Are you trying to understand the difference between SEO and SMM—and figure out whether you need an SEO expert along with an SMM expert?
Worried about how we knew?
Please don’t be. This isn’t a face-reading or fortune-telling website. Instead, you’re witnessing the magic of SEO in action. Sounds confusing? Let us decode it for you by talking about what an SEO expert does.
1. How Does an SEO Expert Function?
An SEO expert tries to understand the concerns of their target customers and addresses them through website content—hoping to rank higher on search engines and attract those customers to their website.
So, to get you here, we first identified what you and many other small businesses are searching for. Then we created content to address those concerns—and waited for it to appear when you or someone like you keyed in those queries into Google.
But why bother about addressing customer pain points? Isn’t it simpler to just incorporate keywords (customer search queries) to make your website rank higher?
No. Just incorporating keywords in your content to make it rank higher without solving real customer pain points is a black hat SEO practice and is severely penalized by Google in ranking.
2. Future of SEO
So, is focusing on addressing customer queries, E-E-A-T signals, ethical link building, and voice search optimization enough to rank on Google and bring in organic traffic?
Sadly no. The world is changing rapidly and with Google launching its new AI update, SEO has suffered drastically. Now, whenever a customer searches for products or services on Google, along with giving them a list of websites matching search results, Google also gives them AI generated answer on top.
As AI overviews satisfy most of customer queries, they don’t have to visit websites, also known as zero click search. So, as a company if you are still relying on SEO to rank higher on Google, bring in search traffic, and organic revenue, you are in for disappointment. Does that mean you should stop doing SEO?
No, not really. SEO is still useful as it can help you lay the bedrocks for your website. More importantly, you should also focus on optimizing your content for AI overviews (through AEO) and GenAI models (through GEO).
We’re sure that by now you know a bit about search engine optimization—and perhaps you’ve also started to consider whether your business needs an SEO expert. So, let’s turn our attention to another area: social media marketing. But first, let’s talk about the importance of having a social media presence.
3. Importance of a Social Media Presence
Research says about 94% of U.S. businesses use social media. In all likelihood, you too have a social media account for your business. But are you utilizing your social media to its full potential? This question has become even more important since Google launched its new AI update.
To be featured in the AI Overview section, businesses now need credibility. And this credibility comes from being listed on almost every digital platform—including social media sites, e-commerce platforms, online forums, and more. And let’s not forget social commerce.
Yes, social media is no longer simply a platform for brands to maintain engagement with their customers. Instead, brands are now using social media to showcase products and sell directly to customers—offering a frictionless and more engaging customer experience.
The following graph from eMarketer, published in 2024, projects the growth of social commerce over the years.
Figure 1 Social commerce sales in the US
4. Why Hire an SMM Expert
As you can understand, you’re not alone on social media when it comes to reaching your target audience. This is why you need the help of an SMM expert. Here’s what an SMM expert does: they devise strategies to promote your brand, product, and services across social media platforms.
The work of an SMM expert starts with identifying your target audience and creating a demographic profile. The expert studies the preferences of this group, the channels they use most, and their pain points. Considering these data points, the SMM expert starts drafting your overall social media strategy.
The ultimate aim is to create content that resonates with your target audience and helps drive leads to your website.
5. Whom to HIRE: a SEO Expert or an SMM Expert?
If you are with us till this point, you already know that your business needs to focus on SEO as well as SMM. So that means your business ideally needs both SEO experts and an SMM expert. But we know hiring both can be challenging and strain your project if you try to fill the vacancies locally.
A far superior alternative, therefore, would be to outsource SMM to a social media marketing company from India while you manage SEO in-house. Or you can hire a digital marketing expert from a remote staffing company like Remote Resource® to handle both SEO and SMM.
If you are a small business with a limited budget, then this arrangement in the initial period can do wonders for your business. And then, as your business grows, you can add SEO and SMM experts to your team. In any case, you always need to hire a digital marketing expert to create the overall strategy or roadmap for your digital marketing efforts.
Final Words
Every business today, whether big or small, needs to focus their efforts on both SEO and SMM to attract customers and grow organically. Therefore, hiring an SEO expert along with an SMM expert becomes mandatory. A business also needs to hire a digital marketing expert to help formulate the overall digital marketing strategy or roadmap for your business.
But hiring these resources in-house can be challenging for your business. Hence, the best alternative is to hire remotely by partnering with reputed remote staffing organizations like Remote Resource®. Connect now to know more and start today with a one-week free trial.
