To survive in a social market, any business would require an effective SEO program, preferably developed by a specialist SEO agency. With mobile devices becoming more and more accessible to the masses, it has become important to conduct a specific type of strategy - one that facilitates the growth of your business by combining SEO with SMO.

Why is SMO important?

SMO or Social Media Optimisation has become increasingly popular and important in the past decades, with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter becoming bywords in millennial lingo. A lot of businesses, especially those catering to a youth audience, find social media an important marketing hub for a number of reasons- the main one being the range of viewing that these platforms allow.

The youth is particularly invested in social media, which makes it necessary for brands to use SMO to reach out to them. Other than this, SMO can also be used to advertise brands and services for free- or at least at a much cheaper rate than conventional forms of advertising.

With the help of your social media presence, you can help customers, engage with them and resolve customer service issues easily and personally. Building a personal bond with your customers may be the push that your brand needs to stand out from the rest. Customers appreciate it when the brand makes them feel heard and understood, and social media makes it easier for you to connect with your client base directly.

Now that we have established that SMO is an important part of building a brand’s online image, let us take a look at how it can be used in collaboration with SEO for better results.

Why is integrating SEO and SMO a good idea in the new decade?

According to Google, once you publish quality content on social media platforms, it improves your site’s rankings on the search engine. Therefore, once you put forth good content on your brand’s Instagram or Facebook pages, it helps with raising the visibility of your website to higher positions on the search engine.

SMO can help build your brand’s reputation and awareness, as well as improve engagement with audiences. With the help of your targeted messaging, you can start conversations about your brand. For example, you can engage and interest audiences with the help of DIY videos showing how they can use the products and the services they are promoting.

When you publish posts with engaging and relevant headlines, it compels the social media audience to visit your site and take a look at it. This eventually results in greater clicks on your website and increased traffic to it. Also, when your content entertains people or makes them think, they will share it on their personal social media accounts, which will draw even more people to your social media page as well as your website. Relevant social signals can actually help with improving the relevance of your website, thus bringing even more traffic to your page.

Social Media Optimisation uses social search results which several customers make use of to get information on a particular brand. Also, when you add relevant keywords to your social media posts, it optimizes your content for crawlers on the search engine.

Using an SEO agency for the best results

Putting SEO and SMO into use together can help you spend your marketing budget more effectively. And using a digital marketing agency for the same may be useful for you. Of course, if you are a one-person small start-up, or if you are just starting out in the market, you can save capital by conducting a digital marketing program yourself. But for larger businesses that do not want to build a digital marketing team within their own unit, outsourcing the services may be the correct option.

When the same company does both your SEO and SMO work, it is actually a lot more beneficial to your brand image. That is because the company is already aware of the type of image that you are trying to build for your brand. It is going to be easier for them to focus their marketing techniques in that direction and gather cohesive and measurable results in the process.