Social Vs Search – Don’t Rely On Just One Channel

Quite a few people are contemplating abandoning either social or search in favor of the other for traffic generation. Such people are considering either investing their time and energies in either PPC or social media marketing to generate leads that improve ROI.

There is a reason for such a thought to take root. Google has been very proactive, in some cases more than proactive, in updating its search results which has frustrated many people and they are now looking at social as a savior for rankings. However, this is not the right approach according to senior Google executives.

Google has made it clear that it will continue to update its search in an effort to give the end-users the best possible experience and to put spammers in place. Google is also aware that unscrupulous SEOs will continue to try to spam the new system and therefore they are actively changing the weight of social signals in search ranking algorithms. Google is determined to weed out black techniques or at least keep them on a tight leash.

Innovations and upgrade of search algorithm is a continuous process and Google does not intend to take a break from this process. Therefore webmasters are better served if they spend more time understanding the nuances of the new search algorithm than try to game it. Efforts to rank higher with shortcuts or by reverse engineering of search algorithm will no longer be possible.

The best possible way out for webmasters and SEOs is to develop and present a fantastic site with great and relevant content to visitors, so that they are compelled to either recommend it or visit it over and over again.

Google believes that having all the eggs in one basket, either search or social, is a bad idea. However, if your ranking on search is not so good you can always try to garner traffic from social sites like Facebook or Twitter. Getting leads from multiple channels is preferable as they ensure you get traffic even if one channel is not returning anticipated results.

Bad content, unethical SEO, and malpractices will definitely lead to unpredictable results as Google’s aim is to make end-users happy, and they don’t really care how SEOs feel about them.