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Beyond Google part two, for marketing

Nov 24th, 2009
by Farhan.

Duane over at Kashflow wrote a great blog post about SEO as a marketing strategy over at the Kashflow blog. I couldn’t agree more. His main point is summed up nicely in this bit:

“Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves – you should never rely on it as your primary source of new business.”

I couldn’t agree more. Not just because algorithms may change and the pipe you’re relying on may break as Duane writes, but also there’s just so many more ways to drive traffic and raise awareness today.

Let’s put SEM aside for one moment and talk about natural low cost digital traffic drivers. With Twitter, facebook, Linkedin, digg and other networks driving more and more traffic there’s no excuse for having SEO as you’re only digital marketing channel let alone on and offline marketing channels.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think SEO is important, and not just from a Google perspective. Naming pages appropriately, having simple readable code, good linking strategy, and making sure pages can be read by the search gods can also lead to users having a better experience.

But we’re seeing a shift from search to recommendations with Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and digg as other potential good traffic drivers. There’s others too. Have a solid interaction plan, interact with the other blogs with other great readers and leverage their audience. Don’t be a troll or a jackass but add value outside of your site and lead people to your content for more value.

It’s not just about executing a varied digital marketing plan it’s also about measuring, measuring, measuring! The great thing about digital is that there’s great tracking and analytics available so you can see which channels are really converting and which ones aren’t. I can check on my analytics tool and see that Twitter and Facebook are great drivers of traffic to my blog, I can also see that avc.com also drives a lot of users – and disqus as well. So I know what’s working when and how well, there’s no doubt that this can’t work for businesses as well.

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Posted in: business, communication, entrepreneurship, google, internet, marketing, twitter.

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  • http://twitter.com/mattchedit Matt Chatterley

    One of the key things here is that 'recommendations' carry much more weight than search results (in theory) – as they are more likely to be from a trusted source, carry less risk (at least psychologically) and so forth – so absolutely, these social mediums are powerful ways to drive traffic (or have it driven).

    I suppose – back to Duane's original post (which also inspired my latest Blog @ http://www.mattchedit.com/Blog.aspx – even if it's a bit of a different angle) – that the key thing here is that a very narrow strategy is seldom going to be a good idea – even if you believe that the “narrow area” is itself huge..!

  • http://www.fiftybyfifty.com/lifeoffarhan/ farhanlalji

    I agree with the theory and the hypothesis, but the great thing about digital marketing is that you can measure easily and see which channels work best. It might be that you drive more conversions through commenting on a specific blog, or listing yourself on a site like Crunchbase. Whatever it is you should cast the net wide and catch as many fish as you can. Then sharpen the knife as you grow.

  • andrew cocker

    great post farhan – as a practical example, look at what happened to kelkoo.

    rode the wave of SEO for a long time, but totally ignored building their brand & as a consequence the service just became yet another comparison service instead of THE comparison service.

  • http://www.fiftybyfifty.com/lifeoffarhan/ farhanlalji

    Spot on Andrew.

    Kelkoo's a great example of a business that had SEO as their total marketing strategy, ignored other marketing channels and didn't improve their product as rapidly and effectively as the competition.

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  • http://www.blank-label.com/ Danny Wong

    you said it right! Internet Marketing isn't just SEO. it's SEM, Social Media, PR, advertising, etc. For optimal performance and greater revenues and profits, you need to utilize several different strategies. but of course, you also have to be careful not to spread yourself too thin.