Driving traffic to your site is the main purpose of social media or search engine marketing. Businesses often fail to decide which one to put primary focus on. It is not quite easy to decide which marketing strategy should deserve more investment or whether they can do without any of the two different forms of marketing strategies.
Ways in Which Search Engine Marketing Outshines Social Media Marketing:
There are a few reasons why some of the business owners prefer search engine marketing over social media.
Reach-ability: Analyzing your own search habits will let you know that people turn to all the popular search engines when they need information about something. The report of survey by E-consultancy shows that 61% of the consumers take the help of search engines instead of social media for searching for necessary information related to products they are planning to buy. Google, AOL, Yahoo, Ask, Bing, Blekko are the most sought after search engines that users seek help from. So, it is important to get good search engine ranking for being discovered.
Searcher’s Behavior: Knowing the exact keywords web users are using for searching information about a particular product offers the business an edge over its competitors. Google Adwords Keyword Tool is an useful tool for them to find it out.
Pay to Get Results: Reaching the top of the organic search results is not easy. If your website fails to make it to the list of organic search results, you can always purchase a space among the sponsored links through Google Adwords Though organic search results get more frequent clicks, still it is good to be on the first page of the search engine instead of not being their at all. Being a part of the paid search listing also allows you to customize the Title or description of your website, your own way.
Social Media Marketing in Some Forms beat Search Engine Optimization:
Recommendation by Hitting a Like: The survey report by E-consultancy mentioned that around 75% of the social media users are aged between 18 and 26 who do a product research through user recommendations on social networking sites before purchasing. The best thing about social media marketing is once you are on social networking sites like, Twitter, Facebook or Google+, you will start getting recommendations from users in the form of Likes for your business page, tags the brand name of your business or mentions your Twitter handle. Your business gets discovered by more and more users through these actions.
Response in Real Time: Apart from the problem of not coming in the search result at all, a business can also face a problem of negative reviews. Online reputation management service has widely started being subscribed to counter bad reviews, rip off reports and any form of damaging texts posted online.
Whenever a business faces online criticism through social networking sites, that can be turned into appreciation through ‘Real Time’ reputation management or responding back to them the very moment you receive criticism. There are books ( like The Now Revolution) available these days that explain how to manage real time crises in social networking sites effectively.
Buy a Space in Front of Your Target Audience: Businesses these days get a fair chance to put their content in front of the users of StumbleUpon Ads, Facebook Advertising and Promoted Tweets. This process also helps in generating traffic to your business website. As a result, the visibility of your messages on social media platform also get increased.
Investment Must be Shared Between Social Media and Search Engine:
It is not a wise decision to put all the eggs in the same basket Each of them have their beneficial points that might help your website to get more traffic. You should not strike one between the two completely off the list. You should invest your time and money for both as both yield result in their unique way.
Install Google Analytic on your site to get a hint of the fluctuating behavior of the traffic to your website. If you click on any of the top five traffic sources you will get to know how important it is to rely on each of the social networking sites and the search engines. You cannot do without any of those. If you compare the traffic of a period of the month with that of a the same period the previous month, you will realize how one offers support when the other fails to drive enough traffic to your site. That is why you need to allocate money for marketing through both the marketing tools.
Author’s Bio: Janet Milano is a full time blogger and SMO expert in Orange County, California. She writes articles about Social Media Marketing and SEO tactics and current Google updates. Follow her in her Twitter account.
