If you have the time or budget to use SEO in conjunction with social media optimisation, doing so will allow you to reach the broadest possible audience.
If your time and budget limit put you in a position of having to choose, here is some information that will help you to do so intelligently:
1. Latest study in 2014 indicated that 51% of website traffic across their study group came from organic search compared to 5% from social media. Even more shocking, when narrowed down to service based sites, organic search accounted for 73% of all traffic.
2. Facebook has an average visitor to lead rate of 0.98%. SEO has a visitor to lead rate of over 14%.
3. Organic Facebook posts only reach an average of 12 percent of your followers. Appearing in the top three in Google organic search results in an average click-through rate (CTR) of 60%. Put simply, five times as many people will click an organic result as will even see a Facebook post!
4. Imagine this, you wake up to a massive leak in your roof. You just moved to the area and don’t know who to call. What do you do? If you are like over 60% of others, you will use Google to find the right solution.
5. What about forecasting? Readily available tools such as the Google Keyword Planner allow you to easily see the average monthly search volume for keywords. Using industry averages, you can take the search traffic and accurately estimate total site traffic for a new campaign. Unfortunately, traffic forecasting is not easy to do for a new social media campaign.
6. What about YouTube? Many of you already know that YouTube is the second largest search engine. While some may argue that YouTube is a social site, SEO is a powerful way to market videos as well. If you are not familiar with YouTube SEO, you can learn more about that in our recent post covering how to generate quick search traffic.
Again, social media can be a great addition to a comprehensive marketing plan. However, if you are looking to maximise your ROI on every marketing dollar spent, SEO is where you should be investing.