There’s a debate going on about online marketing strategies for growing your Home Care agency…what’s better, SEO or social media marketing?
Often, a Home Care business will hire an SEO specialist or marketing agency to increase their online visibility in the search engines, without ever considering social media and the traffic that it can bring them.
Likewise, there are others who focus their attention completely on amassing a social media following without any attention to SEO.
Let’s compare both strategies to see which option is best.
Targeting an Audience
The ability to target a specific audience is critical for driving relevant traffic and generating sales. It is definitely easier to target an appropriate audience on social media platforms.
Most social media platforms allow you to run ads that target a specific part of your market based on their demographic. You can get extremely granular in who you’re targeting and when you want your message to reach your ideal audience.
SEO is not quite as targeted. Though you can definitely target those interested in your niche, you typically can’t narrow it down to a particular demographic.
How Much Effort Is Involved?
To get a return on investment for your content, you’ll need to see how much work is involved with social media and search engine optimization.
Social media requires planning and frequent posting of content on multiple platforms. Although tools can help in making this process easier, you still have to keep doing it on a consistent basis.
Marketing your Home Care business on Social Media is not something that you can rely on to work without investing your own efforts. You need to put in the effort in every day since each post only has a short lifespan. While some agency owners or staff have the time to do this, most do not. Many of the agencies we work with prefer to work on their business rather than in it. Hiring a Home Care Marketing agency to do this work can save a lot of time, allowing business owners to focus on other growth strategies.
SEO, on the other hand, requires ongoing work, but once you start ranking your pages, the ongoing workload can be reduced, requiring less effort than running a social media campaign.
Which Content Should You Use?
It doesn’t matter if you’re planning to do SEO or social media marketing, both rely on content. Your traffic and engagement will depend on what sort of content you create.
When writing content for your home care website or blog, long-form content will usually work best. This means that you may need to create articles of a few thousand words, rather than a few hundred.
For social media, images and videos will work well and will be shared across the community if they resonate with the audience. When this happens and your content starts to get shared, you’ll also get more traffic to your website.
Which is Better – SEO or Social Media Marketing?
You get the biggest benefits from integrating SEO and social media into your online marketing strategy.
Write long articles, and make sure to include images and videos. You’ll get more traffic and visitors will spend more time on your website this way, and will show the search engines that your content is good, engaging, and trustworthy. Plus, people will share content on social media that they find to be interesting and valuable.
Social media is a ranking factor today, so it pays to build your social media presence as it ties into your SEO. Building traffic via SEO to your website will also help people to engage on social media too.
While SEO and social media marketing are different, they both help the other and the goal is the same – to drive traffic to your website, products, or services. We’ve outlined some pros and cons that may help you decide between SEO, Social Media Marketing, or most likely – a combination of the two – so you can spend less time wondering what is right for your home care agency.
What do you think? Which strategy would make more sense for you? Let us know in the comments below!