SEO vs Social Influence

If you’re a marketer or are pretty familiar with the WWW, it’s a no brainer that one of the biggest (traditional) tools for website success is SEO. It’s one of those old textbook answers to your problems.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of designing your website to be search engine friendly. It is essentially building your website such that search engines can intuitively understand what your website is about, and showcase it when users conduct relevant searches.

Since it’s always been argued that it’s important to focus on improving your site’s SEO – perhaps one of the best ways to improve is to learn from the people are already successful.

To give you some context on how powerful/influential some of these people are:

  • Darren Rowse157516 twitter followers; included in 73273 Google+ circles
  • Chris Brogan204109 twitter followers; included in 86489 Google+ circles
  • Brian Solis122688 twitter followers; included in 47705 Google+ circles
  • John Jantsch60 977 twitter followers; included in 16412 Google+ circles
  • Seth Godin146136 twitter followers; included in 90575 Google+ circles

Now let’s take a look at the more technical aspects of the SEO of their sites. Since these bloggers are successful by pretty much everyone’s standards, their websites should all be SEO optimized to perfection, right?

Let’s take a look:

With the exception of Seth’s website, the other leading bloggers and marketers have very little focus on SEO. There’s so much said about the importance of SEO, but the people who are succeeding are barely taking it into consideration.

Perhaps social influence outweighs SEO in importance. Often in the search for success, we focus too much on the technical. The tools. The metrics. But the above analysis highlight how more “fluffy” factors like trust, authority and reach can provide greater results.

At the end of the day,
Giving people what they want is more important than delivering it perfectly