Social Media Disasters: What Should You Do When a Profile Outranks Your Website?

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Social Media Disasters: What Should You Do When a Profile Outranks Your Website?

It’s a situation that many small companies are (annoyingly) familiar with. After investing in social media optimization, their search-friendly social media presence now outranks their own company website, leaving them short on traffic and even shorter on usable leads. While social media is far from a lead-generating slouch, there’s nothing worse than seeing your own website overtaken.

There are various ways to fix this, however. The most obvious is to link your online presences with one another, building a network of sorts using all of your online properties. This ensures that search visibility passes to your own domain, leaving your social media profiles and fan pages prominent in the search results, but not so much that they can limit the amount of traffic flowing to your website.

The second is to limit the exposure of your social media presences. While this strategy may sound slightly counterintuitive – the goal of social media, after all, is to get more traffic – it’s actually one that’s grounded in sensibility and value. When your social media presences reach the right audience, there’s really no reason for them to travel further and come into contact with unnecessary readers.

Social media marketers think of traffic as being of two very defined types – warm traffic and cold traffic. The first is what you’ll generate from targeted search results – visitors that are interested in purchasing your services right from the get-go. The second is more easily generated through casual browsing – if a visitor clicks on your Facebook ad, they’re likely to need more pre-sales attention.

This is where social media is so valuable – in the stages before a visitor turns warm. Salespeople would call it the lead separation stage, as it’s the period in which good leads are split from those with only a minor interest in your product, service, or opportunity. Social media pushes the two apart, allowing you to focus your sales (or pre-sales) efforts with greater attention.

So if your website is outranked by a social media page, don’t panic. View its effect on your traffic, and more importantly its effect on your bottom line. If there’s an increase, you may have split that traffic into warm and cool sectors through chance alone. If there’s a decrease, you now have all the data required to separate your online traffic into two sales-ready categories.