Last time we noted that a mildly alarming number of business owners are completely forgoing SEO in favor of social media. Today, we’ll explain the risks behind putting all your eggs in one basket (that is, the social media basket), and moreover, why SEO is still relevant and why we don’t see SEO disappearing from online marketing strategies any time soon.

First, we’d like to acknowledge that social media is still a viable method for establishing one’s online presence. The point of this post is NOT to belittle the merits of social media (after all, we use Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress, too). Rather, the purpose of this post is to remind business owners that social media should not be the only thing that they focus on in web marketing.

The great thing about SEO is that all the optimization you do on your website is yours and no one else’s. In contrast, when you update your Twitter or Facebook page, you are conducting online marketing through a domain that is not your own. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but what happens if one of these social media outlets goes out of fashion? Say good-bye to all the content that you poured into that external site.

The truth of the matter is that all the marketing you do on social media platforms is ephemeral, but all the optimization you do on your own site is permanent. If you get kicked off of Twitter for some reason, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to retrieve your past content. However, if something similar were to happen to your website (say, for example, your web host chooses not to host you anymore), at least you can easily take your backup files and move to another hosting site. But with Twitter and Facebook, you don’t have that option. You are left completely at the whim of the social media powers that be. On the other hand, if you own your own domain, you are in full control over what happens to your content. This is also why, if you blog, we highly recommend that you try to have your own domain name for your blog. Why? Because if you blog through a subdomain and one day decide to switch platforms, you run the risk of losing a lot of traffic, incoming links, search engine rankings, etc.

To read more about the crucial differences between SEO and social media, be sure to keep an eye out for our next post.