January 13th, 2012
Report Shows SEO Still Ahead of Social Media Marketing
The hotdog vendor has a social media strategy, do you?
Social media is now a bonafide marketing tool for small and medium enterprises. A recent report from Borrell Associates showed how SMEs have adopted social media strategies to enhance their marketing efforts. Most local businesses have contributed to the SME adoption of social media as a marketing boost. It’s not a secret that a social network like Facebook has become a marketplace turning it to a destination-location for merchants and customers.
The report shows that most local businesses between 45% and 70% have already established a social media presence through Facebook and about 60% and 64% of these businesses have a formal presence on social media sites. These aren’t surprising figures, MerchantCircle found that 70% of SMEs are already using Facebook as a means to promoted their products and services. However, Borrell’s report showed that social media marketing was still behind SEO and paid-search last year.
Many local businesses still depend on SEO for potential customers to find them and improve their lead generation. But SMM is catching up in a tremendous way, the report estimates that $6.2 billion was spent on paid-social in 2011. Facebook’s advertising platform has covered 65% of the entire social media advertising last year. With Twitter’s Promoted Tweets and Facebook enhanced advertising platform, it’s a possibility that budget for social media advertising will surpass SEO and paid-search.
SEO pundits might raise their eyebrows with these findings, but it’s a fact that Facebook being more complicated to use with its gamut of changes and the lack of a standard metric for social ROI conversion rates. It’s too early to tell if social media advertising is the end-all and be-all to improve your online marketing. One thing’s for sure, as long as Google’s social products like Google Places and Google+ integrate smoothly with Google’s search engine, search engine marketing is always the old reliable.
January 9th, 2012
Why Google+ Is Now Essential To Your SEO Strategy
Google’s social network, Google+, has made a lot of buzz last year and it seems the latest social network is showing progress. While social network giant Facebook has now over 800 million active users, Google+ shows a lot of promise in terms of SEO functionality, and perhaps, the linchpin to one of the most popular buzzwords around -Social SEO.
So what’s the latest on Google+? Experian Hitwise recently tweeted that “Google+ total US visits reach more than 49 million in Dec-11, biggest month to date & up 55% compared to Nov-11 ow.ly/i/oT3R” It’s remarkable that Google+ doubled its traffic in just a month.” An analyst also said that if Google+ sustain its momentum, it will reach its target of 400 million users by the Q4 of 2012. It’s not far from happening because the proliferation of the Android platform has been on the rise as well. The strong sales of Android mobile devices coupled with its Google integration makes it a lot easier for users to get acquainted with Google+.
Aside from the tremendous growth of Google+, the social network is showing functionalities that can enhance SEO. If you already have a personal Google+ page then try googling yourself, don’t be surprised if your G+ profile page is in the top 5 results. Google+ promotes the use of hashtags as well. Google is known for putting a premium on quality and relevant content so it’s a no-brainer that Google+ wants to generate quality user-generated content using hashtags. Check out the post from Cyrus Shepard of SEOMoz, Shepard also said that Google+ is “incentivizing” inbound links which improves the quality of content online publishers feed the Web.
With these in mind, it’s obvious that Google+ is embracing a personal approach in order to increase its numbers while creating new ways to innovate SEO. So don’t be surprised if clients will ask you to place a Google+ thumbnail on their landing pages. Google+ is just starting to create new strategies to improve your SEO strategies through Social SEO.
So as Google+’s numbers continue to increase, are you convinced to include Google+ to your SEO strategies? What are some ways you can leverage Google+ to augment SEO strategies?
