Why SEO is Still More Effective Than Social Media

It would be easy to get mad when reading posts about how "SEO is Dead." Especially when the person writing it wrote the same thing 3 years ago. The good is thing is that SEOs win either way. Either their field is given the respect that it deserves, or people quit worrying about and it just gets easier. I've seen hundreds of social media gurus knock SEO as a field where its best days are behind it. Many say that if you build a great website and simply implement good web standards, SEO will take care of itself. Instead of worrying about SEO it's recommended that people blog, tweet and update their way to the top. For the reasons mentioned below, I disagree.

Why SEO Is Still Important and Deserves More Respect

• Go look at the search results for ANY competitive vertical that produces good ROI. E.g. education, pharmacy, mortgages. Now find me the crowdsourcing, social media supersite, or show me how social media helped achieve their results. How many Twitter followers does pillsforall.com have?
• SEOs know how to make money. I see tons of bloggers talking about their thousands of visitors coming from Twitter. The problem is Twitter traffic converts like crap. Ask some A-list bloggers how much they make from AdSense. You'd probably be suprised. Good SEOs don't waste resources ranking for worthless keywords. A good SEO can make 5x as much many with a quarter of the traffic.
• Wordpress and Drupal are great if you can use them for your particular project. If you set them up right you'll probably have decent SEO right out of the box (this is of course because SEOs influnced the development of these CMSs). On the other hand, if you need to optimize a 10,000 page, multinational website built with proprietary software WordPress can't help you. You'll be calling an SEO or you won't be ranking for much.
• Most of the big social media players calling out SEO know SEO fairly well. They have learned the basics over the years which now seem like second nature to them. They feel like it's just good web development, and can't believe people pay for this knowledge that seems like second nature. Where do you think they learned that stuff? Seth Godin? Robert Scoble? No. They learned it from other SEOs. Unfortunately, there are still thousands of programmers that haven't learned basic SEO and are still cooking up apps with no regard for search engines.
• Now that Google is incorporating the social graph into its algo, social media and SEO are actually inseparable. They now overlap even more than they did before. If something influences the algorithm, then technically its a part of SEO. As long as their are search engines, there is SEO.
• Even Matt Cutts (Google SERP engineer and spam cop) recently said that SEO would still be around in 5 years. Watch the video.

The Problems With Social Media

Social media is a ton of fun, and I use it frequently. There is no arguing with its general usefulness. In practice, social media can be a good way to support SEO efforts. I'm not saying to avoid social media. I'm simply contrasting the two in terms of effectiveness.

There are a some good examples of large brands and companies with passionate customers that have gained a lot from social media services like Twitter and Facebook. There are some brilliant people in the social media space that can produce returns. However, this the exception instead of the norm.

Services like Twitter can do one thing really well. Make a name for the person tweeting in the social media vertical. However, this name is good for one thing - selling social media services to other people. However, these other people or companies will often not be able to mimic this success. They'll get some followers and tweet some tweets, but at the end of the day, if they don't also have an engaging, social butterfly in their marketing department all of their blogging and updating will often amount to nothing for the client in the way of ROI. The benefit is then presented as "branding" or "web presence." The client often buys this BS because they feel like they are on the cutting edge and are being innovative.

Furthermore, people don't care if their plumber is "social." I could be an awful plumber, but if I'm social enough I can get a lot of followers and position myself as an expert. This happens frequently. How is this useful? I could ask my followers what they think is a good plumber, but this assumes local people follow me, they've hired a plumber and they actually see my tweet. The average user will not have 2K followers. Until Twitter can help people quickly find everyday things, the comparisons to SEO should stop. Do you really look for plumbers, financial services and dentists on Twitter? Sure, try it sometime.

Someday social media may in fact out-gun SEO as an online marketing tactic, but it certainly hasn't yet so let's knock all this "SEO is Dead" shit off.