SMO and SEO: what each one optimises, how they feed each other, and which to start with

SMO (social media optimisation) is the work of making your content easy to find, share and talk about on social platforms. SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of making your website easy for search engines to crawl, understand and rank. They are two different jobs with two different audiences: SMO serves people scrolling feeds, SEO serves people typing a question into a search box. Run together, each makes the other cheaper, because content that people share gets seen, and content that gets seen earns the mentions and links that help search.

Where the term SMO came from

The phrase was coined by Rohit Bhargava in a blog post dated 10 August 2006, "5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)". He described SMO as making changes so a site "is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches", and more often included in blog posts, podcasts and videos. His five rules were:

• Increase your linkability
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy
• Reward inbound links
• Help your content travel
• Encourage the mashup

Those rules sit close to SEO. In 2006 the main payoff of social activity was links, and Bhargava called inbound links "paramount to rising in search results". So SMO began life as a cousin of SEO, not a rival. The bookmarking sites have gone, but the principles hold: make content worth linking to, make sharing effortless, and let it travel beyond your own site.

SMO and SEO side by side

Question	SMO	SEO
Where the audience is	Inside social apps: feeds, stories, groups, in-app search	On search engines and the results they show
What the audience is doing	Browsing, often with no plan to buy	Looking for an answer, often with a need right now
What you optimise	Profiles, posts, captions, share previews, timing, community replies	Site structure, page content, titles, internal links, speed, links from other sites
How fast it works	Fast: a post peaks within hours or days	Slower: pages build rankings over months
How long the result lasts	Short, unless you keep posting	Long: a page that ranks can bring visits for years
Main measures	Reach, engagement, shares, profile visits, clicks to site	Impressions, clicks, positions, organic conversions

The short version: SMO buys attention now, SEO builds a steady flow of people who are already looking. SMO alone means feeding the feed forever. SEO alone misses the people who do not yet know to search for you.

What SMO work actually includes today

When an agency or freelancer sells "SMO services", the useful parts usually fall into five groups.

1. Profile optimisation

Complete every field on each profile: name, handle, bio, category, website link, contact details and location where it applies. Use the words your customers use in the bio and name fields, because every major platform now runs its own search box, and people use it to find businesses.

2. Share previews on your own site

This is the technical half of SMO, and it lives on your website, not on the platform. When someone shares your page, the platform builds a preview card from tags in your page's code. The Open Graph protocol, published at ogp.me, sets four required properties for every page: og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url. A page without them gets a preview the platform guesses at, which often means the wrong image or a cut-off title. The full set of tags, and how to fix a broken preview, is in our guide to SEO and Open Graph.

3. Content made for each platform

The same link and caption pasted everywhere is distribution, not optimisation. Cut each idea into the shape each platform rewards: a short video, a carousel, a thread. Write captions with the words people would type into that app's search.

4. Share buttons and shareable assets

Make it easy to share from your site, and give people something worth sharing: a checklist, a chart, a short quote card, original numbers. This is Bhargava's "help your content travel" in modern form.

5. Community and replies

Reply to comments and messages, take part in relevant groups, and answer questions in public. It is the part cheap packages cut, and the part that turns followers into customers.

What SEO work includes, for comparison

SEO covers technical health, on-page work, content for the questions buyers ask, local listings, and earning links and mentions from other sites. Paid search is a separate discipline again, and our page on the difference between SEO and SEM sorts out where it fits.

How SMO and SEO help each other

Google's SEO starter guide has a section called "Promote your website". It lists social media promotion, community engagement, advertising and word of mouth as ways to get new content discovered "by those who are interested in the same subject, and also by search engines". It also warns that you can overdo promotion: people get tired of it, and search engines may treat some practices as manipulation of search results.

In practice the two feed each other in four ways:

• Discovery. A shared post puts a new page in front of people, including writers and site owners who may link to it or mention it. Those links and mentions are what search engines weigh.
• Testing. Social posts tell you within days which topics and headlines people care about. Use that to choose which pages to write or expand for search.
• Brand searches. People who see you on social often search for your name later. That search lands on your site or your business profile, so keep both in good order.
• Reuse. A strong search page can be cut into a week of social posts, and a social post that took off can become the outline of a full page.

Keep one distinction clear: the like count itself is not what lifts a page in search. Treat social as the way to get content in front of people, and let the visits, links and mentions it earns do the work.

Which to start with

Use the buyer's behaviour to decide.

• Start with SEO if people already search for what you sell: a plumber, an accountant, a software category with known names. Those searches are the closest thing to a buyer raising a hand.
• Start with SMO if what you sell is new, visual or impulse-driven, so people do not search for it yet: a new product, a restaurant, fashion, events. You create the interest first, and the searches follow.
• Run both, lightly, if you are a small business with one person on marketing. Fix the basics of each once (profile fields, share previews, a page per service, a Google Business Profile if you serve a local area), then put most of the weekly hours where your buyers are.

Buying SMO and SEO as a package

Many agencies, especially in India, sell "SEO and SMO" together as one monthly retainer. That works well when the proposal names the deliverables separately. Ask for:

• The number of posts per platform per month, and who writes and designs them.
• Whether community replies are included.
• The SEO deliverables by name: technical fixes, pages written or improved, links earned, local listing work.
• A monthly report with social and search in separate sections, each against an agreed target.
• Who owns the social accounts and the website. The answer should be you, with the agency added as a user.

Be wary of anyone selling follower or like counts as the result. Buying fake followers or engagement breaks the rules of the major platforms, and in the US the FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials (16 CFR 465.8) bars buying fake indicators of social media influence for commercial use.

Questions about SMO and SEO

Is SMO the same as social media marketing?

Not quite. Social media marketing is the whole job, including paid ads and campaigns. SMO is the organic optimisation part: profiles, share previews, content shape and community. Many agencies use the terms loosely, so read the deliverables, not the label.

Does social media activity help SEO rankings?

Indirectly. Google's starter guide lists social media promotion as a way for new content to be discovered by people and by search engines. The value comes from the visits, links and mentions that sharing leads to.

Is SMO still a useful term?

Yes, as a name for organic social work. The 2006 tactics have changed, but the idea of making content easy to find and share on social platforms matters more now that every major app has its own search.

When can you judge SMO and SEO?

Social platforms report reach and engagement for a post within days, and that reach stays up only while you keep posting. For search, Google's SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others could take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before assessing them. Whether new pages earn steady traffic depends on competition and on how well they answer the search, and traffic a page earns tends to last.

The third place people now ask

SMO covers the feed and SEO covers the search box. A growing number of buyers skip both and ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity a question like "which agency should I hire for this". The answer is built from what the assistant has read about you: your pages, your profiles and what other sites say. Social posts and search pages both feed that reading, yet social analytics and rank trackers report on their own channels and stop there. AI Knows Us checks whether your name comes back in that answer, across the main assistants, and shows which sources shaped the reply.