When you’re trying to decide where to put that great new piece of content for your business, you may question whether your website vs social media is the best place to add it. Perhaps you have a website, but you’ve been placing most of your content on a social media platform like Facebook while your website remains stagnant. Or, you don’t have a website and are relying solely on social media to grow your business.
Social media should be part of your marketing strategy to build your brand and engage your customers and prospects. It’s highly likely your competitors are using it, so you should too. But don’t neglect your website while giving most of your attention to social media. Rather, place your best content on your website and use social media to extend the reach of your business and engage your customers and prospects.
Here’s 5 reasons that will hopefully help you look at the website vs social media question from a new perspective.
You Don’t Control the Rules of Social Media
In early 2018, Facebook announced an algorithm change to prioritize meaningful interactions from friends and family over promotional content from brands. This means more posts from friends and family are displayed on News Feeds and less posts from businesses. If you rely heavily on Facebook platform to promote your business, you’ll likely need to adjust your social media strategy each time they change the rules.
Just recently, Google+ announced a privacy breach that exposed the profiles of about half a million Google+ users to third-party developers. They also disclosed their plan to close the consumer version of Google+ sometime in August 2019. It appears that most marketers weren’t relying too heavily on Google+, so closing the consumer version isn’t that impacting. But consider this. What if your marketing efforts are concentrated on a platform that announces it’s shutting down?
The Facebook and Google announcements illustrate the danger of relying too heavily on social media. At any point in time, the platform may change the rules, which can adversely affect the visibility of your business on that platform. Or worse, they could shut down and you lose your content. You have no control over the rules social media imposes. You have complete control over your website. If you keep your best content on your website where it is under your control, rule changes are less impacting to your business.
Consider not just the issue of control but also ownership. Th social media platform owns your content. You own your website content. No third party should own your important business content.
Great Website Content Attracts Backlinks
If you make a practice of creating relevant and engaging content on your website, you increase the likelihood of attracting backlinks to your site. A backlink is created when a website links to another website. It’s also referred to as an inbound or incoming link. When a trustworthy, high authority website links to your website content, this is a thumbs up vote for your content in the eyes of the search engines.
Imagine if you’re an up and coming local restaurant and your business is reviewed online by Zagat and recognized as a top restaurant in your city. If Zagat links to your website in the review, you have earned a high quality backlink from an authoritive website. Backlinks such as this can help boost your site’s ranking by the search engines.
If your best content is on your website and you regularly create new and engaging content, you increase backlink opportunities which helps boost your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Optimized Website Content Helps SEO
If you write high quality, optimized content for your website, you increase your chances of appearing in a favorable position in Google’s search results. Optimized content is structured in a way that makes it easily understood by the search engines. Keep in mind that Google is always looking to return the best possible search results to its users, so optimized content that’s understandable may be rewarded with higher rankings.
Social media profiles get ranked by the search engines. However, if most of your content is on social media, you’re missing opportunities to get your website content listed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages).
Take the time to create relevant and engaging website content that’s optimized for the search terms people are looking for. You’ll boost your SEO and be more visible online.
A Website Tells the Story of Your Business
A well-structured website tells the story of your business in a logical way. You control the narrative and the paths a user takes through the website. Some parts of a website are standard such as the about, contact, and product/service pages. Hopefully, the business’s value proposition and an overview of the products and services are prominent on the homepage. A blog allows articles to be organized in categories to make them easier to find. Overall, a user should be able to obtain a comprehensive understanding of a business via its website.
People often go to a business’s social media pages for engagement and to see how a business interacts, but they go to a website for details on a business and its offerings. The important content for your business should be centrally located on your website, where it can be easily found. Every business should have a website. Users expect it and will wonder why you don’t have one. If you need to create a website for your business or redesign an existing one, be sure to check out Thomson Web Services WordPress web design services.
A Website Provides Valuable Reporting Insights
If you have a business website, hopefully it has Google Analytics tracking setup. Google Analytics provides tools to better understand your customers. You can see how many people visit your site, which pages are generating the most traffic, and the paths being taken through the website pages. These are just a few examples of the many insights you can obtain from the tracking data.
The Google Analytics reports and tracking data provide valuable insight into how to fine tune a website to make it better. For example, if a web page is deemed important but not generating much traffic, the analytics data will highlight the need to improve the page. Once changes are make, you can track the page to see if it’s attracting more visitors and performing better in online search.
Social Media provides some reporting options, but it’s not nearly as extensive as that provided by a website with Google Analytics tracking.