Is Social Search a Threat to SEO?
Interesting post from Nikos Anagnostou (link below) that touches on an important topic around how people and businesses are discovered online. At it's core, the trend that is emerging is this:
People are shifting their reliance from search to peers for news, recommendations and answers.
Nikos argues that the role of search engine optimization (SEO) is diminishing in the face of this. As I commented on his post, I disagree with this.
The future is social AND search.
In our small business base we see a similar trend in terms of an increasing amount of discovery coming through social media, but do not see the need for SEO diminishing as part of a holistic strategy.
The total number of searches occurring via Google, Bing, and other search contexts has continued to increase even with the rocket-ship rise of social media. Natural search results are seen as trustworthy and receive >80% of the clicks for any given search, so it's critical for businesses that want to be found to show up in the first page of organic search results.
What is threatened by social discovery is paid search advertising. More than 80% of people trust recommendations from peers vs. only 14% for paid advertisements. As a result, I think social discovery AND natural, non-sponsored search results will be the dominant ways that businesses will be found by new customers, while paid search listings will be ignored at even greater levels than they are today.
Links to a few posts with some additional data related to this topic below.
What do you think?
Links
- 2 years ago
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