TL;DR: You’ll get less for your money with social media vs website SEO.
After writing the previous post regarding why your business needs a website vs only using social media, it is important to expand further and explain how local SEO is better than a social media only strategy.
Social Media Only Optimisation Limitations.
Lots of people seem to believe the quote “if you build it & they will come” (taken from the 1982 W.P Kinsella novel called “Shoeless Joe”, which was made into the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, with Kevin Costner). But in the internet world, where your digital presence resides, it is very different. And this is where a social media only strategy falls down.
Let us explain. If you have a website, you can tailor your SEO so you can be found for whatever keywords you choose, & have the strategy for. However, if you only use a social media strategy your competitors, who utilise both, will have the upper hand.
SERPs Organic reach & Local SEO
Let’s say you own a bakery in South Devon, here are the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for that user’s search query.
What you’ll notice is that not one is a social media site, and that’s the point. You can only leverage social media so far, and essentially, you’ll only be found if potential customers already know your name and/or your product.
Whereas, if you have a website, you can set your primary keywords to be “Bakery in South Devon” and variants of that as a basis of your SEO strategy, it’s called Local SEO.
Then there’s the key to any online strategy: Content creation
Whether you are Zuckerburg, Musk or QED web design, it doesn’t matter. When it comes to any website, ‘Content is king’.
Don’t get us wrong, we love social media, especially Meta’s Threads at the moment.
Now, if your strategy is social media only just take a minute to think about that statement – You are giving your content, for free, to some of the richest people on the planet in the vain hope that you’ll gain likes, clicks or whatever vanity metric you’d like to use. But the bottom line, as in any business, is the bottom line – cash in the till.
Shifting sands
Social media platforms have their own algorithms that determine which content gets displayed to users. This means that businesses have limited control over how often their content is seen organically.
In contrast, with a website, you have more control over your SEO strategy and can optimise your content to rank higher in SERPs. This can significantly increase your organic reach and attract more visitors to your website.
Social media vs Website SEO, the reality.
Anyone who works in marketing will tell you that social media should make up part of your overall marketing strategy, but that no business should be without a website. After all 75% of all your local customers will reach you via organic search queries (source: SEO.ai) – That’s the point.
If you use social media only then the chances are that your users/customers will already know of you, where as website SEO is a targeted approach because those potential new customers are already searching what you sell or do, but don’t yet know of you.
