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Sean Brokenshire

Sean Brokenshire

Digital Fundraising & Marketing Specialist

Sean has been working professionally in the fields of digital marketing and multimedia production since 2004. For the past ten years, until recently, he worked for Médecins Sans Frontières Australia playing a key role in their digital marketing and communications.

SEO is more valuable than social media

There, I said it – SEO is more valuable than social media. Here is why…

Social media has the power to drive a lot of traffic to your website, and engage your existing customers or supporters. SEO isn’t the shiny new exciting thing anymore, so why am I making this bold claim?

Organic search traffic stays longer

On average, visitors to your website from organic search results stay on your website 42% longer than traffic from social media, and are less likely to ‘bounce’.

What does this indicate? When people are internet searching, they are actively looking for something and are therefore more likely to want to convert at that moment. This is unlike a social media visitor that usually just wants to skim-read an article then go back to their friends’ cat photos.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead and take a look at your own Google Analytics reports, I’ll wait…

Google Analytics benchmarking from 2018

Organic social media reach is dying

Social media platforms are increasingly maximising their profits by rigging their algorithms to show less non-paid posts by businesses. This means you will need to pay to boost posts to ensure your followers see them, unless you think you can ‘go viral’ on every post? Go ahead, give that a go. I’ll wait… 😛

This graph, produced by Convince & Convert, followed the decline in organic reach in 2014.

SEO makes your Adwords cheaper

Google wants its users to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. They reward advertisers that take the effort of making their webpages highly relevant to their ad text and keyword phrases, by making their cost-per-click lower. If you want to have your ad seen for a highly competitive keyword phrase, you’ll either need to overspend, or put together an effective SEO and SEM tandem strategy to maximise your relevance.

So there you go, SEO is more valuable than social media. Does that mean I don’t believe social media isn’t worthwhile? Of course not, social media is a critically important part of every digital marketing strategy – including my own. For example, social media is a great way to promote content from your blog, optimised for SEO value, to increase the odds that your content will be linked to from other websites that found your content valuable.

So, just because Search Engine Optimisation isn’t new and exciting, doesn’t mean you can forget about it. Get started now on your SEO strategy – it’s never too late to start.