Effective SEO and Social Media Marketing

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To borrow a phrase from Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…” 

One could argue that today’s society is experiencing a similar dichotomy of renewal and regression. With the revolution of the Internet, a new marketing medium has arisen, giving companies the opportunity to better connect with consumers.

That being said, consumers are being bombarded with marketing from all sorts of media in volumes that would make any statistician’s head spin to the point of wanting to explode. To effectively market in and stand out in any type of social media, it is important to utilize search engine optimization, or SEO,  for your company’s website.

SEO?

Avinash Kaushik in his book Web Analytics 2.0 provides a simple and logical explanation of search engines. He states, “Search engines are a key part of any company’s acquisition portfolio. For good reason, citizens of the Internet use search to find everything they are looking for, including you.”

Search engines work hand-in-hand with social media. Think about it - radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users while Facebook added 200 million users in less than a year. Because of this, CEOs and management are struggling to cope with just exactly how their businesses can benefit from social media. 

Companies think they are competing with the store across the street or in the same city. The reality is that social media sites – thanks to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo - are creating competitors in England, Peru, Hong Kong and across the globe.

Getting noticed in a daily barrage of some 1.5 billion new pieces of content, more than 200 million tweets, and 1.5 million new YouTube videos is like being a needle in a haystack. 

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SEO, Social Media, and Your Brand

The real power of social media marketing lies in its ability to convey your message as it is shared on an exponential number of social media sites. Through social media marketing, a company has the ability to:

• Increase the speed of its brand message and story. Compared to print media, Tweets can be sent in mere seconds. Pictures can be Pinned in the same amount of time.
• With billions of users on the major social media sites, a business has the ability to engage with a much larger social network.
• It puts the power of “Word of Mouth” on steroids.
• It creates conversations more quickly between customer and company.

In addition to utilizing social media to market your brand, effective SEO works hand-in-hand with social media to gauge consumer psychographics and demographics. Google arguably has been a pioneer in search engine optimization. Within just the last few months, Google has rolled out its new Universal Analytics, which will change how marketers gather web metrics. Highlights from the October Google Analytics summit are presented in this easy-to-follow and must-read infographic:

Google continues to improve web metrics