Introduction

When it comes to digital marketing, two crucial strategies that often get mixed up are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO (Social Media Optimization). While both aim to boost a website's visibility and traffic, they operate in different ways and cater to different aspects of online presence. In this article, we will delve into the key differences between SEO and SMO, helping you understand how each strategy can benefit your online business.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization (SEO) includes various methods and techniques to use with the goal of improving the desired website’s organic traffic and getting higher rankings in search engines. Organic traffic is the one that you get “naturally” when users look for keywords you ranked for. By improving website rankings, businesses attract more organic traffic without the need for paid advertisements.

SEO methods include keyword research, creating content around those keywords, link building, technical SEO, local SEO, etc. To see whether the chosen approaches work, you can monitor your results with a site traffic checker. Such a tool allows you to analyze incoming organic and paid traffic, detect which keywords perform better, and get actionable insights to improve your current strategy.

What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

SMO stands for social media optimization. Although both abbreviations include the word optimization, this is a completely different marketing method. SMO includes methods that take advantage of social media to boost your brand’s overall online visibility and deliver the desired message to targeted users.An integral part of social media optimization is posting valuable content on social networks. The term “valuable” can be anything that can boost your product or service awareness, engage social media, and, therefore, strengthen relationships with existing or potential customers.Finding useful content that encourages further sharing is an excellent way to promote brand awareness. You could also organize giveaways and other contests where one of the requirements to participate would be to share your posts.

SEO and SMO is the channels they focus on. In fact, this is the quickest and easiest way to differentiate SMO and SEO, as SEO is primarily focused on search engines. Some examples include:

Google

Bing

Yahoo

SMO, social platforms like:

Facebook

Instagram

Pinterest

X (former Twitter)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation uses a variety of different methods to make your website rank highly on the search engine results pages (SERPs). These methods include: 

Keyword Planning

Keyword Planning is the process of choosing a specific keyword(s) to target on each page of the website. This is vital to SEO as a clear keyword strategy means pages will not compete with one another for the same search terms. Each page will have a specific purpose. 

Good Quality Optimised Copy

Each page on the website needs to have unique, optimised copy that focuses on specific keywords in order to rank highly on google. The copy needs to be well-written and easy to understand.

Meta Title & Description

Ensuring each of your web pages has a unique meta title (the title of the page which tells Google what the page is about) and a meta description (the snippet of text that appears below the title in the SERPs) is another important part of SEO.  

Link Building

Link building is a part of SEO which aims to gain links from other websites. Each link to your website from a reputable source is a good sign to Google, as these links are effectively ‘votes’ for your website. Combined, this alludes to the popularity of the website. The aim of link building is, therefore, to gain high-quality links in order to improve the ranking position of the website.  

User-Friendly Website

The user-friendliness of your website is relevant to SEO. If your website is unresponsive, slow and difficult to use – it’s not going to get a good ranking on google. 

Social Media Optimisation (SMO)

Social Media Optimisation is a digital marketing method which focuses on making your social media platforms engaging enough to bring traffic to the website. 

Create Shareable Content

Increasing social links through SMO involves developing content that people want to share and link to. Creating a blog on your website, for example, is ideal for this method of SMO as it is easy to link to. 

Make Sharing Content Easy 

This method of SMO involves adding share and social link buttons to your website and blog in order to encourage sharing, recommending or bookmarking. 

Providing Value to Users

This includes adding outbound links into your content even if it doesn’t help drive traffic to your website. This helps your website as you will gain a loyal follower base who will see you as a fountain of knowledge. Valuable content also helps with SEO as Google’s rank brain algorithm decides that useful resources should be at the top of the SERPs.  

Rewarding Loyal Followers

This type of Social Media Optimisation involves rewarding your loyal followers with the occasional ‘thank you’, follow back, or even competition prize. By letting them know you value their support, you will gain a loyal follower for life.  

So, when you’re setting up an SEO or SMO strategy, you’ll have clear channels and platforms in mind. If you want to boost SEO ratings, you need to think about how Google works and dig into Google Analytics, trends, etc.