Optimization and Marketing - Tips for Optimization and Marketing
It’s shocking SEO isn’t yet a core comprehension of all marketers when you consider the power behind the ultimate pull marketing channel. Yet it’s not, because the truth is it’s work to stay on top of search trends, continuously learn new best practices and relentlessly market your site better than competitors. It’s also an environment where cash is not king, and many tenured marketers who only understand 1-to-many channels don’t know how to participate in that sort of arena.
Unsustainable traffic
Social marketing efforts behind a website that isn’t optimized will produce fleeting returns. You’ll hit peaks and valleys this way. The social web is fickle like that, and users navigating the river of real-time see today’s signal as tomorrow’s noise. Search on the other hand provides infinite life for your best content. Good content makes your website and the search engines equally more valuable, everyone wins.
No one looks at page 2
Social web users look at page one of our favorite social sites. We want wants new, now. For many, page 2 of Digg, Reddit or even clicking “more” on Twitter might as well be page 50. If there’s some thought given to SEO behind your social participation your ideas can be extended beyond real-time and given infinite life by the engines. If not, when you fall onto “page 2,” you’ll live in archive purgatory.
Your campaigns can and will outrank you
If you engage in social media without having an SEO strategy behind it, it’s possible externalities are going to outrank your own content. I used to be surprised brands would let this happen, but I’ve seen it happen so often that I’m actually surprised when I see the opposite occur. It’s just so rare people put thought behind this stuff.
You’re leaving traffic on the table
Good social media participation earns links – the organic, editorial kind. The kind the engines want to reward you for. But without an SEO program in place, you won’t fully benefit from those links – which are invaluable. Most companies aren’t cognizant of the value of links they’re earning or how to make those links work for them, especially many engaged in social media. And they’re only succeeding in letting competitors crush them.
Bottom line...
Be weary of social media marketers who aren’t fluent in SEO – you’ll never benefit from the biggest opportunity the web has to offer. Search may not be as sexy as social, but it still matters more: it brings more traffic, higher conversions and is sustainable.
Thinking about this a bit further, this actually goes beyond social media marketing. I’ll just say it like it is: if you put any marketing or PR before SEO, you’re putting the cart before the horse. There is a nexus between these items, but you can’t uncover it until you are organizationally savvy about search.