Seo or smm which is better. Difference between SEO, SMM and SMO. What is SMO promotion

Online marketing can be challenging, even for tech-savvy people. Why do some sites stand out and make money while others, sometimes even the best, sites lack traffic?

For some, SEO, SMO, SEM and SMM are just incomprehensible abbreviations, nothing more, however, these are tactics that lead to more traffic and money. These are the ingredients of internet marketing that can significantly increase your income.

In layman's terms, there are two ways to generate traffic, one is organic search (SEO) and the other is paid search (SEM). In the SEO vs. SEM battle, who will win? Traffic coming from SEO is almost always free, while traffic coming from SEM is very effective! But before we move on to analyzing which is better, you must first understand what SEO and SEM are, as well as SMO and SMM.

SEO, SMO, SEM and SMM: What do the acronyms stand for?

SEO (search engine optimization)

Refers to the ranking of a site on a search results page (SERP). The SEO technique is to improve your site's rankings in search engines ah, make it more visible, and therefore increase your traffic. This technique includes website optimization, adding keywords to titles, meta tags, content and meta descriptions, updating the website frequently, and increasing loading speed on both desktop and mobile.

This means that if your site is optimized for SEO, the chances are that it will appear in the first and second positions in the SERPs for search queries related to your work is very high!

The various SEO techniques that you can use to optimize your website are as follows:

Optimizing pages (internal optimization): The first thing you can do on a web page is to optimize it for keywords. For example, you can include a specific keyword at a density ratio of 2-3% on your web page, you can also use that keyword in the filename, page title, meta description, page title.

External optimization: this kind of optimization can be done by getting backlinks from other relevant sites. For example, you can optimize your page by referring to one-way backlinks from higher ranked sites. This will bring not only good traffic, but also the chances of higher rankings.

Black SEO technologies: This technique uses strategies that give you higher rankings, but as the name suggests, these methods are unethical and not rated by popular search engines. Black SEO techniques, for example, use content that is hidden from the user. These methods do not work for long, then the site falls under the filters of search engines. So it is better to refuse such a thing.

White SEO technologies: Compliance with the rules that Google sets from time to time for search engine optimization. This method involves optimizing websites in accordance with established rules, for example, creating a site with a focus on the user, increasing the loading speed of sites by removing unnecessary advertisements, etc. This technique takes time but gives more benefits. than black SEO technology.

Closely related to SEO, SEM can simply be defined as paid search traffic. Sponsored ads usually appear at the top-right side of "organic" search results. The largest platforms for using SEM are Google AdWords and Yandex Direct.

SEM has many features and tools. If you want to get into the paid traffic field, you need to consider all the keywords related to your business, geographic location, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), advertisements, and other factors.

Pay per click is one of the main SEM methods for driving traffic. When a campaign starts, you don't have to wait a few days to see results, because they come almost immediately. If you are at the mercy of SEO search algorithms and updates, the SEM gives you more control. It is fast and provides a lot of traffic, which not only increases your visibility, but also allows you to customize your ads based on geographic location, time of day, and your budget. However, this can be risky if you don't have a complete long-term strategy, because once you stop your campaign, you may not get many hits.

This means promoting your business through social media channels. It also includes "Paid Social Search" or paid advertising in in social networks... While paid social search is similar to SEM, it adds a behavioral trend to the search equation. Most ads, however, are the same as SEM, where the advertiser only pays when the user clicks on the ad.

SEO vs SEM, SMO vs SMM

SEO VS SEM

Now you know what the terms SEO and SEM stand for. The outcome of the SEO vs SEM battle is pretty simple.

SEO tends to drive good traffic to you, but it can take years. SEM, on the other hand, gives you instant results, many leads in a very short period of time.

SEO is a process where you add something every few days and get results later. SEM, on the other hand, is an instant result for every penny spent. As soon as the penny runs out, the benefits disappear immediately.

SEO vs SEM - SEM is the clear winner in the short term.

In the long term, the SEO vs. SEM battle - SEO wins.

Likewise, if you compare SMO and SMM.

So what should you use?

The simple answer is both channels! Paid and free. These are all two sides of the same coin, one takes time and effort, and the other requires money. Aside from black hat SEO, all of the above methods are essential if you want to get higher SERP rankings, more visibility, and more traffic. However, the deciding factor in how your campaign works is not what you use, but how effectively you use it. To do this, you need to have a person in your company responsible for this, with a good salary.

Your budget

First, you first need to know your budget, or how much you are willing to spend. If you are a small business, you cannot cash in on pointless campaigns that are not producing any results. Spending money on campaigns without understanding the essence of their work is spending more than necessary and not getting results. Understand the market, the methods that will work best for your niche, and then move on to planning your campaign.

Short and long term plan

Next, you need to decide what plans you have. If you are just getting started, your best bet is to invest in SEM. You can use your budget for paid ads, test new features you may have implemented, see and analyze consumer behavior by looking for keywords that match your website exactly. This is when you should start investing your time in organic traffic. Since organic traffic is dependent on keywords, optimization, and user behavior, you can use analysis from SEM campaigns to implement it to make your website SEO-optimized.

Access to market competition

If you believe that both traffic channels can exist at the same time, you need to understand your competitors' marketing techniques. Your best bet is research. Find out what your competitors are spending on, what keywords they are using. Figure out the SERP competition with Google Keyword Planner and find out the targeted keywords that work best for you. Since PPC relies on bids, not keywords, you need to figure out how much you are willing to pay for a single click on your keyword. This will help you channel your budget in a way that is not only effective, but also doesn't burn a hole in your pocket.

Test your campaigns

Talking about the benefits can be a lot and beautiful. The truth is that there is no definite answer - what will work in your case. Nobody but you can clarify this. Try every method, test it. You launch one campaign, that's good. Do it again. If the campaign is unsuccessful, delete or modify it to suit your goals. At the end of the day, it’s about optimizing your website — maybe you need to improve the user interface, rewrite texts, or move buttons to make the user experience better. All this can also affect the position of the site!

It's all easy in words. Creating quality organic traffic takes time, creativity, and patience. While generating paid traffic takes money.

What is easier for you - to pay or to do - decide for yourself.

SEO is used to attract visitors through search engines. But traffic comes to the site not only from Google and Yandex. Social networks are a stable source of new users. Social media promotion is carried out by an SMM specialist. And so that the conditional client from Vkontakte is not disappointed, you need to carry out SMO - social optimization. In this article, we will talk about a new form of work with content and site structure.

Features of SMO as a type of promotion

Social media optimization is related to SMM. Both sets of measures are designed to interact with the audience of social networks. They are distinguished by the site where the main work takes place:

Thus, the SMO optimizer is engaged in setting up the infrastructure of the resource and content.

Working with content

Presenting information in a readable form is the most important condition for social promotion. For the text, you need to choose the right font, color and size. It is necessary to equip it with a competent structure - the modern user is not predisposed to reading "sheets": he skims over the subheadings and lists to get an impression of the text, and reads only the fragments of interest.

Subheadings should be tagged with an appropriate font to

was more

but less

... It is important to choose a suitable background for the text so that the visitor does not experience difficulties in reading.

Content should grab attention and make you want to linger. Text information is diluted with illustrations and videos. This increases the chances that the user will read the material, save it to bookmarks, and share the link with friends.

This is all the work of the SMO optimizer.

Working with the site structure

Interesting, well-presented content is half the battle. Information should be easy to find and export. An SMO specialist improves the structure and design of the site. It's important to change the navigation so that users stay longer. Post in a prominent place announcements of popular and new articles, calls for transition.

Internal linking simplifies navigation. Competently linked pages not only increase the position in the search, but also help the social promotion specialist - after it, behavioral factors improve.

SMO provides for a competent arrangement of tools for interacting with text:

• share buttons for social networks;
• subscription to the newsletter;
• button for saving to bookmarks;
• the ability to mark the text;
• the ability to place a link on the user's resource.

A comment form linked to the social network is added to the site. People love to read discussions and engage in exchanges. If you work wisely with feedback - protect from spam and add likes - you will get new traffic.

The site should have an appropriate color scheme. A colorful design, annoying color combinations can quickly tire - and the user will soon leave the site.

Why companies began to engage in social optimization

With proper optimization, an avalanche effect is achieved: users repost content, share with friends and subscribers, those with their friends, as a result, the site becomes more popular.

Search engine marketing jobs are paying off, but they can be boosted by social traffic. This is important because users spend a lot of time on social media. The best results come when SEO, SMM and SMO work together.

The material was prepared by Svetlana Sirvida-Llorente.

And SMM are different branches of internet marketing, which are nevertheless very interconnected: both of them drive traffic to the site. It doesn't always make sense to choose between them, because together these systems work better and bring more conversions.

What is the difference between SEO and SMM?

Both SEO and SMM are ultimately promoting a company's product or service, so they influence each other. The impact of SMM on SEO starts with social signals.

Social signals for website promotion

Social signals are all user reactions to posts:

• likes;
• reposts;
• discussions;
• "Sharing";
• comments;
• the total number of subscribers / members of the community.

The influence of social signals on website promotion is the most positive and one of the most noticeable.

How SMM affects search engine promotion

SMM and seo-promotion in Google are connected: in the company stated that links from Twitter and Facebook influence rankings. But at the same time, robots place great emphasis on the authority of the account, and links are closed with the nofollow tag. That is, everything is not so prosaic. Social media activity can affect a website's search rankings directly and indirectly.

SMM and SEO-promotion in Yandex are also linked, although everything is also complicated.

Direct factors influencing the ranking:

• The already mentioned social signals - user activity in a group / public page is tracked and analyzed by search robots, and links to communities often end up in the search results along with the main site:

• Traffic - If you create interesting content on your website and post links on social networks, users follow them. Then they share the links with their friends, share them through their social media profiles, and the traffic grows.
• The links themselves. If they are not indexed, they are still counted as bonuses to the usefulness of the resource for users.

Indirect factors:

• Behavioral. Their influence is enormous, and search engines actively monitor many of these indicators. For example, viewing depth, total time on page, bounce rates. Agree, the user who sees the post in the feed and follows the link will be more interested and stay on the site longer, because he is from the target audience, your content is relevant to his interests.
• Search bots take into account any user interactions on the site and on social platforms, so include social media buttons on the site. Integration will be beneficial.

• Fast: Social media posts and links are indexed faster than blog articles. Fast robots work with social networks, which will help bots to slowly learn about new pages on the main site.

Social media for SEO: what to consider

Our SEOs conduct an SMM audit to identify the factors that are most important for search engines:

UPD: For regular users (with addresses ending in @ gmail.com) Google+ was disabled on April 2, 2019.

YouTube. Promotion on YouTube from an SEO point of view is justified if there is really interesting material that is relevant to the video format. Social activity in terms of views, subscribers, and click-throughs will drive traffic.

conclusions

• SMM and seo-promotion of sites is a working tandem of Internet marketing, useful precisely because of its interconnectedness.
• The complex relationship between search engines and links from social networks does not negate the fact that user activity on any site is useful for SEO.
• You need to focus on content. High-quality content will attract users from both social media and search.
• For SMM and seo promotion, the price differs, but to increase brand awareness and conversion, it is better not to choose one, but to use both tools.

Any more or less advanced Internet user has repeatedly come across terms such as SMO and SMM. They are easily operated by insiders, but most people have a somewhat vague notion of what SMO and SMM really are, and even more so - what is the difference between them.

First, let's define that SMO and SMM are not the same thing. We can say that SMO is part of SMM, but these concepts should be separated in order to more fully understand all the information.

• This is social media marketing, which consists in holding a set of events on other people's sites (forums, blogs, websites, chats, news resources, etc.) in order to promote goods, services, advertise services and highlight events.
• SMM is not open advertising. This is a hidden, unobtrusive advertisement that attracts the target audience to the promoted product. Users should not understand that they are being offered a product openly - they should themselves want to purchase / order a service due to the information presented.
• SMM encourages the posting of promoted information on social networks or other resources by other users and targeted audience attacked by SMM. The more competently the information is presented, the more people will want to tell their friends about it, that is, potential buyers.
• SMM provides information about the promoted product to the target audience in the form of reviews, communication between the user and sharing his own opinion.
• In order for SMM to be successful, it is important to establish a trusting atmosphere between users. This increases the level of trust in unobtrusive ads, and the user begins to believe the suggested tips and tricks.
• Provocative headlines, bright thoughts and ideas attract the attention of the audience to the promoted product and, thanks to this, SMM wins the attention of the audience.
• Having gained attention, SMM envisions uniting the audience. This is what creates an atmosphere of trust and understanding, in which users lose their vigilance and do not realize that they are being offered a product. They only hear personal opinions and experiences that are shared with them. And they appreciate it.

• SMO is social media optimization, but it is not a social media job. SMO is work on a personal site, with the content that is posted on this site.
• The aim of SMO is to make the site attractive to visitors from social networks, they should be interested in visiting the site and exploring the content.
• SMO assumes the desire of users of social networks to share a link to the promoted resource with their friends.
• SMO helps transform your website in such a way that the content and specifications are interesting and convenient for visitors.
• An important part of SMO is website transformation. It is necessary that the proposed content be filled with interesting videos and colorful illustrations for the text. Any text should be bright and attractive. This is the only way to achieve an irresistible desire on the part of the visitor to bookmark this site and tell his friends about it.
• Interesting content isn't the only SMO rule. It is very important that the site welcomes its visitors with a pleasant color scheme, a user-friendly interface, and well-chosen fonts. The text should make you want to read it - it should be structured. The “sheets” of the text without structuring are unlikely to be read by anyone, and SMO specialists know this.
• SMO builds the infrastructure of the site. Content should not only be easy to understand. Users of social networks need to be able to conveniently export it (the “share” button for social networks, subscribing to a mailing list, adding a site to bookmarks, “rating” the text, the ability of the user to place a link to the promoted site on his resource).
• One of the goals of SMO is to reduce user abandonment. Entering the site, the visitor does not close it on the first open page, but continues to explore other pages of the site. This can be achieved thanks to high-quality content and a user-friendly interface. Conveniently located announcements allow the visitor to navigate through the pages of the site with ease, which attracts his attention. The call for transitions to other pages is not excluded.
• The ability to comment and exchange views is a hallmark of SMO. Users are happy to join the discussions that unfold on the site. This increases traffic and brings in new visitors. If the site provides protection from spam and supports the best commentators, the popularity of the site increases significantly.

SMO promotion is a set of measures aimed at optimizing a website for users of social networks. The main goal of such a promotion is to make it so convenient for users of social networks on the site, so that they constantly take part in discussions and return to it. A vivid example of successful SMO promotion is the resources of Habr, Pikabu, YaPlakal.

SMO is needed to increase website traffic, brand promotion, and attract new customers. In the process of optimization, the site is made similar to social networks and closely associated with them - for example, they leave repost buttons under each post.

Interesting fact: promotion originated on the basis of social marketing. Its name - SMO - it owes to two marketers: Gerald Zaltman and Philip Kotler.

The difference between SMO and SMM and SEO

In SMO, a webmaster works only with a website, but focuses on social media users. Changes the interface, adds the ability to comment and reposts, monitors discussions, forms a feed of the latest events. To clearly explain the differences between SMO and SEO and SMM, we have prepared a table.

SMO
	The promotion is targeted at social media users.	Promotion is aimed at those who use search engines.
We are working with the site, rarely - in addition to social networks.	We are working with social networks, but often there are links to the site.	We are working only with the site and the content posted on it.
The main goal is to attract a wide audience, regular readers.	There can be many goals: to increase brand awareness, attract customers, etc.	The main goal is to get to the top of search engine results for queries from the cotyledon.
Tools - social media widgets, interface and design redesign.	Means - creating attractive posts, advertising.	The tool is internal and external website optimization.
Feature of content - attractiveness for social networks.	The peculiarity of the content is its attractiveness to the target audience.	Feature of content - optimization for keywords.
	Opportunities for users - to rate posts, communicate.	Opportunities for visitors - to read the content, rarely - to leave comments.

SMO website optimization methods

There are many ways to optimize SMO sites. We will talk about the most common ones.

Adding widgets for repost

On the YaPlakal portal, the buttons for repost are located right under the heading

You can add such buttons using special services, for example:

Also, the share buttons can be installed using a code by taking it from the social networks themselves that you need.

Formation of news feed, links

The home page of sites that are engaged in SMO promotion is often similar to a news feed on social networks. It hosts the "hot" posts that have received the most comments and ratings, or posts in chronological order - new ones are at the top, old ones go down.

The news feed is visible on the main page of the Peekaboo. You can watch it in the "Actual" or "New" tab.

To implement such a feed, you can use paid or free themes, or special plugins. For example, for WordPress, these are:

• Jetpack;
• WP Most Popular;
• WP Tab Widget;
• WordPress Popular Posts;
• other.

Registration on the site using social networks

It is important for SMO that users can register quickly, literally in two clicks, and that the site is somehow connected with social networks. Therefore, many provide the opportunity to register through social networks.

This is how the registration form for Pikabu looks like - you can register from 4 social networks

You can make such a registration using the same plugins. For example, for WordPress you can use:

Adding the ability to evaluate materials

Evaluation of materials - the usual "classes" and "likes" - helps users to feel like they are on a social network. Also, the rating is useful for the formation of relevant news - the more ratings, the more interesting the post.

You can add a minus and plus to each entry on the Peekaboo.

For this, you can also use plugins - for example, Rating Widget.

Formation of comments

In the comments, users share their opinions, communicate, argue. This makes the site popular - many return to comment on new posts or see responses to previous comments.

Almost every entry on Habré is typing comments

You can connect ordinary comments - for example, through, or comments in social networks. This can be done again using plugins. You can also leave comments to motivate users:

• display comments on the air - for example, as on vc.ru;
• displaying the rating of the best comments on the main page or under the posts - for example, how it is implemented on Pikabu;
• periodically create a post with the best comments of the week, day, month - for example, as they do on sports.ru.

Use of user-generated content

The main difference between SMO and other promotion methods. On sites, materials are created by users themselves - they write posts, rate them and leave comments. On some sites, this is implemented as a blog - everyone can blog. On others - in a form close to social networks: everyone can post posts, and from them a news feed, recommendations and collections are formed.

This is how it is implemented on vc.ru - each user can blog

In order for users to create their content, you need to add plugins, configure personal accounts and give the rights to create content to users.