On January 15th, 2013, Facebook announced the beta launch of their own search service, called Graph Search. It’s called that, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg, because it’s algorithm is based on the remarks and actions of the other people in your social graph, (We think that is a terrible name! btw).
This is good for SEO because:
#1. Competition is always good for the consumer and with FB’s reach and closed environment it has a good chance of becoming a major threat to Google’s decade long stranglehold on search marketing
#2. It is especially good for online marketers in the Dallas metro because we, and a few other top tier seo providers in the dallas market, saw this coming as much as 3 years ago and began incorporating social media marketing as a core component of any SEO campaign.
Marketing, and that includes SEO, has never been about technology or even about top search placement. True SEO’s primary purpose is to increase brand awareness and generate qualified traffic from superior placement, but that means nothing without increasing the client’s revenue. SALES are the point. In fact there is no other good reason to invest in SEO Outsourcing as top placement without increased sales is the epitome of futility and wasted effort.
Sales has never been about technology. It has always been about connecting with people. Its about research to locate and identify your target market, interacting with that market to discover their wants and needs then finding a solution to their problems and pain points. In other words, talking to people and serving them.
A little over 3 years ago we started developing blogging tools and distribution processes to “spread the word of mouse” by finding who our market is and saying what we need to say to get them where they expect to go to be able to solve their problems. We’ve never taken our eyes off the target of generating traffic from superior search placement BUT, we kept talking, tracking and engaging people thru social media. Over this past 14 months or so we have seen the increase in conversions coming directly from social media and have refind the process to connect with interested people without spamming them, wasting their time, (or ours), and generating good will and SALES.
We realize that many SEO firms who were getting results evan as late as a year ago will soon be specializing into other segments of the marketing mix or turning the open sign on the door around because they lack the insight and experience to know how to actually move beyond only technology and now have no clear path to follow to get them to where they need to be in order compete in this new social driven environment. BUT, for those companies, (like us), who have the experience and ability, we see a bright future, for not just SEO outsourcing companies, but for out clients as well.
At this point, no one is sure that social based search algorithms are going to outshine the text based ones like Google was built on, but one thing I am sure of, talking to, connecting with and solving problems for people will never go away. We are actually very happy with all the new opportunities that SEO 2013 offers and expect a lot of changes but we embrace those changes and see online marketing as only getting better!
