Today we will wrap up our series on why social media will not replace SEO.

Social media marketing

Some businesses (particularly new or small ones) get caught in the glory of building a large number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans. They assume that once they establish a large following, word of mouth will be easy and the sales will inevitably follow. However, the hole in this logic is evident when you take the following example: Say you have 5,000 followers on Twitter. Even if you tweet something about your awesome new product, if your followers don’t need the product at the time, they’re not going to care, which means that your tweet will be lost and gone to waste. Even if they need your product later, what are the chances that they will actually take the time to comb through your old tweets to find that one <140 character update you wrote about it? There are too many other web marketing message your customers are seeing daily. This goes back to our previous point about how SEO tailors to the customer’s experience. Combined with your web marketing efforts, SEO can really target your customers. If you properly optimize your site for target keywords, then when people find themselves in need of your product, your website will be one of the first things they see when they use a search engine. SEO brings users to the pages that are relevant to their wants/needs, and this facilitates your customer conversation rate in a way that social media is not capable of doing all on its own. Financially speaking, the ROI in SEO has proven itself against the test of time. Yes, SEO is certainly an investment. However, it is a worthwhile investment that will reap fruitful benefits for your company in the long run.

And if the above reasons haven’t convinced you of why social media can’t replace SEO (at least not yet), another reason you should devote a chunk of your web marketing strategy to SEO is because well, quite frankly, your competitors are most likely investing in SEO. Your competitors are doing their best to rank higher than you in search engine results, so unless you want to lose all your potential customers to them, you might as well invest in SEO, too. And if you are fortunate enough that your competitors have not (yet) invested in SEO, then optimizing your web pages before them gives you a great advantage.

Social media may be the new big thing, but let’s not forget about what is tried and true. If executed properly, SEO can (and will) drive in more traffic and revenue to your business.