How the “Marriage” of Search and Social Media is Changing the Future of SEO

In case you haven’t noticed, search and social media have irrevocably tied the knot.

Come on, you can’t be that shocked. The signs have been pointing in this direction for years now.

A commitment with a bright, beautiful future was the next logical step. The good news is that unlike some marriages (we won’t name names); nobody had to get dragged into this one.

The reason why is simple: search engines love relevant and current content (in fact, they live for it), and the billions of social media subscribers are providing this every day, all day. It really is a match made in heaven.

What does this mean for SEO?

For all you SEO professionals, I’m sure this union has stirred up some anxiety and certainly some hard to ask questions.  So, we’ll ask them for you: how will this affect our current SEO campaigns and will it complicate the SEO industry as we know it?

The response to all these questions is exactly the same: start integrating social media marketing into your SEO campaigns and you’ll have nothing to worry about.  In order to do this, you’ll need to know how the union of search and social media is changing the world of SEO.  Here are a few examples:

• The Facebook “Like” feature: Not too long ago, Facebook and Bing agreed to allow Microsoft’s search engine to return results based on the Facebook “Likes” of the searcher’s friends.  The purpose of this is to provide a richer and more personalized search experience for each user based off their social media networks.  Example: if a user searches for “sushi restaurant Salt Lake City” the results will include restaurants the user’s friends have “liked”, etc.
• Google and Twitter: Google has decided to team up with Twitter by including Twitter updates in search engine results.  This means that essentially whatever businesses are ‘tweeting’ about could show up in a browser’s search. However, in order to do this successfully, SEO experts will have to begin integrating social networking into their client’s current SEO campaigns IMMEDIATELY. Think: YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  An SEO/Social media campaign is the only way to ensure that a client’s brand becomes integrated into both their physical and online communities.

Don’t hate, integrate.

One thing that should remain clear is that this union will NOT change the overall goal of SEO, which has always been to put clients at the top of result pages.  All it really does is provide more ways to accomplish this by adding social media to organic search, paid search, and etc.  Really, if you want to stay relevant as an SEO expert you’ll have to accept this and begin developing new and improved strategies.

Social Media: What all the Cool Kids are Doin’

Trying to gain social media success while trying to integrate SEO is like jumping on the back of a sick, asthmatic donkey and expecting to get to THE Sale of the Century in a timely fashion.  It’s exhausting work if you don’t know what you’re doing. So, get off your stubborn donkey and let Oozle Media, your Utah SEO and social media experts, do it for you!