Establishing a strong online presence has become crucial for almost any business nowadays. Whether you are a website owner or a digital marketing expert hired to boost site performance, you should be familiar with the terms SEO and SMO.
These abbreviations sound similar and some people may use them interchangeably, but they are different marketing methods. And, if you’re unsure about SEO and SMO, this guide is here to help. Below, we’ll dig into SEO vs SMO, covering definitions of both terms and explaining exactly how they differ.
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. Also, you should compare your progress with competitors to understand benchmarks and goals to strive for.
That’s important because the vast majority of users only click on the first few results they see for each search term. So, with a strong SEO strategy, you can push your pages up the ranks and get more clicks, more visitors, and perhaps even more sales.
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.
Having profiles on multiple social platforms is important to expand your reach. Many users will find it easy to send you a message over these networks, so customer communication is another integral part of SMO.
Key Contrasts Between SEO and SMO
So, when it comes to SMO or social media marketing vs SEO, how do the two compare?
Well, they clearly have some similarities, as they’re both focused on helping brands build a strong online presence. However, there are also lots of notable differences between SEO and SMO, including goals, methods, channels, timeline, results, and metrics. We’ll cover each in the sections below!
Goals
Goal-wise, SEO is focused on boosting organic traffic to a website by making it more visible in search engine listings. Its main aims include:
- Pushing your site up the Google search results
- Helping the website get more visits
- Enhancing the brand’s awareness
To do that, you’ll typically need to invest in quality content creation, as well as clever use of meta tags, links, and so on.
SMO is similar, but still not quite the same. Like SEO, it’s aimed at helping you get more attention and have a bigger and better brand. However, the means to that end are a little different. While SEO is all about content and website aspects, like metadata, SMO is 100% concerned with your social media output.
In other words, SMO’s ultimate aim is to make your brand more visible and and get more engagement on social media. It has no real focus or link with your actual website, being entirely built around your socials, like the kind of posts you make on Facebook or how you respond to people on Instagram.
Methods
Perhaps the biggest difference between SMO and SEO is in their methodology. They’re used in very different ways. A big part of SEO, for example, is about keywords. Usually, to kick off an SEO campaign, experts will look up a list of relevant keywords and phrases that a brand should try to target. An online shoe store, for example, would ideally want to rank high for phrases like “buy shoes online” or “best winter shoes for women.”
From there, the SEO strategy usually revolves around those keywords. New content – like blog posts and articles – will be created incorporating the keywords to help the site rank higher. In addition, metadata, like title tags and descriptions, should be added to boost potential rankings. SEO tactics can also involve improving site performance, speed, and responsiveness.
SMO is done in a totally different way. Since it’s purely social media-based, the main way in which people boost their SMO scores is via creating and sharing content. That might include making posts on Facebook or Twitter/X or sharing photo and video content via Instagram and TikTok. This can also include chatting with followers and creating contests.
Channels
Another big difference between 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:
- Bing
- Yahoo
SMO, on the other hand, focuses on social platforms like:
- X (former Twitter)
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. Meanwhile, for SMO improvements, it’s important to have rich knowledge of social sites and audiences.
Timeline and Results
Another way we can separate SMO and SEO is by looking at how quickly they tend to provide results and how long the average SMO/SEO campaign runs. If you’re new to these concepts, the difference in speed and efficiency between SEO and SMO may surprise you, as one of them tends to generate way faster results than the other.
So, which is faster? Well, more often than not, SMO tends to be much faster. You get to see the results of your SMO work almost immediately in some cases. For example, you can post something on Facebook and quickly start to get likes, comments, interactions, and so on. If you’re lucky, your content can even go viral, providing a gigantic brand boost.
SEO isn’t exactly slow, but it definitely tends to take longer by comparison. You’ll need to put in more time and effort and have a little more patience when waiting to reap the rewards of your hard work. It can take weeks or months to fulfill an SEO content strategy, for instance, and even longer to see how that strategy has impacted your site traffic and rankings.
Metrics
Whether you’re investing in social media marketing or setting up a super new SEO campaign, you’ll need to know about the relevant metrics and measurements to track. This is what allows you to effectively monitor how well you’re doing in the SEO or SMO department and potentially fine-tune or improve your approach accordingly.
SEO-wise, the main metric to focus on is keyword rankings. Everybody dreams about appearing on the first page of the search engine results for a particular keyword. Checking how your website is currently positioned, but also measuring organic traffic, conversion rates, and other parameters, could help confirm that your SEO strategy is working.
For SMO, it’s totally different. There, on social sites, engagement is the No. 1 focus. You need as many likes as you can get, as well as comments and shares. The idea is to create a reaction without neglecting other SEO-related metrics like click-through and conversion rates, which are also relevant here.
Summing Up
Overall, it’s clear that SEO & SMO are definitely not the same thing. They revolve around very different aspects of an online brand or company, with SEO being all about how your site performs on Google (and other engines) and SMO more centered on social media platforms and apps. Both work differently and provide different results, but both are vital for building a successful online brand.
