What does it mean to work with SEO today? What goals is Google really pursuing with its recent algorithm changes? What is “social branding” and how is it changing the relationship oftrust (trust to put it in the American way) of the company with its customers, its target niche? As I start writing, I always like to immediately delimit the scope, what I am going to talk about. To the “list” just made, I would add a couple of false myths to dispel:
- SEO is dead, and if it’s not dead, it’s not doing very well;
- SEO and Social Media Marketing are two separate and distinct things that it is good to always leave strictly separate
As is appropriate, I begin at the beginning. The way I see it, doing SEO means mostly study. It may sound like a trivial consideration, but I sincerely believe that the timing of only “technical” search engine optimization has a very low impact of practical results in today’s reality.
Leaving aside the last algorithmic update silently released only last August (the so-called “HummingBird“), whose real effects on search engines are still all to be calibrated, I think that the impact on the ranking of news, therefore also of companies, on SERPs should be constantly monitored, even more than in the past. If Google’s stated goal is semantic search-that is, to simplify, the perfect interpretation by search engines of user queries-this cannot fail to have an immediate effect on many fronts.
But, it should be understood, how did it get to this point? A key juncture, from my point of view, has been the implementation of authorship, that is, of a mechanism that seeks to certify the attribution of a piece of content through its author. A web authorship mechanism.
But, you will say, why does this affect very different areas such as SEO, SMM and, ultimately, the reliability and trustworthiness of companies on the web? Let me explain immediately. In my opinion, we could say that to have forced those who write on the web, those who want to convey content on the web, and those who do SEO to “put their face” on it in the eyes of Google, is to have changed the terms of the matter altogether. We could say that the traditional organization of web success factors by “pyramids” has been replaced by a mechanism that rests solely on three pillars:
- SEO
- Content relevant to its market
- Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing: the strategy on Social Networks
In this kind of new organization, authorship, acts as the inescapable glue. In a mechanism in which there is a tendency, in fact, to bring on the same level the author subject (company), and the content (news-communication-offer), equal fate cannot but befall the “containers/vehicles” of this same information i.e. SEO, as far as search results are concerned, and, in a different and later stage, Social Media Marketing, as social dissemination of the content.
That is why any communication strategy that really wants to be successful, cannot disregard these elements. If this is really the case, it changes and it also changes a lot for companies. Following this order of factors, more than ever, the company “is what it publishes,” and the relationship with its active base, its niche of fans, cannot but start from here. The corporate avatar, on the web, therefore, has gained strategic and economic value.
That is why then, SEO is not dead at all, but rather has ended up drawing new vigor from google’s innovations. Maybe it has just changed its skin. Perhaps it is less and less “optimization” and more and more “positioning,” that is, a vehicle for corporate image as well. After all, precisely corporate trust is achieved by reaching out to one’s audience. It is at this point in the chain that social sharing, the exclusively “marketing” side of social media, comes into play. Many analysts, tend to emphasize the fact of connecting people through social. In my opinion, however, even more amazing, and economically relevant, is the side that concerns B2C, that is, in the potentially direct relationship between brands and consumers, between desires and products. In short, between company and its audience. A whole that appears differentially mediated than in the past. Although, as those who work on the web know very well, the difference between #epicwin campaigns and those marked with an #epicfail is often very blurred.
In other words, if “being on the web” is no longer enough, taking care of one’s brand on the web makes all the difference in the world. Managing, keeping track of “social signals,” then, is no longer just a technical matter concerning the world of search engines and Google’s dominance, but instead becomes a heavy and decisive activity for the entire fate of a brand, whatever its target market. It is not surprising, then, that in the United States, an important base for understanding “global moods,” investments in social media have weathered the financial crisis better than traditional media.
The sign of the times, some would say.
