Monday, June 13, 2011

Can Social Media be more effective than SEO for startups?

While doing a search on Search Engine Optimization(SEO), which I figured could have been like “googling” Google, and was worried about some sort of implosion, I came across an interesting blog post on SEO for startups. The article “SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups”, was written earlier this year and takes the view that SEO is very 2008 and that using it as your single marketing strategy is not effective enough in getting users to your site.

I agree that using SEO as the only marketing strategy will generally not be very effective but the process and use of the tools to make sure your site is optimized is now more of a cost of entry into the market than something that is going to get you in front of the competition. Although many of the search engine algorithms are kept secretive, it is still important for these websites to have the correct labeling, inserts, links, captions and keywords to make sure that their site gets indexed. That way, if the spiders are only looking for those items, then at least your site should appear somewhere in the results. It would be expected now days, that any website that is a major player in the market is using these tools and therefore you would be even further behind if you decided not to use SEO for your site.

Looking further at the costs of entry and as part of setting up your site, it would seem to be more important to register your own Facebook page, Twitter account and Blog linked to your site. Building on that, working on creating more social buzz, by blogging, tweeting and posting on Facebook to get fans, followers and readers, can be a more effective tool for getting users. Getting others to repost, retweet and link into your articles and effectively market your side for you could be the better, more value play. After all, external linking into your webpage is supposed to get you higher ranking on the list for search engines. So rather than hire one of the many SEO experts, it might offer more value to hire a more rare social media expert.

Does this mean that the SEO of 2008 is now the social media of today and leveraging those tools are the better more viable startup strategies?

1 comment:

Ida said...

Interesting post. I think that social media has the potential to be more effective than SEO for not just startups, but any company. The operative word being "potential". It's interesting to see the spectrum of success that organizations and companies find with social media. Coming from an arts background, a lot of non-profit arts organizations rely on social media as a cost-effective way to get their name and message out to the public. Some of these organizations have a lot of success and find an engaging audiences, and some are still struggling to get "likes" on Facebook. From what I've seen and experienced is that the success of the viral campaign is also affected by the base number of followers already committed to the organization. For example, at my current job at a public garden and cultural center, our marketing department's tweets were quickly picked up which did help our Facebook page gain more fans. But at a small non-profit arts organization where I worked last summer, I tried everything from creating video blogs, street marketing, flyers, Facebook, Twitter... you name it -- there wasn't a huge bite. This non-profit is not as well known as the other.

Regardless, social media is cheap, whereas SEO is a luxury that not many arts organizations can afford.