Clash of the Titans: SEO vs Social Media – Who’s Going to be Left?
From Dan Martell
In a recent tweet, Micah Baldwin boldly declared, “If you do SEO for a living, you will be out of business or irrelevant in 3 years.” We’ve been reading about the death of SEO since the late 1990s when SEO was still very much in its infancy. But lately there’s been something different in the cyber air about the future of SEO and it got me wondering …
In the race for relevancy, could 2010 be the year that SEO is forced to relinquish its organic search throne to give way to the power of search filtered through and against the social graph + geo?
I think so. Here’s why:
Twitter on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)
A few weeks ago, Google started testing real-time Twitter search results. That got me ‘hmmm-ing’ like crazy.
If what I saw is what there is, wow. This thing is sooooo easy to game. Check this out: Let’s say I’m looking for a new dentist. Do I really care about conversations about dentists, from dentists or dentistry in general? No, not really. But what if I could geo-filter those same conversations? Okay, that’s more interesting. Now what if I could add a second filter to these same conversations, only this time showing only those tweeple I’m following on Twitter? Ahhh ….
Read the rest of the post on Dan Martell’s site
I think that this comment is fundamentally wrong. It should say, if you do SEO like they did in the 2001 era then you are in trouble. SEO, Creative SEO, is key to all aspects of digital. It involves UBDP, UIC, PLUIC, UGC, PPC [acronym crazy - sorry] and Social Networks. You Tube is nothing more than a search engine, as too is Facebook. Creative SEO is the boundary pushing discipline that suggests creative content that, in-turn, creates traffic then sales.
Creative SEO – as a great example – is the Old Spice campaign. Perfect.
What will die very soon is the view on Social Media. Too many times I here in events I present at round the world that this campaign worked well and created lots of “buzz.” Buzz is great but when the bean counters look at the money spent on a campaign, what they care about is…Get ready…Sales or any other SBE [another one].
I am seeing more and more people jump on the social band wagon. Its like advertising in the 1980’s. Be warned – “buzz” is cool, but remember that you are paid by a client and they want an ROI. Never forget that.
With Twitter posts you still have to place in keywords so they rank, FYI.