Today another local marketing firm post an interesting statistic on Facebook. It was about the graph below where Google Trends shows how “social media” is now search on more than SEO and they implied that because of this, we should be spending our money on social media instead of SEO.
Although this is an interesting phenomena, I’m not sure it is directly related to where people should spend their marketing dollars. Although I do believe social media is becoming ever more important, it’s a fallacy to think SEO is becoming less important. In fact I believe one can’t live without the other. A better way to judge this would be a comparison of the traffic to search engines and/or number of search queries in general, compared to the traffic and other usage metrics related to social media.
Don’t get me wrong social media is definitely a powerful tool, and if you’re company is not involved in it already.. it probably should get started. However, social media in itself does not eliminate the need to have a properly configured website that follows SEO best practices.
Plus, using Google search trends to determine the SEO (The process used so that one’s website is found in search) is a cyclical argument.
