Liza Sisler pointed to this in a tweet and I thought I would spend a little more time on the topic. Anyway, Chelsi Nakano has an article about SEO Lead Generation Outshining Paid Search & Social Media. From my own experience I find this to be true as well. Here’s a quick graphic.
I think the higher percentage from a business channels also makes a lot of sense. At work, we tend to use facebook and twitter less and we tend to do a lot of searching on relevant terms when looking for very specific solutions. Specific solutions must be targeted and a facebook page that focuses on embedded traffic sensors probably won’t catch the eye of that 50 year old traffic engineer sitting in a city office somewhere.
I should note that the CMSWire article also has a nice infographic is you want to click through for more info.
More Thoughts on SEO
Of course, once you decide that optimizing your content for search you then need to focus on the hard part……………….getting a search engine to notice you. I’m not an SEO expert. Everything I’ve seen points to SEO as the product of a consistent effort over a period of time plus a little bit of luck. Take this blog for example. My first couple of blogs got a sum total of maybe 3 hits. I’m pretty sure one hit came from my brother, one came from me and one came from John Bimson who used to work with me. Over time, we continued to create relevant content and every now and again got noticed by other web sites. Now we have a decent number of views each week which I won’t disclose. My point is, we now have a body of content that others have found interesting enough to link to. That has pushed up the people who view the blog and has made it easier to find the blog. I’m betting the same will hold true for other sites.
To become a search engine optimization expert does not require a degree or being the most intelligent in this niche. You don’t even have to read all those SEO books just to master all the techniques .It requires thorough understanding and initiative to take one courageous action to test which strategy really work.