Will SEO drop out of the social media mix in the future?
November 20th, 2008 by Andy Merchant
After reading an excellent post by Learn to Duck, titled SEO is dead, I started to wonder, where does that leave SEO? And, who now owns the majority slice of the social media mix, if not SEO?
To recap, the main points of the ‘SEO Is dead’ post were:
- There was a time when SEO consultants could charge a fortune for services, but now everyone is a so called SEO expert.
- Web designers are designing websites with SEO in mind.
- Platforms such as Wordpress have SEO principals in their framework.
- SEO organisations need to re-position themselves within the next three years.
So where does this leave the SEO specialists, if in three years time SEO is dead and buried?
I think there will always be a need for SEO expertise, but not in the traditional stand alone sense. We have to develop a more joined up sense of how online PR, or any other element of the social media mix, links with SEO tactics. The joined up approach is the way Liberate Media likes to operate, meaning in an ideal scenario our client’s online services will be streamlined and focused on the same overall strategy, like a well-oiled machine. So, SEO expertise is still a very valued service but in the wider context of a digital strategy. In the future, I don’t think SEO will be seen as a standalone service.
Therefore, if we remove the channel approach, who will own the future SEO slice of the social media pie if not search agencies? - Online PR, marketers, digital agencys, freelance consultants, something completely new, or all of the above? Will our skills need to encompass the entire digital range to become truly proficient social media marketeers?
Tags: digital agencies, online PR, SEO, Social media
November 20th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I think we need to rethink how to do good SEO, and all other web marketing. To me its all a PR play…
The lesson of web 2.0 is clear: you can do wonderful (and cheap) marketing with the web nowadays if only you can get other people to blog about you, link to you, bookmark you, and tweet about you. Do this, and you will win new business, reduce your support costs, and maybe even sign a major record deal out of the blue.
Conversely, when you successfully cultivate a reputation and a following in this way, you also do the best possible job of convincing Google that you’re the real deal. The PageRank algorithm was designed specifically with this in mind.
Notably, both of these things require some good old-fashioned machiavellian PR smarts with a fair dash of geekery thrown in. Keywords. Content. Distribution. Relevance. Influence. Optimization. Reputation. Persuasion.
Spooky, huh?
Roger, Founder, Online PR Agency, C&Ms last blog post..UK Online PR Agency C&M Believes ‘Old School PR’ is Dead for Small to Medium Sized Companies