Does Search Still Matter For Business Owners?

As a business owner,  I’m sure some time during your week is spent figuring out how to improve your SEO/SEM strategy.  Unless you’re Amazon, Facebook, or some other Internet behemoth, thinking about ways to bring new traffic to your website becomes a preoccupation because it’s perceived to be vital to your bottom line.  However, I would like to play the devil’s advocate and ask the simple question,” Does search really matter?”

It’s a common fact that people use public search engines to locate information, but how does that matter to your business and the relationships ( new and old) that you’re trying to build with your customers?  More importantly, could that money you’re currently spending on search marketing and SEO manipulation be better invested with your customers, building relationships online using the social media platforms, and providing incentives for word-of-mouth promotions to your most loyal brand advocates?

In my humble opinion, unless you’re a major Internet destination, or a content farm (Demand Media), I don’t know if it makes sense for a business to invest the overwhelming amount of their marketing spend on click acquisition from people who’ve told you nothing more about themselves and why they’re a good fit for your business.

A successful alternative, especially for the small and mid-size business, would be to invest money into building better relationships online.  Fortunately, with the advent and popularity of closed networks like Facebook, a business has an opportunity to directly interact and reward existing and potential customers in a much more meaningful way than being the first paid search result on a term that is perceived to be “contextually relevant” to their business.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of search marketing and optimization, I’m just beginning to believe they continue to matter less and less in the age of the social web.