Anyone with a website is mad if they don't have a Facebook page these days. And social media and SEO are closely related, of course. So you'd expect there to be about the same number of them in each field. But this doesn't seem to be the case.
Many FB pages about social media
What I noticed was that pages about social media were far more numerous than ones related to SEO. Sure, it stands to reason that Facebook, being a social site itself, is more likely to have such pages. Still, I don't think this could fully explain the imbalance in the relative numbers of such sites since it was quite marked.
Also, many of the businesses that offered SEO services included social media packages -- and vice versa. Clearly the two fields are seen as mutually inclusive. That's to be expected, what with all this talk about "social media being the new SEO".
But from what I've seen on Facebook it doesn't seem like both fields are equally important in this process. It seems that, in market terms at least, social is slowly devouring search. There are just so many sites offering promotion and expertise related to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and the like. They wouldn't exist if there wasn't a huge demand for them.
Social becoming the main traffic method for business?
From this phenomenon it seems that social is already being seen as the major way to bring visitors to sites, with SEO coming in second. And if we're not at this point already we are certainly very close to it.
Much of this trend is due to the current buzz around social media. But I think it's also got a lot to do with the fact that Google is becoming a lot more sophisticated in its algorithms, making SEO a much more challenging field to succeed in. Now that it's more difficult to gain traffic this way, perhaps an increasing number of SEM companies are going out of business, and fewer than before are starting up in the first place?
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