SEO & Social Media to renew their wedding vows

SEO and Social Media got married a while ago. The wedding was great, PR (the mother of the bride) got drunk and PPC kept quiet when the question was asked.

The special occasion.

Not long after the wedding, baby ‘online reputation management’ was born. Everyone was happy and a long life together seemed on the cards.

The problem is, as Jeremy Kyle can confirm, SEO wasn’t really the father.

It had quickly gone back to its old ways of indulging in link building with dodgy websites and Social Media was left to have it away with old man Mr. Brand Manager, 79, from Harvard (whenever she could get a look in).

However, I still think the marriage can work. SEO and Social Media should stay together and raise ‘online reputation management’ as their own. But maybe rename it ‘online audience engagement’ to dispel the bad memories.

As you may know, ‘online reputation management’ is the process of finding mentions of your brand name (usually by using social media tools) and then getting involved in the conversation. This can sometimes result in you being able to link back to your website.

You can also take this further, monitoring the internet for mentions of the keywords you’re focusing on and doing the same – something I like to combine with ‘online reputation management’ and call ‘online audience engagement’.

The problem for many SEOs seems to be engaging in a meaningful way, with the process being too lengthy for not enough SEO benefits.

This is because many SEOs in competitive markets subscribe to the approach that the value of links need to be judged in terms of their perceived popularity and the time it takes to build them. This essentially means spending as little time as possible getting links from sites with as high PageRank as possible.

In other words, they subscribe to a purely short term approach, which usually leads to using methods that Google works against.

The benefits of integrating Social Media and SEO can be exponential for your brand in the longer term, if you spend time trying to do it well.

For example, if you engage in a meaningful way, with something to say of value to the audience, then they are one step closer to becoming advocates for your brand. And how do you advocate a brand online? By linking to it.

If you devote just a small amount of time towards Social Media in your SEO campaign and strive to do it well, then it could be well worth doing it at the expense of some of those mediocre ‘quick win’ links.