Search and Social – We Should Be Friends

Guest post by Mark Johnstone from Distilled

Working in SEO, I often find that a company’s social media and SEO teams are practically strangers (whether they’re in-house or agencies).  In fact, I’d go as far as saying there’s sometimes a great deal of suspicion and mistrust between the two parties.

But this is crazy.  Working more closely could easily be mutually beneficial, and we’ve actually more in common that we might think.  You don’t have to look too far, to discover quite a few similarities between Social and Search…

Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation are both slight misnomers

“Search Engine Optimisation” isn’t exactly a line I enjoy pulling out at parties as it is.  It’s jargon-filled, unfortunately a bit like the industry itself.  But the name’s flawed in other ways too – you should be optimising for users, not just search engines.

Similarly, “Social Media” implies the focus is on the media, but the media is never as important as the content.  It’s about the message and the people in the conversation.

In both cases, focusing on the means to the exclusion of the end goal could result in poor decisions and adversely affect your results.

We have the same goals

At the simplest level, we both want people to view and share our stuff.  As SEOs, we love it when people link to our site, but likes and tweets are becoming increasingly important too.  And social sharing is effectively the same as linking – people are saying ‘check this out’.  And in both cases, creating valuable content is the key to making this happen.

Both social and search are forms of permission marketing, as opposed to older forms of interruption marketing.  And ultimately, we’re both aiming to increase business for the organisations we serve.

The good guys are already doing both

Those in social media creating valuable content are already building links and strengthening their site in the eyes of the mighty Google.  Good SEOs are building relationships via Twitter and blogs which they leverage to publish and share content.

Lots of people are doing it wrong

Intentionally or not, lots of people are getting social media and SEO wrong.  There’s a lot of conflicting advice in the SEO world, largely due to spammers finding loopholes to exploit until Google clamps down.

And social appears to be filled with corporate bloggers who think we want to read about their journey into work.  Or that we’re just desperate for another channel of advertising content.

Many businesses are jumping on the search and social bandwagon without any idea what they’re doing (or even what their agencies are doing on their behalf).  They’re simply doing it because others are doing it, and it sounds like a good idea.  I happen to think they are both good ideas, but it helps if you know why you’re doing them, and how they work.
In many cases, there’s a focus on tactics rather than strategy, e.g. just thinking about the next post or the next link-building campaign.  But both could benefit from considering their target audience and what they are offering in general.

In a sense, social and search are merging anyway, whether we like it or not.  Tweets and Likes are already considered part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

If you’re into social and want to learn more about search, the SEOmoz Beginners Guide is a great place to start.

So here’s to stronger collaboration in the future, building relationships, and adding great content to the web that people want to share.  Hey, no time like the present – if you liked this post, why not tweet about it?

FreshNetworks will be speaking at Distilled’s free ‘meet up’ on Wednesday 5th October from 6.30pm at Gow’s Restaurant, London. The topic of the event is about how to integrate the off and online world into your SEO and social media strategy. Click here to register for the event and to find out more information.

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