SMI: the smart way to integrate search into your social strategy

One of the biggest challenges I have with my clients is getting them to understand that ‘search’, or much to my dismay what many of my clients often refer to as cost-per-click (cringe), can no longer be separated from your digital marketing strategy.

One of the challenges is getting clients to understand that search is no longer a separate element to your digital strategy; rather a fundamental component to the strategy and everything you do needs to feed back into it – whether it be organic or paid for.

The pitfall is that a lot of people see search as paid for (CPC) and don’t necessarily understand the importance of how to build one’s organic rankings.

The fact is that search marketing has evolved and that what we used to call SEO (search engine optimization) has become an integral part of strategy and is now referred to as SMI — Search Marketing Integration.

As such search needs to be built into the overall digital marketing practice – SMI at its best. SEO strategies that worked a few years ago are no longer relevant, if at all reliable, mainly due to the many changes in Google algorithms.

Search marketing strategies can no longer be limited to uploading a page ridden with keywords and anchor text-embedded links. Google no longer rates sites based on keywords and links but rather sees search criteria from the human point of view, by recognizing users as people; with a unique set of needs, interests, locations and histories and not just an IP address.

But real game changer in SEO and now SMI is the development, and ever-evolving world of social media.

Social search

The sad truth is that many businesses, and agencies (scary), regard search marketing and social media as two completely separate disciplines. The truth however is that the two have started to overlap, and the dividing line between the two is constantly diminishing.

The reason for this is that both search marketing and social media offer unique ways for users to uncover information as well as allow brands to build awareness and engage with customers on multiple platforms. But the single most important aspect that holds true to search marketing and social media is that they’re both critically important avenues for content creation.

To leverage the two and allow them to work effectively together is actually quite simple. It comes down to optimizing your social media strategy for SMI – meaning that you need to start thinking about how to create content designed to fit in with how your customers are searching for it. Once you’ve done this you then need to start socializing that content across all of your social media platforms; including your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Foursquare etc.

Social values in SMI

Social media values are the set of norms that online users have accepted and adopted in the day-to-day use of social media across the internet and mobile platforms. Due to the constant changes to search engine algorithms, social media values, such as likes, shares, retweets, and +1s, are growing in influence in terms of boosting search results. This is how people have started to search for relevant information — by looking at people within their communities who have liked, shared or posted certain content. The important thing to take away from this is that this is now the commonly accepted way of recommendations, and thus paid for search and ‘advertising’ hold little weight in comparison.

As social media becomes more and more intertwined in the day-to-day lives of individuals and businesses, its influence is growing in power. The bespoke nature of social media and its effect on search (how people search, where, when and what they search for) is the key element in the importance of the shift towards search marketing integration.

People search for what they really want to know
The introduction of the Facebook Graph, as well as Google’s growing intelligence of individual users (in terms of location, previous search results and auto prediction tools), are examples of how online users are able to use social platforms to influence how they search within specific environments. Allowing users to use social elements to customize what information is served to them is a powerful tool and allows for the epitome of search customisation.

People no longer search for ‘restaurants in New York’ they now search for ‘restaurants in New York that my friends; like, have been to, recommend’ etc. By harnessing social influence brands can integrate this into how they produce content, where they publish that content and how it is shared – all in the attempt to grow their presence and visibility, socially, in search.

Don’t forget about Google

Although the online user is critical to your success in search, you can’t discount the authority and power that Google itself has in the process. Google looks for sites that produce fresh and relevant content regularly. So the more content you create, relevant to what users are searching for, talking about or sharing, the higher you will rank. Google rewards sites that rank well socially, thus integrating social values is a good way to improve the social ranking of your site.

It’s all about people

Although SMI has a lot to do with algorithms, strategy and content, the beauty is that social media brings in a human element. As a result, users are beginning to rely more on people, rather than just algorithms to attain valuable, relevant search results. And that’s really what SMI is all about: optimizing your search marketing strategy to appeal to people rather than search engines.