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We are increasingly moving from a search driven world to a social driven world. If your online marketing spend includes the vast proportion being spent on SEO and SEM, it is time for a rethink. Google’s development of Google Plus in an effort to ‘get social’ (against the behemoth in the social world that is Facebook) is based on a simple fact: that Facebook and social is beginning to dominate traffic on the Internet. And traffic = money. Not just for the big players such as Facebook and Google, but to those these giants serve. That’s you, and your business.
There is no getting round it. We have moved into a new era on the Internet and there are now companies (and not just those who at first glance would seem most suited to the social world) where anywhere from 30% upwards of traffic comes directly from Facebook activity, and not from the search engines. Some companies, according to research published in 2011, are seeing nearly all of their traffic coming from social sites such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc rather than the carefully crafted SERPs.
Whilst it is unlikely that the world is suddenly going to cease using the search engines, and hence the need for SEO will continue, the reality is that social media marketing is becoming THE traffic driver and cannot be ignored.
“We don’t do Twitter or Facebook because we have banned all access to social sites within our business” sounded fairly ludicrous 4 or 5 years ago. But now it sounds more like a death knell for any company taking such a stance.
Ignoring the fact that Facebook is introducing new forms of advertising and using social signals amongst friends and networks to bring advertisers closer to potential customers would be plain daft. Google would seem to be deeply concerned about the Facebook threat to the display advertising market Google has held almost absolute power over this last few years. After all, that’s part of Google’s core business, and any threat to that level of revenue has to be taken seriously.
We are seeing the big advertisers exchanging www.ourdomain.com on TV and print ads, packaging, websites etc with Follow Us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Short status updates are so much easier to manage than redesigns and website updates. There is a level of immediacy about social media which is missing from websites; a layer of personalisation and response that is difficult to ’see’ on your bog standard, old school website. Whilst adding +1, Tweet, Like and other social sharing buttons to content on a website can help to illustrate the popularity, authority and quality of content, it somehow lacks the impact of a status update with 100+ comments, or a tweet that has been ReTweeted multiple times. A website also lacks the reach of social updates and it is easy to see how a simple tweet or status update can go viral, (mainly because of the lack of overlap between every individual’s personal network), at a cost – HR and cash – that is verging on impossible with more ‘traditional’ internet marketing methods.
Google’s Search Plus Your World is a clear indication that social signals are receiving more importance in the algorithms. And hence businesses need to pay more attention to the social space.
Are you still focussed on SEO and SEM? Or has your business decided to put more budget into social? What are your social media marketing plans for 2012?
It’s fascinating that even after all these years involved with search engine and internet marketing, there are still those who believe that being in the top 10 results on a search engine is the only result that matters when promoting a business online. And, more interestingly, that many company executives believe that typing in the company name (or, worse, the URL) into the search engine and ranking number one, proves that the budget spent on internet marketing is justified.
Let us consider the problems with the above misunderstanding, particularly for SMEs.
Firstly, if the only budget you are spending to market your business online is on search engine optimisation, you are missing a huge audience. Whilst many companies may not feel that there is the necessary time and resource to handle multiple social media accounts, this is a) where agencies come in and b) a misunderstanding of how social media operates – you do not need a vast social media presence to benefit.
Obviously, the search engines are a logical and essential place for you to have an online presence. However, it is vital to understand how people use the search engines before making the (wrong) assumption that all searchers looking for your company, products and services will type in your company name. Or your URL. If a potential customer knows your URL, and are a savvy Internet user, they are just as likely to type this directly into the location browser of the browser and bypass the search engines entirely.
What is far more likely is that the person looking for your products does not actually know you exist as a company, is unaware of your URL or company name, and therefore will only find your website if it is optimised for the specific terms being searched upon.
If you sell a product, particularly one that is in a competitive market, there is a strong possibility that your website visitors and sales come from word of mouth recommendations from the potential buyer’s social network, from comparison sites, or from links and reviews on other, well-trafficked websites.
Returning to the search engine optimisation issue, many websites do not actually rank for the terms that the average searcher is likely to use to find your product. Many websites are built by website designers, rather than by designers with search engine optimists’ assistance. Whilst Management may love the look of your website, if it does not work for either the search engines or your potential visitors, it will not work for you either.
Therefore, it is important to check that your site includes the terms most likely to be searched for, that these terms occur in all the places required by the search engines, and that the site is competitively optimised in order to rank above others selling similar products.
If the last is not feasible because you are a small fish in a big pond, then it is even more imperative that you use many of the other tools in the internet marketing toolbox to attract attention. eg social media.
To see how well your website is doing on Google, type your main product into the search box and check your ranking. Check your analytics to see how many visitors you are getting from the terms you had expected to be those bringing in most traffic. Think long and hard about where else you are marketing and whether it is driving the necessary traffic to your website. Perhaps 2012 may be the time for a change of tactics?
For some people, creating new content is a struggle. It really needn’t be. There is fresh content to inspire you all over the Web. However, you should always create unique content, rather than copying someone else’s work. Internet marketing, whether it is SEO, SEM, PPC, Web PR, all relies on informative, keyword rich content to work properly.
Use the resources below to find exciting content to get your creative juices flowing in no time.
Squidoo – so many people maintain their lenses (or mini websites) regularly, and there are thousands of people who follow specific lenses and encourage the authors to post more often. Look for the top ranked lenses on your keyword, or most recently updated.
Delicious – is one of the many social bookmarking sites and offers a wide variety of search mechanisms which will open up thousands of new sites for you to investigate for inspiration. Others include Digg and Stumbleupon – feel free to add more in your comment below.
Twitter – it’s really quite staggering how many Tweets are now sent each day, and the search feature is becoming ever more useful for finding latest news for particular niches. When it is working, that is!
Alltop – is a funky news site (but be warned: you can get lost in here easily, so use the eggtimer to prevent that!)
That should keep your pen busy scribbling on the paper for a while with all the news and views that are available.
Which sites help you to develop new content, write blog posts, or just get into heated debates with colleagues?! Let us know.
Interestingly, I was just penning a post for another blog on the subject of Rupert Murdoch etc when Seth’s latest article landed in my inbox – Rupert Murdoch has it backwards
I think Seth, and potentially many others, may have it wrong. I include myself on this as I am now re-writing my post for the other blog!
Why? Because I read this, literally seconds before Seth’s post landed, on The Register – Murdoch: Google is mortal and together we can kill it
Have some of us in the industry possibly become innured and accustomed to Google’s presence in our world? Do we fight it or argue about Google being the ‘main man’? Or have we given in? It isn’t that long (only 15 years) since I started in the industry, but there was no Google then. I don’t remember suffering to be honest.
The whole purpose of setting up an Internet Marketing business was to help companies to be found online. There were plenty of places where they could be found in the pre-Google days, but the SMEs didn’t know how to be featured in those places. For some, the costs vs rewards of internet marketing were infinitely better than now back then.And far less stressful!
Have we given Google an infinite rein to run around on like a demanding, spoilt brat? Or is it just “let the best man win” and Google are, indeed, winning?
I have just looked at the last 5 email newsletters from the industry which have landed today. I will choose one, at random, to illustrate how deeply ingrained our reliance on Google has become.
Today’s SearchEngine Land: SearchCap, the day in search for November 23rd. First 4 stories: Google + one ad for SMX. Look further down that email, 34 mentions of Google. Just to give you a clue as to its prevalence, there are precisely half that number of instances of the word “and”.
I urge people to read the somewhat controversial, possibly, article in El Reg and then comment. But only after you have paused for thought.
Forget you are American and so is Google, forget you earn your living from SERPs, and Google, adwords etc. First and foremost you are an internet marketer and should be using every channel and avenue for your clients.
What exactly does this alt.thinking mean to you?
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More than likely not, but there is no time like the present to look at the possible issues around this question.
There have been numerous discussions recently about the UK serps (search engine results pages) showing too many non-UK sites above established UK content. Is it a bug in the algorithm, some sort of global testing to open commercial doors for non-UK companies or is it just SNAFU?! We’ll discuss this issue next post.
On top of that, comes a re-opening of the discussions which started in 2006-7 when many in the internet marketing world were amongst the early adopters who started to use social media for personal engagement first, and then for marketing. With that use came the realisation that here was huge potential for less searches to be made on search engines because answers could be found more quickly from your peers and community.
The threat to Google et al search revenues was quite clear, as well as to SEO companies who needed to develop social media marketing strategies quickly, and the effects have become more apparent as Twitter, Facebook, community media tools and social networking have taken off.
However, the last few weeks have seen an escalation of the Google backlash, negative PR, and questionning which has been ongoing for some time because of the ubergoogle factor, but it is wider than that – it is beginning to affect the perception of the whole industry. This article seems to be the most telling of many recommending that the time has come to regulate the search landscape.
Bearing in mind the phenomenal growth of tools such as Twitter, and the fact that for many it is now far faster to find an answer to a simple problem, to conduct research, to run a survey, to go viral and so on through tools such as Twitter than through standard internet marketing and seo, it was inevitable that the search engines would start to lose favour for certain ‘real-time’ needs.
As the threats of social media have become apparent to the Googles of this world, it would seem that efforts have been made to either eliminate the threat from the likes of social bookmarking tools and blogs (as in the great October 2007 Pagerank loss for major blogs), incorporate social media tools within Google’s own apps (eg the new features in Google Reader) or to remove certain results from the algorithm entirely, whether that is manually or automatically.
The blogosphere and Twitter are both full of many, many theories, commentaries and opinions on just what is going on and what should be done about it.
If Google finds its revenues under threat – we know Google has been slow to adapt to the fast-paced development of social media – then those in the internet marketing industry need to be aware of the potential changes that Google may make to resist that ‘attack’. And hence how others will see the impact those changes have when such a massive proportion of the search engine acreage is owned by a single company, and the efforts that are then proposed to regulate that control of search habits and results.
There may be difficult times ahead for those who have put all their eggs in the Google basket.
Now really is the time to look out of the box. If the dominance that Google (once everyone’s darling and the word on everyone’s lips meaning “to search the web”) has coveted for so long is seen as a threat to world trade (particularly in times of global recession), or to the independence and freedom web surfers should enjoy, and hence efforts are made to reduce that dominance, the impact to all in the SEO, SEM and IM trade could be awesome. And not in a good way for those who have been slow to see this cloud on the horizon.
Whether you are reliant on gmail for your email, google apps and docs for all your in-house documents (a problem Twitter has recently faced when hacked) or your core business relies on serps, you should start researching and considering the potential for you.
Discuss!
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According to an internet marketing behaviour survey out this week conducted by Microsoft’s AdCenter, 73% of small businesses would rather do their taxes than plan or implement a search engine marketing campaign.
400 small businesses in the US were surveyed, and whilst the majority do take steps to develop a website, the vast majority do nothing to market their online presence. 59% do not use Pay Per Click as a marketing tool, and of those, 90% had never even attempted to.
So, whilst 9 out of 10 of those surveyed suspect they may be missing a trick or two, as well as some serious opportunities in this economically tough time, there is major apathy, or perhaps fear, about implementing search engine and internet marketing within the small business community.
After almost 14 years in this game, I would strongly suspect that similar figures would be obtained in the UK if small businesses were quizzed about their online marketing strategies and behaviour.
In order to run PPC campaigns well, you need to up the game, monitor and use bid management tools. Which is why many businesses bring in the experts to manage PPC bids and campaigns. However, to run a basic PPC campaign and win extra traffic for your website and qualified leads for your business is definitely not rocket science. You won’t even need to hold on to your hat!!
To get you started and help you overcome your fear of the unknown, there is a FREE best practice guide to implementing a successful PPC campaign here for you today!.Small businesses must grasp the nettle of Internet marketing and start to implement IM campaigns now in order to beat the recession.
And whilst you are on with it, why not check out the FREE best practice guide to successful SEO and the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Marketing
