SMO vs SEO: What’s The Difference?
Our Dallas SEO company offers several online marketing services, including SMO. All of these services to maximize your ROI from your business website, but what’s the difference between SMO and SEO?
For starters, SEO is Search Engine Optimization, which is the process by which you use several online tools, techniques, and practices to maximize your website’s visibility on search engines. A good SEO strategy ensures that users who are interested in your field or expertise can easily find your website before they find your competitor’s site.
The goal of SEO is to increase your website’s traffic through search engine results. So it first focuses on creating valuable content, enriched with relevant keywords, meta descriptions, alt tags, headers, HTML and backend coding, and other coding techniques. It takes time to develop and attaining significant results is relatively slow but practiced correctly, will deliver good and lasting results over the years.
On the other hand, SMO stands for Social Media Optimization, which is a specific practice for promoting your website on social media channels. It is just one significant part of the entire Search Engine Optimization process.
SMO is practiced by sharing your content as widely as possible through relevant social media platforms, at appropriate dates, times, and to their corresponding target markets. It provides you with relatively faster results but needs to be exercised much more frequently than SEO.
How do SMO and SEO work together?
Since SMO is an integral part of SEO, you need to start with SEO first, specifically with content creation. Google makes sure that the sites that reach the top of the search results deserve the spot, so website owners that practice shady techniques such as keyword stuffing, duplicate content, link spamming, article spinning, spam commenting, cloaking, and more are penalized and cut off from the search results. This way, users only find sites that provide fresh and valuable content.
Once you’ve published your original and relevant content, and have applied the appropriate SEO techniques that are in line with your objectives, then you can move on to SMO.
Now, SMO requires a well-thought-out strategy, not just random link-sharing on social media sites lest you get pegged for a spammer – and you will. You’ll have to determine your target audience, their online activity schedule, and the kind of posting language to use that will resonate with them. After posting comes engagement, which is a fancier term for interacting with your audience so they’ll be encouraged to visit your site, share your content to their respective networks, and eventually become your loyal following and paying customers.
SMO also ensures that you gain enough followers who share your content online, which Google detects as a measure of your authority on your subject. The more people who share and engage with your content, the higher authority you have, and the higher your rank on search engines. And this is how SMO delivers returns to your overall SEO strategy.
So in a nutshell, SEO lets your site be found on search engines, and SMO lets you be seen in social media networks. Both are proven ways of attracting more traffic to your website, only one is developed for a long-term strategy while the other is more of a quick, tactical process.
Our Dallas SMO company understands well that you’ll only have half the chances of outranking your competitors without a proper social media optimization plan. This is why we have a number of services that will help you connect better to your target audience in social communities.
If you’re ready to take your social media strategy to the next level, contact us now for your free consultation.
