals pointing people back to your site.
This is all part of what’s called “inbound marketing,” which is all about drawing people to you rather than blasting out messages via traditional “outbound marketing” methods (ads, cold calls, SPAM e-mail, post card mailers, etc.). The idea is that you encourage people to come to you by offering them something of value, like great content on a topic they’re interested in. You promote the content through social networks, e-mail and other notification systems, but the message is more about making people aware of new information than trying to sell them something right away. When approached with this mindset, social media marketing becomes even more effective, and will almost certainly become one of the biggest referrers of traffic to your website.
With all this in mind, the question we posed at the beginning of the article still lingers: Where should you focus your efforts, social or search? The answer: both. Okay, okay, don’t get frustrated. We’re not dodging the question. Here’s the thing: If you enact a good content marketing strategy, and promote it well through social media, then you will also be serving your overall search engine optimization strategy. Why? Because SEO is all about generating inbound traffic to your site. The more sites and sources that are linking to your site, the better. Also, there is a concept called “social proof” that has an indirect impact on your search engine rankings. The more your social media posts are liked, shared, re-tweeted and +1’ed by others, the more credibility you get as a content producer. That means your content is more likely to appear in search results, and higher up the page, because you’re viewed as an authority. Also, social media posts themselves often appear in search results, giving you more real estate on that all-important first page of search, and increasing the likelihood that someone will click a link to one of your online properties. For example, check out this Google search result for “SMO Pros” (below). The top five listings include our website and several of our social media properties, plus a link to a recent post (in the sidebar result).
To summarize all this, just remember that online marketing is an integrated, multi-channel exercise. You can’t just post on Facebook. You can’t just blog. You can’t just have a pretty website with good SEO. You need to do all of those things, and more, to reach your audience in the ever-shifting world that is today’s Internet. It may seem daunting, but it’s a surprisingly reasonable enterprise when you have a good plan and a good marketing partner.
To learn more about social media marketing and Internet marketing for small businesses, check out our free online resources: Why Your Business Needs Social Media and Internet Marketing for Small Businesses.
To see how we can help you create the perfect content marketing and social media marketing strategy for your business, request a consultation with SMO Pros today!