What You Need To Know About SMO

For years, search engine optimization has ruled the digital marketing world as the end all be all marketing strategy. But there’s a new strategy in town: SMO. SMO, or social media optimization, is very similar to SEO in a lot of ways. There’s one key difference: search engines vs. social media platforms. It may seem like if you know SEO you know SMO too, but there are different methods and practices that go into it that differ from SEO. That’s where we come in. We’ve identified the most important things to know about SMO, how it differs from SEO, and how to use SMO to its full advantage.

SEO and SMO both have the same main purpose:

To drive traffic to your website. But the way they go about that task is slightly different. With SEO, it’s incredibly important to consistently post high-quality content to your site to increase visibility. Not only does it give your audience something to look at, it gives website crawlers content to view, too. With Seo, it’s also important to link to other sites and have others link to your site. These backlinks increase your digital footprint, therefore increasing your visibility on search engines. A third top priority of SEO is keywords. Without keywords, your site will be lost in the sea of search engine results and will lose out on one of those highly coveted top search result placements.

All of these facets, and more, are incredibly important to effective use of SEO, but are they important to your SMO strategy?  The answer is kind of. SEO and SMO should ideally work together to grow your brand and your digital presence, as SMO itself is very similar to SEO in its principles. However, it is different in its implementation of those principles.

Posting content regularly is just one of the similarities between SEO and SMO.

For SMO, posting regularly is key to getting on top of searches, hashtags, and explore pages. When it comes to linking, SMO focuses more on tagging. It is important to tag other brands and creators in your posts so you both get the benefit of greater online visibility. Their followers will be able to see your post and vis-a-versa. The wider you can spread your digital net, the better. Another area of similarity is in keywords, but in the style of hashtags. Your business’ hashtag choices are incredibly important. Using too few or too many hashtags can seem spammy. But finding the right balance between the amount and content of the hashtags is the key to SMO. Without hashtags, potential new followers will not be able to find you, therefore killing any SMO strategy you might have implemented. Keywords are important, but not quite as important as the use of proper hashtags when it comes to SMO.

All in all, SEO and SMO follow similar paths to success. Content, cross tagging, and keywords are all integral parts to the best practices of SEO and SMO. The fundamentals are the same, but the applications differ ever so slightly. But that slight contrast could mean the difference between success and failure for your campaign. Following these fundamentals will help you on the journey to growing your brand and increasing your digital footprint.