Social Media Marketing Vs SEO

When considering the most effective digital marketing campaign to maximize a good return on investment (ROI) it’s good to think about targeting Social Media Marketing (SMM) aka “LinkBait” or to use traditional SEO link building and online advertising.

With the hype Social Media is getting, even to the extent of people talking about Google being replaced by social sites, there are still companies fueled by advertising and traditional SEO that dominate the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

Social media has its pros and cons but does not suit all sites. For instance, there are only so many people that are going to care about real estate agents. So a real estate business considering the pricing of social media would not benefit from the costly campaigns that are sold from $5,000 or more per link bait concept. The real company would need to sell a lot of houses to see a ROI.

Sure, there is the potential for traffic and blog links, but blog links get devalued in time as they get archived. The same can be said of a traditional link-building-based SEO campaign. Client may not see an ROI and with every campaign, there are no guarantees and risks. The goal is to determine what type of campaign would better suit the client based on his budget and the ability to achieve an ROI.

Social media lends itself better to certain types of websites. Sites with larger competitors and generic terms will need to push the sites and use link baiting methods. Sites selling, music, computers, gadgets, hosting, etc. are better candidates for Social Media Marketing.

Sites like the real estate agencies, dentists, and lawyers are usually better served by using traditional link building for related industry links. Advertising is also recommended for regional Australian sites.

Articles are more of a cross between traditional SEO tools and link baiting, but again they are devalued in time and need to be syndicated quite often. If termed an “article” then they are economical to syndicate and can offer an ROI. If termed “Social Media Marketing” then they are quite expensive and the syndication is different to the client.

Sure you can come up with catchy linkbait for anything, but again the risk and potential ROI to the client is minimal when paying for costly link baiting services. Training the client to do its own link baiting, should become part of SEO campaigns or SMM campaigns.

Decisions need to be made that can determine what the best and most realistic digital marketing campaign should be for the client. ROI is important if you plan on keeping a long-term client. As a digital marketing company in Perth, that has a high client retention rate, it is something we factor in from the initial phone call with the client. We need to determine that they can achieve an ROI, or they will end the campaign.