Understanding SEO and Social Media: Are they different or the same?

Did you know both social media and search engine optimization (SEO) can make a significant impact on your digital presence when used strategically and wisely? Both of these tools are essential strategies to implement as they can significantly help the visibility and credibility of your brand. However, before you can implement them into your digital strategy, you must understand the difference between them.

Social media is one of the most important facets of digital marketing. Introducing your business to these platforms will help your brand reach a bigger audience, increase sales, and improve customer relationships. But what’s the purpose of social media? First, you use it to humanize your brand, which will build brand trust and loyalty. This is where you showcase your brand’s narrative with authentic content, engaging captions, sharing the latest updates, relevant reels, and Stories. You can also create paid ads that are objective-focused. Think of social media as another communication extension as you would with your business phone.

Once you have solidified your social media presence, it is time to tap into your SEO capabilities. By definition, SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In layman terms, it means the process of improving your site visibility on search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. How does it work? Bots are used to crawl pages that collect information and then put them in an index. Next, the algorithm analyzes the page, taking into account multiple factors such as keywords, meta tags, etc. These efforts will help your site rank when specific phrases or keywords are being searched via the search engine.  

So how do both of these tools work hand in hand? Although social media and SEO are inherently different tools, they can be very successful when put together. First, social media can support SEO by helping boost your content. For example, if you own a recipe website, you can add “Google Pumpkin Recipe XYZ blog” in your caption. It will direct your followers to actively search those terms in Google and inadvertently rank your site. In addition, you can create backlinks opportunities by having other like-minded influencers share your blog or website through their posts on social media. Thirdly, it is vital to ensure social media sharing buttons on your website or blog. They will help to increase traffic to social media and help with your ranking on search engines through direct sharing.

Overall, incorporating both strategies into your marketing plan will improve your brand’s chances of being seen and discovered! If you haven’t implemented either of these tools, now’s the time to do so. If you’re not sure where to start with your digital marketing strategy, contact us today!