Frank Olivo

Frank Olivo is the founder of Sagapixel. He writes on a number of topics related to digital marketing, but focuses mostly on SEO.

SEO vs. Social Media: Which is Right for Your Business?

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SEO versus social media—they do very different things, and in this article, I’m going to explain. 

There are benefits to having your business market itself through social media; there are benefits to marketing your business through SEO. In some cases, there are benefits to integrating both and doing both social media and SEO, and in some cases, it’s worth ignoring one or the other. 

So, let’s get into it.

My name is Frank, and I’m the founder of Sagapixel. We pride ourselves as an agency on how we integrate social media content and SEO. However, I will recognize that there are businesses that don’t necessarily benefit from both of these channels, and my hope is that this video is going to help you identify which is likely to work for you.

What is SEO Good At?

Let’s talk about what SEO is good at. There are two scenarios in which SEO, or search engine optimization, can help drive business for your company.

Scenario one: People explicitly look for the thing that you do. Let’s say, for example, you are a weight loss doctor in Mobile, Alabama. Ranking for a keyword like “weight loss doctor Mobile, Alabama” or “ozempic Mobile, Alabama” will put you in front of your customers.

Scenario two: You have a product where people have questions or problems that your product or service can address, but they’re not yet at the point of explicitly looking for it. Or maybe they don’t even know that your solution is their solution. In other words, that medical weight loss doctor would also benefit from answering a question like, “Can I take ozempic if I’m on high blood pressure medicine?” In that scenario, the doctor is going to get in front of their target patient, and he or she should try to produce content answering that question.

What Can SEO Not Do?

Now, what can SEO not do? 

If people don’t know that the thing or the service that you sell exists, they’re not going to look for it, and SEO is not going to be able to put you in front of them. Likewise, if you have the type of service that no one’s really looking for, and no one really has any questions about it or the problem that you solve, SEO is not going to help you.

I also want to add a caveat with all of this: there are cases where people are looking for the thing that you do, but your target customer is not. We, for example, work primarily with small to medium-sized businesses. A company like Sagapixel can benefit from SEO. If we were focused on Fortune 500 enterprise clients, I don’t think it would really help us too much. Amazon’s not Googling “SEO company near me” if they need to hire someone to help them with their SEO.

So, before you go all in on SEO as a marketing channel for your company, make sure that your target customer is indeed using Google to find services like yours or to research problems that you can help them with. If they are, then SEO is the ideal channel to put you in front of those clients in the moment when they want the thing that you provide.

What is Social Media Good At?

So let’s talk about social media.

Unlike SEO, which really can’t get in front of people that aren’t looking for the thing that you do, social media absolutely can. The biggest development in social media over the last couple of years has been a shift away from social media being focused on connecting people with other people and more towards connecting people with creators that are making content around their interests. 

This means that if you are a medical spa in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and you have a brand new machine, there’s nothing else like it on the market, and nobody even knows to even look for this solution, SEO is not going to be able to help you. But producing content about the machine, educating and entertaining people, very well may present the opportunity for you to get in front of people that are interested in med spas, beauty, anti-aging, and skincare, which can create awareness.

Social media is also better at building and maintaining trust than SEO. On channels such as Instagram Reels or TikTok, simply engaging with some of your content very well may put you back out in front of those same potential customers. The same thing goes for YouTube. There’s a good chance after seeing this video, you’ll start seeing others of our videos popping up in your feed—though I still would recommend that you subscribe. 

Social media can get you out in front of your target customer practically on a daily basis.

What Can Social Media Not Do?

But what can social media not do? 

Outside of a stroke of luck and pure coincidence, odds are that you’re not going to be out in front of people in the moment when they’re specifically looking for the thing that you do. In the case of the med spa, when someone says, “You know what, I think it’s time to get some Botox,” if they don’t have someone in mind, there’s a good chance that they’re going to Google “Botox + [City],” and whoever is showing up in the map results is going to be the med spa, dermatologist, or plastic surgeon that gets that new patient.

Social media can also struggle sometimes with certain types of businesses. We work with a lot of home care agencies, and I can tell you that no one is really interested in following a home care agency. In all the years that we’ve been working with those types of businesses, I have not once come across one anywhere in North America, Europe, or the Middle East that has leveraged social media successfully as its primary lead generation channel, the way I’ve seen for med spas, plastic surgeons, dentists, and all kinds of other types of industries. 

Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to have necessarily a “sexy” business. I could even see a business like a garbage pickup company potentially putting together compelling content on TikTok that would make people actually want to follow it. It just takes a little bit of creativity.

Comparative Analysis: SEO Vs. Social Media

So, let’s do a comparative analysis of SEO versus social media.

SEO is good at the following:

  1. Getting in front of a potential customer in the moment when they are looking for the thing that you sell.
  2. Getting in front of people when they are Googling the problems that you solve.
  3. Driving an incredibly low cost per lead once you’re ranking well in the organic search results.
  4. Creating a marketing channel that doesn’t necessarily need to be constantly fed with time or money. Once you’re ranking in the organic search results, it’s usually yours for some time.

What is SEO not good at?

  1. It’s not particularly good at generating demand. While SEO can get in front of someone when they are in the moment explicitly looking for the thing that you sell, it is not very good at getting in front of someone that doesn’t even know your solution exists.
  2. It’s very difficult to build an audience through SEO. There are websites that do it, but this is usually not feasible for your typical small to medium-sized business. Your “SEO content” is often going to be read once and never again. There’s no real easy way to “follow” a website the way you can follow a social media account.
  3. Finally, it’s rare that SEO is something that’s going to start working practically overnight. If you have an established website that’s been around for a long time and you have a track record of fulfilling search intent—like, in other words, people have been coming to your website, liking what they’ve been finding—very often the timeline to getting results from organic search and SEO is going to be rather short. But if you have a brand new website, you’re probably looking at some time before you’re going to get any sort of return on your investment through SEO. While there are social media accounts that go viral overnight and become incredibly successful in a matter of weeks, it’s very unusual for that to happen through SEO.

So what are the advantages of social media?

  1. Social media does a much better job of generating trust than the written word or SEO. Your social media followers and people that find you on TikTok, YouTube, and so forth are going to feel like they know you over time—that’s not going to happen through SEO. Overall, social media does a much better job of demonstrating your expertise and earning trust.
  2. Social media is better at staying in front of your users. On engagement platforms such as Instagram, if you manage to get someone to follow your Instagram account, you’re going to get in front of them most days of the week if you’re posting every day. Through SEO, you’re basically going to get in front of them when they’re Googling something they need. It’s harder to stay top of mind through SEO.
  3. Social media can be used for demand generation, not just demand capture. While SEO is great at getting in front of someone in the moment when they’re looking for what they want and they’re looking for the thing that you do, social media is good at getting them to want it in the first place. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, someone invented a microneedling machine that was safe to use around the eyes. No one knows that this exists—honestly, as far as I know, it doesn’t exist—and odds are that the first med spa that would get such a device would have a very hard time getting in front of people through SEO because they don’t know to look for it. But if a med spa has a big social media following, it can educate everybody and do videos on this new cool machine that they’ve bought. And even if they don’t have followers, if they’re on platforms such as TikTok and, to a lesser extent, YouTube, they can produce those videos, and if they get a lot of engagement and people like them, the platform will push them out to other people that have similar interests, like beauty and skincare, and so forth.
  4. On some platforms, sometimes there’s the opportunity for a shorter timeline to success on social media. When you’re dealing with brand new websites and SEO in any sort of even medium competition market, you’re probably looking at 3 to 6 months before you’re ever going to get anywhere near a spot in the search results where your customers are going to find you. There are social media accounts that blow up overnight. We have a TikTok client that has maybe three or four dozen videos at this point, and we know that he’s already signed tens of thousands of dollars in cases from those videos.

So, what are the cons of social media marketing?

  1. There’s a higher barrier to entry. With social media, you often have to produce video, shoot content, take pictures, and it’s overall a lot more involved than sitting down, writing a landing page, and optimizing it, or writing a blog article.
  2. You have to do it constantly. YouTube has evergreen content—like, it’s possible for you to shoot a video and people will still see it for years—but that does not happen on TikTok, Instagram, and so forth. You’re going to constantly need to be on the content treadmill, constantly putting out new content.
  3. You’re going to get in front of lots of people that are in no way at all your potential customer. While through SEO, you are targeting queries—the searches that your target customer is looking for in the moment when they need what you do—social media is not going to be able to do that. You’re going to be casting a wider net, trying to get people to know who you are and keep you top of mind when they make the decision that they want what it is that you do. You’re counting on them remembering.
  4. Lastly, social media tends to have a cycle where platforms come and go. Google’s been around for 20 some odd years at this point; it’s probably not going anywhere. But I can tell you that all the businesses that spent tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars building their Facebook pages stopped seeing any return from that eight years ago. And the same will likely happen with Instagram someday, as well as TikTok.

Conclusion

To wrap all this up, I want to point out the importance and the opportunity of integrating your SEO and social media content

There’s a chance that you discovered this video through organic search and you are on our blog, which now presents the opportunity for us to send you over to our YouTube channel and possibly turn you into a subscriber.

Then you’ll see us the next time you get on YouTube and we put out another video that might be of interest to you.

Likewise, you may have watched another one of our videos on our YouTube channel, saw this in the side, clicked on it, and then you went down the rabbit hole of watching our videos and maybe even ended up on our website.

An approach to content where you take your videos, upload them to YouTube, embed them in the blog on your website, generate a transcript, and optimize it for search presents an opportunity for you to create social media content that can rank in organic search and SEO. Not to mention, you can still take the same video, cut it up into smaller snippets, and push it out on Instagram Reels, LinkedIn, TikTok. 

This approach is the best of both worlds: you can get in front of people that are Googling their problems, and you can then use video to present your solutions as a solution to their problems through video, which, let’s be honest, is a lot more impactful than an article that people are barely going to skim the headlines of.

In addition, there are going to be cases where people come in through organic search, they watch the video, they end up on the YouTube channel, and they’ll see us again. In the case of an article, odds are they would have just landed on the article and we would have never heard from them again. You should be doing this if you have the type of business that sells any sort of expertise at all.

I hope this video was helpful. If it was, please consider giving a like, and if you want to schedule a time to sit down with me to talk about your business’s marketing, click over to our website and I’d be happy to talk to you.

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