Do you have a small marketing team and aren’t sure whether you should be focusing on social media or SEO?

SEO marketing has been the standard for brands for decades, especially brands who thrive on driving traffic to their websites.

At the same time, social media allows brands to reach new audiences. Plus, it’s allowed some brands to go viral.

In this post, I compare social media marketing and SEO marketing so you can decide which strategy is best for your brand.

Social Media vs SEO: Which is Better?

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is ambiguous. That answer is: it depends.

It all comes down to which channels your audience consumes content on the most and how much competition exists on that channel.

Let’s say there are quite a few creators who create content for your niche on YouTube, but your niche also gets a lot of search traffic.

If the YouTubers you found in your niche already have thousands of subscribers or more, you might find it difficult to break the mold and get noticed on that platform.

But if a lot of the keywords you find for your niche don’t seem all that competitive (they have keyword difficulty (KD) scores of 50 or less in whatever keyword research tool you use), you might have a much easier time earning traffic from SEO content than you would YouTube content.

The takeaway here is this. Choose a marketing channel that has:

• Traffic from your audience
• Low competition

I really want to emphasize the “traffic from your audience” point.

If you only focus on finding a channel that has low competition, you risk wasting your time creating content for a channel your audience isn’t even interested in using.

Here’s a quick, five-step process for assessing competition on a social media platform:

1. Open the platform’s search function.
2. Enter a popular keyword for your niche. For example, if your niche is baseball, a popular keyword would be “how to throw a curveball.”
3. Look through the platform’s search filters and see if you can sort the results by popularity (such as number of views or likes).*
4. Open each popular post you find, and make note of the number of views and engagements it has. You can do this mentally. No need to get technical here.
5. Click through to each post’s creator to see how many followers they have.

*Note: If the posts you see after sorting the results by popularity seem irrelevant, change the sorting back to relevancy.

This will give you an idea of how competitive your niche is on each platform.

For SEO, enter a few popular keywords into a keyword research tool. If you don’t have one, Semrush gives you a handful of free searches everyday.

If a lot of the KD scores for these keywords are under 50 (under 40 would be better), you might be able to gain traction in this niche on Google.

Why SEO Still Matters

SEO marketing has never been more unpredictable.

Google released a large update in late September of 2023 called the “Helpful Content Update” (HCU) that decimated traffic for a lot of websites, and no one really knows why.

There are a lot of theories as to why certain sites (such as affiliate sites) were hit, but none of these theories explain why similar sites weren’t hit.

Google also started inserting AI overviews into a lot of search queries in 2024, giving searchers the answers they’re looking for without them having to click through to websites.

Finally, Google entered into a $60 million contract with Reddit in 2024 that allows it to train its AI models on human-written posts and allows Reddit posts to receive more priority in Google search results.

Combine all of that with the fact that the emergence of generative AI has led to an influx in AI-generated content clogging search engine results pages (SERPs) and you understand why a lot of marketers are apprehensive about creating SEO content these days.

Why SEO is Still Important

With all of that said, here’s why SEO is still worth it:

• Google still dominates the search engine market, according to StatCounter. They have an 89.83% market share worldwide, an 86.37% market share in North America, and a 90.25% market share in Europe, even as some consumers are replacing traditional search engines with ChatGPT and other chatbots.
• By creating helpful content for keywords related to your niche, you increase your chances of appearing in product and service-based search results.
• Creating blog content for Google gives potential customers an additional channel to find you through.
• Blogging allows you to grow your own audience by collecting them as email subscribers, which means your blog will have two traffic sources (Google and email).
• Having a collection of well-written and well-researched content on your website helps you increase your authority in your niche.
• You own your blog content. While Google may penalize certain pages on your website for various reasons, it doesn’t have the authority to delete your pages altogether in the way social media platforms have the authority to delete your content.
• The more content you create on your website, the more backlinks you’ll acquire organically. And the more backlinks you acquire, the higher you’ll appear on SERPs.
• SEO helps you build a long-term source of traffic that isn’t dependent on viral content.

Why Social Media is Also Important

Social media can be a difficult channel for many brands to enter. Social media trends come and go, and it can be difficult for a lot of brands to keep up.

Even so, social media is an important content channel that can increase brand awareness and give you an additional channel to acquire customers from.

Millions of people around the world log onto social media to check their feeds throughout the day. This means there are multiple opportunities for consumers to discover your content while they browse social media on a daily basis.

This doesn’t happen on Google. While Android phones do have the Google News feed, consumers aren’t going to discover your blog content casually while they browse the web.

Typically, consumers have to actively search for keywords related to your niche in order to discover your blog content, which they’ll do directly on Google or through other sites who have linked to your content.

Most importantly, short-form videos are dominating the web, and it’s always a good idea to create whatever kind of content consumers crave most.

According to research conducted by Business Research Insights, the short-form video market size was valued at $34.79 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to $289.52 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.33%.

Plus, a lot of marketers are already using this content format, so your brand risks getting left behind if you don’t jump on this trend fast.

According to Metricool’s analysis of short-form videos created on its platform in 2024, 51.03% more marketers are now using this content format.

Why You Should Use Both (and How)

Ideally, you should include blog and social content in your marketing strategy.

Create original content for each platform, and use the other as a distribution channel. This is something a lot of marketers are now doing to deal with Google’s ever-changing algorithm.

The process behind this strategy is simple:

• You publish a blog post on your site
• You then repurpose that post as a social media post or several
• You then embed that content into your original blog post

There are a few additional steps in between these steps, but this is the gist of it.

The general idea is that by optimizing your site for SEO and promoting your posts on social media, you make up for any drops in organic traffic by increasing your social traffic.

How to Promote Blog Posts On Social Media

Bloggers have been using link posts to promote posts on social media for years.

By adding a URL to a post on certain platforms, you create a link post that generates a clickable element that contains your post’s featured image and headline.

Unfortunately, this is a poor social media marketing strategy that largely depends on the size of your existing audience and how much interest your audience has in the topic your post is about.

It’s not really a strategy that earns engagements or new followers.

Here are a few tips for promoting blog posts on social media more effectively:

• Create a link-in-bio page, and add your blog links to it. Then, add your bio link to your TikTok and Instagram bios (these platforms don’t allow you to add URLs to posts). When you want to promote a blog post on these platforms, say “link in bio.”
• Promote your latest posts in Instagram Stories with the link sticker.
• When you promote a post on Facebook, add the URL as your post’s first comment instead of the post body. Facebook recommends doing this to improve a post’s reach and distribution.
• Use AI and automation to generate social media posts based on your posts by…
  • …asking NotebookLM to turn your post into a Twitter thread.
  • …asking NotebookLM to turn your post into a list of facts, then use the Bulk Create app in Canva Pro to turn those facts into several short-form videos/images or one longer short-form video.
  • …asking NotebookLM to turn your post into a script for a short-form video or a long-form YouTube video.
  • …asking NotebookLM to turn your post into a mini blog post for Facebook.

Of course, if you do decide to use AI to repurpose your blog posts, be sure to edit any text it creates so it sounds more human and closer to how you personally write and speak.

This is a simple process for repurposing blog posts as social media posts, but you should also create original social media content.

Here are a few ideas for original social media content:

• Short-form video tutorials for your niche
• Short-form videos featuring product demonstrations
• Helpful infographics shared on Pinterest
• Daily vlogging with Instagram stories
• Helpful image-based carousels shared on Instagram and TikTok
• Long-form tutorials shared on YouTube
• Industry/brand news and updates created as a long-form podcast that’s shared as video content on YouTube, shortened clips on short-form video platforms, and an audio version on podcast platforms