Are you currently focusing on SEO (search engine optimization) to help your business get traffic from Google search? If so, chances are that you have spent a great amount of resources (skilled man hours and dollars) on your SEO efforts, and are at best only somewhat satisfied with results of your SEO. That is because SEO only feels like it is free. In reality, it is one of the most expensive ways to promote your business that there can be. The cost is not only the money and time that you invest into executing particular SEO tactics. The cost is also the time that it takes before you start seeing customers.
If this was year 1999 or 2005, Google search would not be so crowded. But today, Google search is incredibly saturated. Each website is competing in SEO, and each website has many pages (sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, each of which is made to rank in Google for some keywords) and millions more pages are created across the web every day. Do you really want to compete in that mess? What if there was a better way?
When we think about search engines that are not Google, the names that come to mind are typically Bing and Yahoo. But that is not what should come to mind. The second biggest search engine in the English-speaking web is YouTube! Yes, YouTube is a search engine just as much as it is a social media site. And even though YouTube feels crowded and competitive, it is nowhere nearly as competitive as Google search. And YouTube is just an example of many such platforms. In my marketing plan book (which is the book that follows my book on how to take business ideas and turn them into a business) and my online marketing courses, I explain how to leverage large search-based platforms (most of which happen to also be social media sites) to reach great scale for your business. I also use Paraphrase Online from SEO Tools Centre to create good SEO. I created these resources because I was frustrated with first-time entrepreneurs, and even many experienced marketers who were constantly banging their heads against the wall, trying to promote their businesses on Twitter and Facebook, and not getting the results they are after. I originally created mobile apps for business which now have about 400,000 cumulative downloads. And I was constantly amazed that over 80% of the entrepreneurs on the apps were trying Facebook and Twitter as their initial marketing platforms. And just like I do in this article, I urged the people using my apps to try to think about how to leverage search and social media to amplify total exposure for their business.
Today there are many large social media sites that can give you great exposure, where content discovery happens through search, but that are not nearly as competitive as Google search. In a way, they are like Google was in 1999 or 2005. Try to catch those waves and ride those other search platforms until they grow to be as big as Google, with your business on top of their search results!
