In all the workshops I have ever delivered, whilst saying in one breath you have to have a multichannel marketing strategy, that has been quickly followed by telling the micro and small business owners that Search Engines and especially Google, is where the money is made and this is where you should spend your time and effort getting found.
Search Engines Retake the Lead in 2017
Many a small business owner though did not heed that advice and decided to follow the lead sheep and go off in another direction. A direction that was seen as the cheapest way to market the business – down the social media channel route.
The above is part of a great article put together by Craig Zevin at Shareaholic and commented upon by Rand Fishkin. Rand added in his tweet information he shared from data gathered by Jumpshot which tells its own story.
The chat on the wires was based around the story and a number of great statistical graphs provided by Craig at Shareaholics which clearly shows that social media’s tenuous grip on being the top referral category is over. For the last three years Social was standing proud holding onto that crown but has had to give back the title to Search Engines. This dramatic turnaround comes driven by change everyone saw in January 2018 to the algorithms behind Facebook’s News Feed.
What Matt Bailey Said About Social Media – Years Ago – Still Stands
I could go back many years before this and whilst driving round Scotland in the company of my good friend and Colleague Matt Bailey author of Internet Marketing An Hour A Day.
As we took in the great scenery of Scotland we talked about the role of Social Media, and he said back then “Your not in social media to make a sale, your looking to find and establish relationships.” And in his book he said “Without a clear goal and strategy, the rush towards social media becomes one with a directive of “We need to be there!” rather than evaluating “What can we do there?” The social media message, as he said then becomes disjointed, because there is no clear message and the purpose becomes lost.
I have looked at lots and lots of micro and small business twitter and facebook pages and the most common thing I see is the neglect to drive visitors to a particular destination and everyone’s efforts were hung on twittering like there was no tomorrow and yet what was it doing for the company? Using different social media brings different results.
Lots of small business owners have something to offer and something to say in telling their story. But they don’t work hard enought at actually driving the audience they want back to their most important doorway – the one that leads people into their OWN website. Instead they leave their audience on a loop out in social media channels by simply hastagging this and hashtagging that but offering no direction.
Matt also quoted in his book “Your company does not have to spread efforts among all the Social Media Channels if it doesn’t make sense” and “simply throwing time at Social Media will not produce results.
If you ever get a moment pick up Matt’s book and go to page 30 and 31 as even after that great journey we went on around Scotland educating businesses on how important Search Marketing and hour a day is to your business, his words of wisdom and that of Rand Fishkin on working at your SEO strategy remains as being very important.
I once read from another well known Marketing Consultant in the UK who shall remain nameless here. but who said to his audience that SEO was dead. But, this was because he just wanted to have everyone spend their dollars with him doing all your Pay Per Click. But you can’t do pay per click advertising using AdWords without achieving a Quality Score.
That Quality Score means you have to ‘Optimise’ your website page to achieve your AdWords Campaign being successful.
So, this latest study in bringing Search Marketing back to the fore means that SEO is never going away. We just have to do it differently today. And don’t get me wrong Pay Per Click Advertising has its place in the multi-channel digital marketing strategy that we should all be working at.
If you want to learn more about where to put your time and effort into marketing your website, there has never beeen a better time for Scotland’s businesses to get along to Business Gateway Workshop. Their are some great learning topics and they are being updated all the time. And if you want a review of your website’s performance and digital marketing strategy, then who should you have a chat with. I will leave that decision with you………
Brian Mathers
Internet Marketing Practitioner
Delivering OnlineXcellence to SMEs in Scotland