Why SEO is a much better way to grow your blog than social media

It has been my experience that SEO is a much better way to grow your blog than social media. Why? For me there are 4 clear reasons:

• Much more reliable traffic
• The right kind of traffic
• Much less time consuming
• Amazing growth

Much more reliable traffic

First up the traffic is much more reliable. I find that every time I put hard work into SEO, I see clear results in increased search engine traffic, and that traffic increase is usually there for the LONG-TERM (not short-term spikes like with social media!). Pretty much without exception, when I work on SEO on my blog, I see a long-term increase in my traffic.

This is the complete opposite of social media, where I can work super hard on it for months and see LITTLE OR NO RESULTS, and when I do see results, they are usually short lived. Social media tends to drive very erratic traffic, whereas SEO drives consistent traffic growth over time.

The right kind of traffic

When people do a Google search, they are looking for something VERY SPECIFIC – they want some help and advice about a topic. When they find your blog post as a result of that Google search, they are very motivated to read it and maybe even share it or tell their friends about it.

And, if you’ve chosen your niche well, they are likely to be interested in the rest of your blog too – they may well stay to have a look round your site, read some other articles and maybe even subscribe. In essence, if you do SEO well, the readers you attract from Google searches are much more likely to be your TARGET READER.

Contrast that to someone arriving on your site from social media. With social media they are not specifically looking for what you have to offer. Rather, they are scrolling through their feed and clicking on something that catches their eye.

This kind of reader is much less likely to be interested in the rest of your content, and much less likely to share it or subscribe to your newsletter. That’s not to say using social media is a BAD idea – it’s just that it is much less effective at attracting the RIGHT KIND of readers.

Much less time consuming

SEO is much, much less time consuming than social media. Yes, there is some work involved with SEO, but a lot of that work can be done once, and it’s done. The rest can be very easily added into your usual blog post writing routine.

To give you an idea – in a normal week I probably spend about 30 MINUTES on SEO related activities, whereas I probably spend 5-6 HOURS on social media related activities – and yet my search engine traffic is roughly THIRTY TIMES the traffic I get from Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram added together. If I take Pinterest out of the equation, my search engine traffic is OVER 100 TIMES my social media traffic. I think these figures speak for themselves! Working on SEO is a much better use of my time, than working on social media.

But it gets better, because even without me doing anything, that search engine traffic would keep coming. Whereas to get any traffic at all from social media, I need to work at it constantly. Put it this way… if I were to take a whole month off blogging, my search engine traffic would most likely stay pretty much the same, whereas my social media traffic would nosedive – in fact it would be almost zero!

THIS is why I am so passionate about SEO, it is such an efficient and effective way of growing your blog and such a wise use of that very precious commodity: TIME! Growing your blog with SEO rather than social media means you can get the kind of traffic that means serious income and positive life change, WITHOUT having to work crazy hours!

Amazing growth!

And my final reason why SEO is much better than social media is simply this: amazing growth. I am pretty confident that even if I had worked 24 hours a day on social media, I would not have seen anything like the kind of growth I have seen from SEO.