Posted by mark-johnstone A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, I’d like to add some important context and detail to the original post. I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it’s based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success. I wouldn’t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend. “Trend” is the important word here. If you’re looking for a dramatic step or jump as a direct result of one piece of viral content, this could cause you to overlook a positive trend in the right direction, and even tempt you to conclude that this form of content-based link building doesn’t work. With regards to this type of link building and its impact on domain-wide rankings, I’d like to focus on the follow 4 points:
What successful link building really looks likeSimply Business was held up in the SEO myth post as an example of this kind of link building not working. I would argue the opposite, holding it up as an example of it working. So how can this be? I believe it stems from a misunderstanding of what success looks like. The post highlighted three of the most successful pieces of content Distilled created for Simply Business. However, focusing on those three pieces of content doesn’t provide the full picture. We didn’t make just three pieces of content; we made twenty-one. Here are the results of those pieces: That’s links from 1466 domains built to 19 pieces of content over a period of 3 years. The myth in question is as follows:
Though this wasn’t the hypothesis explicitly stated at the start of the post, it was later clarified in a comment. However, that’s not necessarily how this works. An accurate description of what works would be:
To hold up, the myth required a directly attributable jump in rankings and organic traffic within approximately 3 months of the release of each piece of content. So where was the bump? The anticipated reward for all those links? No. The movement we’re looking for is here: Not a jump, but a general trend. Up and to the right. Below is a SEMRush graph from the original post, showing estimated organic traffic to the Simply Business site: At first glance, the graph between 2012 and 2014 might look unremarkable, but that’s because the four large spikes on the right-hand side push the rest of the chart down, creating a flattening effect. There’s actually a 170% rise in traffic from June 2012 to June 2014. To see that more clearly, here’s the same data (up to June 2014) on a different scale: Paints quite a different picture, don’t you think? Okay, but what did this do for the company? Did they see an increase in rankings for valuable terms, or just terms related to the content itself? Over the duration of these link building campaigns, Simply Business saw their most important keywords (“professional indemnity insurance” and “public liability insurance”) move from positions 3 to 1 and 3 to 2, respectively. While writing this post, I contacted Jasper Martens, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, now VP of Marketing at PensionBee. Jasper told me:
That translates to money. A serious amount of it! Simply Business also saw ranking improvements for other commercial terms, too. Here’s a small sample: Note: This data was taken from a third-party tool, Sistrix. Data from third-party tools, as used both in this post and the original post, should be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t provide a totally accurate picture, but they can give you some indication of the direction of movement. I notice Simply Business still ranks #1 today for some of their top commercial keywords, such as “professional indemnity insurance.” That’s pretty incredible in a market filled with some seriously big players, household UK names with familiar TV ads and much bigger budgets. Why success looks like it doesI remember the first time I was responsible for a piece of content going viral. The social shares, traffic, and links were rolling in. This was it! Link building nirvana! I was sitting back waiting for the rankings, organic traffic, and revenue to follow. That day didn’t come. I was gutted. I felt robbed! I’ve come to terms with it now. But at the time, it was a blow. I assume most SEOs know it doesn’t work that way. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s an assumption that one big burst in links will result in a jump in rankings, as discussed in the original post. That’s the myth it was seeking to dispel. I get it. I’ve been there, too. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And, actually, it makes sense that it doesn’t.
The Google algorithm is an incredibly complex equation. It’s tempting to think that you put links in and you get rankings out, and a big jump in one will correspond to a big jump in the other. But the math involved is far more complicated than that. It’s not that linear. Other factors to considerLink building alone won’t improve your rankings. There are a number of other influential factors at play. At a high level, these include:
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I wanted to mention that you need to consider these factors and more when reviewing the impact of link building on a site’s rankings. Below is the graph from SearchMetrics for Concert Hotels, also via the original post. This is another site to which Distilled built a high volume of links. As you can possibly tell from the large drop before Distilled started working with Concert Hotels, the site was suffering from an algorithmic penalty. We proceeded under the hypothesis that building high-quality links, alongside other on-site activity, would be important in the site’s recovery. However, after three or four large link building successes without any corresponding uplift, we recommended to the client that we stop building links and shift all resources to focus on other activities. As you’ll see at the end of the chart, there appears to be some positive movement happening. If and when the site fully recovers, we’ll never be able to tell exactly what contribution, if any, link building made to the site’s eventual rankings. You can’t take the above as proof that link building doesn’t work. You have to consider the other factors that might be affecting a site’s performance. How can we improve our approach?As I mentioned at the start of this post, I actually agree with a lot of the points raised in the original post. In particular, there were some strong points made about the topical relevance of the content you create and the way in which the content sits within the site architecture. Ideally, the content you create to gain links would be:
This can be a challenge, though, especially in certain industries, and you might not hit the sweet spot every time. But let’s look at them in turn. Topical relevanceIf you can create a piece of content that gains links and is closely relevant to your product and what you do for customers, that’s great. That’s the ideal. To give you an example of this, Distilled created a career aptitude test for Rasmussen, a career-focused college in America. This page earned links from 156 linking root domains (according to the Majestic Historic Index), and the site continues to rank well and drive relevant search traffic to the site. Another example would be Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors. Building lots of links to that page will certainly drive relevant and valuable traffic to the Moz site, as well as contributing to the overall strength of the domain. However, your content doesn’t have to be about your product, as long as it’s relevant to your audience. In the case of Simply Business, the core audience (small business owners) doesn’t care about insurance as much as it cares about growing its businesses. That’s why we created several guides to small business marketing, which also gained lots of links. As Jasper Martens explains:
Integrating the content into the site architectureDistilled often places content outside the main architecture of the site. I’ll accept this isn’t optimal, but just for context, let me explain the reasons behind it:
While it worked for Simply Business, it would make sense, where you can, to pull these things into the normal site architecture to help distribute link equity further. Content that’s valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)Google is always changing. What’s working now and what’s worked in the past won’t necessarily continue to be the case. The most future-proof way you can build links to your site is via activity that’s valuable in its own right — activities like PR, branding, and growing your audience online. So where do we go from here?Link building via content marketing campaigns can still make a positive impact to domain-wide rankings. However, it’s important to enter any link building campaign with realistic expectations. The results might not be as direct and immediate as you might hope. You need to be in it for the long haul, and build links to a number of pieces of content over time before you’ll really see results. When looking for results, focus on overall trends, not month-to-month movements. Remember that link building alone won’t solve your SEO. You need to make sure you take other on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors into consideration. It’s always worth refining the way you’re building links. The closer the topics are aligned with your product or core audience’s interests, the more the content is integrated into your site’s architecture, and the more the content you’re creating is valuable for reasons beyond SEO, the better. It’s not easy to manage that every time, but if you can, you’ll be in a good position to sustainably build links and improve your site’s rankings over time. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! What Link Building Success Really Looks Like posted first on your-t1-blog-url via Blogger What Link Building Success Really Looks Like
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Posted by mark-johnstone A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, I’d like to add some important context and detail to the original post. I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it’s based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success. I wouldn’t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend. “Trend” is the important word here. If you’re looking for a dramatic step or jump as a direct result of one piece of viral content, this could cause you to overlook a positive trend in the right direction, and even tempt you to conclude that this form of content-based link building doesn’t work. With regards to this type of link building and its impact on domain-wide rankings, I’d like to focus on the follow 4 points:
What successful link building really looks likeSimply Business was held up in the SEO myth post as an example of this kind of link building not working. I would argue the opposite, holding it up as an example of it working. So how can this be? I believe it stems from a misunderstanding of what success looks like. The post highlighted three of the most successful pieces of content Distilled created for Simply Business. However, focusing on those three pieces of content doesn’t provide the full picture. We didn’t make just three pieces of content; we made twenty-one. Here are the results of those pieces: That’s links from 1466 domains built to 19 pieces of content over a period of 3 years. The myth in question is as follows:
Though this wasn’t the hypothesis explicitly stated at the start of the post, it was later clarified in a comment. However, that’s not necessarily how this works. An accurate description of what works would be:
To hold up, the myth required a directly attributable jump in rankings and organic traffic within approximately 3 months of the release of each piece of content. So where was the bump? The anticipated reward for all those links? No. The movement we’re looking for is here: Not a jump, but a general trend. Up and to the right. Below is a SEMRush graph from the original post, showing estimated organic traffic to the Simply Business site: At first glance, the graph between 2012 and 2014 might look unremarkable, but that’s because the four large spikes on the right-hand side push the rest of the chart down, creating a flattening effect. There’s actually a 170% rise in traffic from June 2012 to June 2014. To see that more clearly, here’s the same data (up to June 2014) on a different scale: Paints quite a different picture, don’t you think? Okay, but what did this do for the company? Did they see an increase in rankings for valuable terms, or just terms related to the content itself? Over the duration of these link building campaigns, Simply Business saw their most important keywords (“professional indemnity insurance” and “public liability insurance”) move from positions 3 to 1 and 3 to 2, respectively. While writing this post, I contacted Jasper Martens, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, now VP of Marketing at PensionBee. Jasper told me:
That translates to money. A serious amount of it! Simply Business also saw ranking improvements for other commercial terms, too. Here’s a small sample: Note: This data was taken from a third-party tool, Sistrix. Data from third-party tools, as used both in this post and the original post, should be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t provide a totally accurate picture, but they can give you some indication of the direction of movement. I notice Simply Business still ranks #1 today for some of their top commercial keywords, such as “professional indemnity insurance.” That’s pretty incredible in a market filled with some seriously big players, household UK names with familiar TV ads and much bigger budgets. Why success looks like it doesI remember the first time I was responsible for a piece of content going viral. The social shares, traffic, and links were rolling in. This was it! Link building nirvana! I was sitting back waiting for the rankings, organic traffic, and revenue to follow. That day didn’t come. I was gutted. I felt robbed! I’ve come to terms with it now. But at the time, it was a blow. I assume most SEOs know it doesn’t work that way. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s an assumption that one big burst in links will result in a jump in rankings, as discussed in the original post. That’s the myth it was seeking to dispel. I get it. I’ve been there, too. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And, actually, it makes sense that it doesn’t.
The Google algorithm is an incredibly complex equation. It’s tempting to think that you put links in and you get rankings out, and a big jump in one will correspond to a big jump in the other. But the math involved is far more complicated than that. It’s not that linear. Other factors to considerLink building alone won’t improve your rankings. There are a number of other influential factors at play. At a high level, these include:
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I wanted to mention that you need to consider these factors and more when reviewing the impact of link building on a site’s rankings. Below is the graph from SearchMetrics for Concert Hotels, also via the original post. This is another site to which Distilled built a high volume of links. As you can possibly tell from the large drop before Distilled started working with Concert Hotels, the site was suffering from an algorithmic penalty. We proceeded under the hypothesis that building high-quality links, alongside other on-site activity, would be important in the site’s recovery. However, after three or four large link building successes without any corresponding uplift, we recommended to the client that we stop building links and shift all resources to focus on other activities. As you’ll see at the end of the chart, there appears to be some positive movement happening. If and when the site fully recovers, we’ll never be able to tell exactly what contribution, if any, link building made to the site’s eventual rankings. You can’t take the above as proof that link building doesn’t work. You have to consider the other factors that might be affecting a site’s performance. How can we improve our approach?As I mentioned at the start of this post, I actually agree with a lot of the points raised in the original post. In particular, there were some strong points made about the topical relevance of the content you create and the way in which the content sits within the site architecture. Ideally, the content you create to gain links would be:
This can be a challenge, though, especially in certain industries, and you might not hit the sweet spot every time. But let’s look at them in turn. Topical relevanceIf you can create a piece of content that gains links and is closely relevant to your product and what you do for customers, that’s great. That’s the ideal. To give you an example of this, Distilled created a career aptitude test for Rasmussen, a career-focused college in America. This page earned links from 156 linking root domains (according to the Majestic Historic Index), and the site continues to rank well and drive relevant search traffic to the site. Another example would be Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors. Building lots of links to that page will certainly drive relevant and valuable traffic to the Moz site, as well as contributing to the overall strength of the domain. However, your content doesn’t have to be about your product, as long as it’s relevant to your audience. In the case of Simply Business, the core audience (small business owners) doesn’t care about insurance as much as it cares about growing its businesses. That’s why we created several guides to small business marketing, which also gained lots of links. As Jasper Martens explains:
Integrating the content into the site architectureDistilled often places content outside the main architecture of the site. I’ll accept this isn’t optimal, but just for context, let me explain the reasons behind it:
While it worked for Simply Business, it would make sense, where you can, to pull these things into the normal site architecture to help distribute link equity further. Content that’s valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)Google is always changing. What’s working now and what’s worked in the past won’t necessarily continue to be the case. The most future-proof way you can build links to your site is via activity that’s valuable in its own right — activities like PR, branding, and growing your audience online. So where do we go from here?Link building via content marketing campaigns can still make a positive impact to domain-wide rankings. However, it’s important to enter any link building campaign with realistic expectations. The results might not be as direct and immediate as you might hope. You need to be in it for the long haul, and build links to a number of pieces of content over time before you’ll really see results. When looking for results, focus on overall trends, not month-to-month movements. Remember that link building alone won’t solve your SEO. You need to make sure you take other on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors into consideration. It’s always worth refining the way you’re building links. The closer the topics are aligned with your product or core audience’s interests, the more the content is integrated into your site’s architecture, and the more the content you’re creating is valuable for reasons beyond SEO, the better. It’s not easy to manage that every time, but if you can, you’ll be in a good position to sustainably build links and improve your site’s rankings over time. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! What Link Building Success Really Looks Like published first on your-t1-blog-url via Tumblr What Link Building Success Really Looks Like Posted by mark-johnstone A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, I’d like to add some important context and detail to the original post. I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it’s based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success. I wouldn’t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend. “Trend” is the important word here. If you’re looking for a dramatic step or jump as a direct result of one piece of viral content, this could cause you to overlook a positive trend in the right direction, and even tempt you to conclude that this form of content-based link building doesn’t work. With regards to this type of link building and its impact on domain-wide rankings, I’d like to focus on the follow 4 points:
What successful link building really looks likeSimply Business was held up in the SEO myth post as an example of this kind of link building not working. I would argue the opposite, holding it up as an example of it working. So how can this be? I believe it stems from a misunderstanding of what success looks like. The post highlighted three of the most successful pieces of content Distilled created for Simply Business. However, focusing on those three pieces of content doesn’t provide the full picture. We didn’t make just three pieces of content; we made twenty-one. Here are the results of those pieces: That’s links from 1466 domains built to 19 pieces of content over a period of 3 years. The myth in question is as follows:
Though this wasn’t the hypothesis explicitly stated at the start of the post, it was later clarified in a comment. However, that’s not necessarily how this works. An accurate description of what works would be:
To hold up, the myth required a directly attributable jump in rankings and organic traffic within approximately 3 months of the release of each piece of content. So where was the bump? The anticipated reward for all those links? No. The movement we’re looking for is here: Not a jump, but a general trend. Up and to the right. Below is a SEMRush graph from the original post, showing estimated organic traffic to the Simply Business site: At first glance, the graph between 2012 and 2014 might look unremarkable, but that’s because the four large spikes on the right-hand side push the rest of the chart down, creating a flattening effect. There’s actually a 170% rise in traffic from June 2012 to June 2014. To see that more clearly, here’s the same data (up to June 2014) on a different scale: Paints quite a different picture, don’t you think? Okay, but what did this do for the company? Did they see an increase in rankings for valuable terms, or just terms related to the content itself? Over the duration of these link building campaigns, Simply Business saw their most important keywords (“professional indemnity insurance” and “public liability insurance”) move from positions 3 to 1 and 3 to 2, respectively. While writing this post, I contacted Jasper Martens, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, now VP of Marketing at PensionBee. Jasper told me:
That translates to money. A serious amount of it! Simply Business also saw ranking improvements for other commercial terms, too. Here’s a small sample: Note: This data was taken from a third-party tool, Sistrix. Data from third-party tools, as used both in this post and the original post, should be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t provide a totally accurate picture, but they can give you some indication of the direction of movement. I notice Simply Business still ranks #1 today for some of their top commercial keywords, such as “professional indemnity insurance.” That’s pretty incredible in a market filled with some seriously big players, household UK names with familiar TV ads and much bigger budgets. Why success looks like it doesI remember the first time I was responsible for a piece of content going viral. The social shares, traffic, and links were rolling in. This was it! Link building nirvana! I was sitting back waiting for the rankings, organic traffic, and revenue to follow. That day didn’t come. I was gutted. I felt robbed! I’ve come to terms with it now. But at the time, it was a blow. I assume most SEOs know it doesn’t work that way. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s an assumption that one big burst in links will result in a jump in rankings, as discussed in the original post. That’s the myth it was seeking to dispel. I get it. I’ve been there, too. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And, actually, it makes sense that it doesn’t.
The Google algorithm is an incredibly complex equation. It’s tempting to think that you put links in and you get rankings out, and a big jump in one will correspond to a big jump in the other. But the math involved is far more complicated than that. It’s not that linear. Other factors to considerLink building alone won’t improve your rankings. There are a number of other influential factors at play. At a high level, these include:
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I wanted to mention that you need to consider these factors and more when reviewing the impact of link building on a site’s rankings. Below is the graph from SearchMetrics for Concert Hotels, also via the original post. This is another site to which Distilled built a high volume of links. As you can possibly tell from the large drop before Distilled started working with Concert Hotels, the site was suffering from an algorithmic penalty. We proceeded under the hypothesis that building high-quality links, alongside other on-site activity, would be important in the site’s recovery. However, after three or four large link building successes without any corresponding uplift, we recommended to the client that we stop building links and shift all resources to focus on other activities. As you’ll see at the end of the chart, there appears to be some positive movement happening. If and when the site fully recovers, we’ll never be able to tell exactly what contribution, if any, link building made to the site’s eventual rankings. You can’t take the above as proof that link building doesn’t work. You have to consider the other factors that might be affecting a site’s performance. How can we improve our approach?As I mentioned at the start of this post, I actually agree with a lot of the points raised in the original post. In particular, there were some strong points made about the topical relevance of the content you create and the way in which the content sits within the site architecture. Ideally, the content you create to gain links would be:
This can be a challenge, though, especially in certain industries, and you might not hit the sweet spot every time. But let’s look at them in turn. Topical relevanceIf you can create a piece of content that gains links and is closely relevant to your product and what you do for customers, that’s great. That’s the ideal. To give you an example of this, Distilled created a career aptitude test for Rasmussen, a career-focused college in America. This page earned links from 156 linking root domains (according to the Majestic Historic Index), and the site continues to rank well and drive relevant search traffic to the site. Another example would be Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors. Building lots of links to that page will certainly drive relevant and valuable traffic to the Moz site, as well as contributing to the overall strength of the domain. However, your content doesn’t have to be about your product, as long as it’s relevant to your audience. In the case of Simply Business, the core audience (small business owners) doesn’t care about insurance as much as it cares about growing its businesses. That’s why we created several guides to small business marketing, which also gained lots of links. As Jasper Martens explains:
Integrating the content into the site architectureDistilled often places content outside the main architecture of the site. I’ll accept this isn’t optimal, but just for context, let me explain the reasons behind it:
While it worked for Simply Business, it would make sense, where you can, to pull these things into the normal site architecture to help distribute link equity further. Content that’s valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)Google is always changing. What’s working now and what’s worked in the past won’t necessarily continue to be the case. The most future-proof way you can build links to your site is via activity that’s valuable in its own right — activities like PR, branding, and growing your audience online. So where do we go from here?Link building via content marketing campaigns can still make a positive impact to domain-wide rankings. However, it’s important to enter any link building campaign with realistic expectations. The results might not be as direct and immediate as you might hope. You need to be in it for the long haul, and build links to a number of pieces of content over time before you’ll really see results. When looking for results, focus on overall trends, not month-to-month movements. Remember that link building alone won’t solve your SEO. You need to make sure you take other on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors into consideration. It’s always worth refining the way you’re building links. The closer the topics are aligned with your product or core audience’s interests, the more the content is integrated into your site’s architecture, and the more the content you’re creating is valuable for reasons beyond SEO, the better. It’s not easy to manage that every time, but if you can, you’ll be in a good position to sustainably build links and improve your site’s rankings over time. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! What Link Building Success Really Looks Like published first on your-t1-blog-url via Tumblr What Link Building Success Really Looks Like Posted by mark-johnstone A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, I’d like to add some important context and detail to the original post. I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it’s based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success. I wouldn’t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend. “Trend” is the important word here. If you’re looking for a dramatic step or jump as a direct result of one piece of viral content, this could cause you to overlook a positive trend in the right direction, and even tempt you to conclude that this form of content-based link building doesn’t work. With regards to this type of link building and its impact on domain-wide rankings, I’d like to focus on the follow 4 points:
What successful link building really looks likeSimply Business was held up in the SEO myth post as an example of this kind of link building not working. I would argue the opposite, holding it up as an example of it working. So how can this be? I believe it stems from a misunderstanding of what success looks like. The post highlighted three of the most successful pieces of content Distilled created for Simply Business. However, focusing on those three pieces of content doesn’t provide the full picture. We didn’t make just three pieces of content; we made twenty-one. Here are the results of those pieces: That’s links from 1466 domains built to 19 pieces of content over a period of 3 years. The myth in question is as follows:
Though this wasn’t the hypothesis explicitly stated at the start of the post, it was later clarified in a comment. However, that’s not necessarily how this works. An accurate description of what works would be:
To hold up, the myth required a directly attributable jump in rankings and organic traffic within approximately 3 months of the release of each piece of content. So where was the bump? The anticipated reward for all those links? No. The movement we’re looking for is here: Not a jump, but a general trend. Up and to the right. Below is a SEMRush graph from the original post, showing estimated organic traffic to the Simply Business site: At first glance, the graph between 2012 and 2014 might look unremarkable, but that’s because the four large spikes on the right-hand side push the rest of the chart down, creating a flattening effect. There’s actually a 170% rise in traffic from June 2012 to June 2014. To see that more clearly, here’s the same data (up to June 2014) on a different scale: Paints quite a different picture, don’t you think? Okay, but what did this do for the company? Did they see an increase in rankings for valuable terms, or just terms related to the content itself? Over the duration of these link building campaigns, Simply Business saw their most important keywords (“professional indemnity insurance” and “public liability insurance”) move from positions 3 to 1 and 3 to 2, respectively. While writing this post, I contacted Jasper Martens, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, now VP of Marketing at PensionBee. Jasper told me:
That translates to money. A serious amount of it! Simply Business also saw ranking improvements for other commercial terms, too. Here’s a small sample: Note: This data was taken from a third-party tool, Sistrix. Data from third-party tools, as used both in this post and the original post, should be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t provide a totally accurate picture, but they can give you some indication of the direction of movement. I notice Simply Business still ranks #1 today for some of their top commercial keywords, such as “professional indemnity insurance.” That’s pretty incredible in a market filled with some seriously big players, household UK names with familiar TV ads and much bigger budgets. Why success looks like it doesI remember the first time I was responsible for a piece of content going viral. The social shares, traffic, and links were rolling in. This was it! Link building nirvana! I was sitting back waiting for the rankings, organic traffic, and revenue to follow. That day didn’t come. I was gutted. I felt robbed! I’ve come to terms with it now. But at the time, it was a blow. I assume most SEOs know it doesn’t work that way. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s an assumption that one big burst in links will result in a jump in rankings, as discussed in the original post. That’s the myth it was seeking to dispel. I get it. I’ve been there, too. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And, actually, it makes sense that it doesn’t.
The Google algorithm is an incredibly complex equation. It’s tempting to think that you put links in and you get rankings out, and a big jump in one will correspond to a big jump in the other. But the math involved is far more complicated than that. It’s not that linear. Other factors to considerLink building alone won’t improve your rankings. There are a number of other influential factors at play. At a high level, these include:
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I wanted to mention that you need to consider these factors and more when reviewing the impact of link building on a site’s rankings. Below is the graph from SearchMetrics for Concert Hotels, also via the original post. This is another site to which Distilled built a high volume of links. As you can possibly tell from the large drop before Distilled started working with Concert Hotels, the site was suffering from an algorithmic penalty. We proceeded under the hypothesis that building high-quality links, alongside other on-site activity, would be important in the site’s recovery. However, after three or four large link building successes without any corresponding uplift, we recommended to the client that we stop building links and shift all resources to focus on other activities. As you’ll see at the end of the chart, there appears to be some positive movement happening. If and when the site fully recovers, we’ll never be able to tell exactly what contribution, if any, link building made to the site’s eventual rankings. You can’t take the above as proof that link building doesn’t work. You have to consider the other factors that might be affecting a site’s performance. How can we improve our approach?As I mentioned at the start of this post, I actually agree with a lot of the points raised in the original post. In particular, there were some strong points made about the topical relevance of the content you create and the way in which the content sits within the site architecture. Ideally, the content you create to gain links would be:
This can be a challenge, though, especially in certain industries, and you might not hit the sweet spot every time. But let’s look at them in turn. Topical relevanceIf you can create a piece of content that gains links and is closely relevant to your product and what you do for customers, that’s great. That’s the ideal. To give you an example of this, Distilled created a career aptitude test for Rasmussen, a career-focused college in America. This page earned links from 156 linking root domains (according to the Majestic Historic Index), and the site continues to rank well and drive relevant search traffic to the site. Another example would be Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors. Building lots of links to that page will certainly drive relevant and valuable traffic to the Moz site, as well as contributing to the overall strength of the domain. However, your content doesn’t have to be about your product, as long as it’s relevant to your audience. In the case of Simply Business, the core audience (small business owners) doesn’t care about insurance as much as it cares about growing its businesses. That’s why we created several guides to small business marketing, which also gained lots of links. As Jasper Martens explains:
Integrating the content into the site architectureDistilled often places content outside the main architecture of the site. I’ll accept this isn’t optimal, but just for context, let me explain the reasons behind it:
While it worked for Simply Business, it would make sense, where you can, to pull these things into the normal site architecture to help distribute link equity further. Content that’s valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)Google is always changing. What’s working now and what’s worked in the past won’t necessarily continue to be the case. The most future-proof way you can build links to your site is via activity that’s valuable in its own right — activities like PR, branding, and growing your audience online. So where do we go from here?Link building via content marketing campaigns can still make a positive impact to domain-wide rankings. However, it’s important to enter any link building campaign with realistic expectations. The results might not be as direct and immediate as you might hope. You need to be in it for the long haul, and build links to a number of pieces of content over time before you’ll really see results. When looking for results, focus on overall trends, not month-to-month movements. Remember that link building alone won’t solve your SEO. You need to make sure you take other on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors into consideration. It’s always worth refining the way you’re building links. The closer the topics are aligned with your product or core audience’s interests, the more the content is integrated into your site’s architecture, and the more the content you’re creating is valuable for reasons beyond SEO, the better. It’s not easy to manage that every time, but if you can, you’ll be in a good position to sustainably build links and improve your site’s rankings over time. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! Article source here: What Link Building Success Really Looks Like via Tumblr What Link Building Success Really Looks Like Posted by mark-johnstone A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, I’d like to add some important context and detail to the original post. I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it’s based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success. I wouldn’t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend. “Trend” is the important word here. If you’re looking for a dramatic step or jump as a direct result of one piece of viral content, this could cause you to overlook a positive trend in the right direction, and even tempt you to conclude that this form of content-based link building doesn’t work. With regards to this type of link building and its impact on domain-wide rankings, I’d like to focus on the follow 4 points:
What successful link building really looks likeSimply Business was held up in the SEO myth post as an example of this kind of link building not working. I would argue the opposite, holding it up as an example of it working. So how can this be? I believe it stems from a misunderstanding of what success looks like. The post highlighted three of the most successful pieces of content Distilled created for Simply Business. However, focusing on those three pieces of content doesn’t provide the full picture. We didn’t make just three pieces of content; we made twenty-one. Here are the results of those pieces: That’s links from 1466 domains built to 19 pieces of content over a period of 3 years. The myth in question is as follows:
Though this wasn’t the hypothesis explicitly stated at the start of the post, it was later clarified in a comment. However, that’s not necessarily how this works. An accurate description of what works would be:
To hold up, the myth required a directly attributable jump in rankings and organic traffic within approximately 3 months of the release of each piece of content. So where was the bump? The anticipated reward for all those links? No. The movement we’re looking for is here: Not a jump, but a general trend. Up and to the right. Below is a SEMRush graph from the original post, showing estimated organic traffic to the Simply Business site: At first glance, the graph between 2012 and 2014 might look unremarkable, but that’s because the four large spikes on the right-hand side push the rest of the chart down, creating a flattening effect. There’s actually a 170% rise in traffic from June 2012 to June 2014. To see that more clearly, here’s the same data (up to June 2014) on a different scale: Paints quite a different picture, don’t you think? Okay, but what did this do for the company? Did they see an increase in rankings for valuable terms, or just terms related to the content itself? Over the duration of these link building campaigns, Simply Business saw their most important keywords (“professional indemnity insurance” and “public liability insurance”) move from positions 3 to 1 and 3 to 2, respectively. While writing this post, I contacted Jasper Martens, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, now VP of Marketing at PensionBee. Jasper told me:
That translates to money. A serious amount of it! Simply Business also saw ranking improvements for other commercial terms, too. Here’s a small sample: Note: This data was taken from a third-party tool, Sistrix. Data from third-party tools, as used both in this post and the original post, should be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t provide a totally accurate picture, but they can give you some indication of the direction of movement. I notice Simply Business still ranks #1 today for some of their top commercial keywords, such as “professional indemnity insurance.” That’s pretty incredible in a market filled with some seriously big players, household UK names with familiar TV ads and much bigger budgets. Why success looks like it doesI remember the first time I was responsible for a piece of content going viral. The social shares, traffic, and links were rolling in. This was it! Link building nirvana! I was sitting back waiting for the rankings, organic traffic, and revenue to follow. That day didn’t come. I was gutted. I felt robbed! I’ve come to terms with it now. But at the time, it was a blow. I assume most SEOs know it doesn’t work that way. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s an assumption that one big burst in links will result in a jump in rankings, as discussed in the original post. That’s the myth it was seeking to dispel. I get it. I’ve been there, too. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And, actually, it makes sense that it doesn’t.
The Google algorithm is an incredibly complex equation. It’s tempting to think that you put links in and you get rankings out, and a big jump in one will correspond to a big jump in the other. But the math involved is far more complicated than that. It’s not that linear. Other factors to considerLink building alone won’t improve your rankings. There are a number of other influential factors at play. At a high level, these include:
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I wanted to mention that you need to consider these factors and more when reviewing the impact of link building on a site’s rankings. Below is the graph from SearchMetrics for Concert Hotels, also via the original post. This is another site to which Distilled built a high volume of links. As you can possibly tell from the large drop before Distilled started working with Concert Hotels, the site was suffering from an algorithmic penalty. We proceeded under the hypothesis that building high-quality links, alongside other on-site activity, would be important in the site’s recovery. However, after three or four large link building successes without any corresponding uplift, we recommended to the client that we stop building links and shift all resources to focus on other activities. As you’ll see at the end of the chart, there appears to be some positive movement happening. If and when the site fully recovers, we’ll never be able to tell exactly what contribution, if any, link building made to the site’s eventual rankings. You can’t take the above as proof that link building doesn’t work. You have to consider the other factors that might be affecting a site’s performance. How can we improve our approach?As I mentioned at the start of this post, I actually agree with a lot of the points raised in the original post. In particular, there were some strong points made about the topical relevance of the content you create and the way in which the content sits within the site architecture. Ideally, the content you create to gain links would be:
This can be a challenge, though, especially in certain industries, and you might not hit the sweet spot every time. But let’s look at them in turn. Topical relevanceIf you can create a piece of content that gains links and is closely relevant to your product and what you do for customers, that’s great. That’s the ideal. To give you an example of this, Distilled created a career aptitude test for Rasmussen, a career-focused college in America. This page earned links from 156 linking root domains (according to the Majestic Historic Index), and the site continues to rank well and drive relevant search traffic to the site. Another example would be Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors. Building lots of links to that page will certainly drive relevant and valuable traffic to the Moz site, as well as contributing to the overall strength of the domain. However, your content doesn’t have to be about your product, as long as it’s relevant to your audience. In the case of Simply Business, the core audience (small business owners) doesn’t care about insurance as much as it cares about growing its businesses. That’s why we created several guides to small business marketing, which also gained lots of links. As Jasper Martens explains:
Integrating the content into the site architectureDistilled often places content outside the main architecture of the site. I’ll accept this isn’t optimal, but just for context, let me explain the reasons behind it:
While it worked for Simply Business, it would make sense, where you can, to pull these things into the normal site architecture to help distribute link equity further. Content that’s valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)Google is always changing. What’s working now and what’s worked in the past won’t necessarily continue to be the case. The most future-proof way you can build links to your site is via activity that’s valuable in its own right — activities like PR, branding, and growing your audience online. So where do we go from here?Link building via content marketing campaigns can still make a positive impact to domain-wide rankings. However, it’s important to enter any link building campaign with realistic expectations. The results might not be as direct and immediate as you might hope. You need to be in it for the long haul, and build links to a number of pieces of content over time before you’ll really see results. When looking for results, focus on overall trends, not month-to-month movements. Remember that link building alone won’t solve your SEO. You need to make sure you take other on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors into consideration. It’s always worth refining the way you’re building links. The closer the topics are aligned with your product or core audience’s interests, the more the content is integrated into your site’s architecture, and the more the content you’re creating is valuable for reasons beyond SEO, the better. It’s not easy to manage that every time, but if you can, you’ll be in a good position to sustainably build links and improve your site’s rankings over time. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! What Link Building Success Really Looks Like published first on your-t1-blog-url via Tumblr What Link Building Success Really Looks Like Posted by mark-johnstone A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, I’d like to add some important context and detail to the original post. I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it’s based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success. I wouldn’t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend. “Trend” is the important word here. If you’re looking for a dramatic step or jump as a direct result of one piece of viral content, this could cause you to overlook a positive trend in the right direction, and even tempt you to conclude that this form of content-based link building doesn’t work. With regards to this type of link building and its impact on domain-wide rankings, I’d like to focus on the follow 4 points:
What successful link building really looks likeSimply Business was held up in the SEO myth post as an example of this kind of link building not working. I would argue the opposite, holding it up as an example of it working. So how can this be? I believe it stems from a misunderstanding of what success looks like. The post highlighted three of the most successful pieces of content Distilled created for Simply Business. However, focusing on those three pieces of content doesn’t provide the full picture. We didn’t make just three pieces of content; we made twenty-one. Here are the results of those pieces: That’s links from 1466 domains built to 19 pieces of content over a period of 3 years. The myth in question is as follows:
Though this wasn’t the hypothesis explicitly stated at the start of the post, it was later clarified in a comment. However, that’s not necessarily how this works. An accurate description of what works would be:
To hold up, the myth required a directly attributable jump in rankings and organic traffic within approximately 3 months of the release of each piece of content. So where was the bump? The anticipated reward for all those links? No. The movement we’re looking for is here: Not a jump, but a general trend. Up and to the right. Below is a SEMRush graph from the original post, showing estimated organic traffic to the Simply Business site: At first glance, the graph between 2012 and 2014 might look unremarkable, but that’s because the four large spikes on the right-hand side push the rest of the chart down, creating a flattening effect. There’s actually a 170% rise in traffic from June 2012 to June 2014. To see that more clearly, here’s the same data (up to June 2014) on a different scale: Paints quite a different picture, don’t you think? Okay, but what did this do for the company? Did they see an increase in rankings for valuable terms, or just terms related to the content itself? Over the duration of these link building campaigns, Simply Business saw their most important keywords (“professional indemnity insurance” and “public liability insurance”) move from positions 3 to 1 and 3 to 2, respectively. While writing this post, I contacted Jasper Martens, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, now VP of Marketing at PensionBee. Jasper told me:
That translates to money. A serious amount of it! Simply Business also saw ranking improvements for other commercial terms, too. Here’s a small sample: Note: This data was taken from a third-party tool, Sistrix. Data from third-party tools, as used both in this post and the original post, should be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t provide a totally accurate picture, but they can give you some indication of the direction of movement. I notice Simply Business still ranks #1 today for some of their top commercial keywords, such as “professional indemnity insurance.” That’s pretty incredible in a market filled with some seriously big players, household UK names with familiar TV ads and much bigger budgets. Why success looks like it doesI remember the first time I was responsible for a piece of content going viral. The social shares, traffic, and links were rolling in. This was it! Link building nirvana! I was sitting back waiting for the rankings, organic traffic, and revenue to follow. That day didn’t come. I was gutted. I felt robbed! I’ve come to terms with it now. But at the time, it was a blow. I assume most SEOs know it doesn’t work that way. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s an assumption that one big burst in links will result in a jump in rankings, as discussed in the original post. That’s the myth it was seeking to dispel. I get it. I’ve been there, too. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And, actually, it makes sense that it doesn’t.
The Google algorithm is an incredibly complex equation. It’s tempting to think that you put links in and you get rankings out, and a big jump in one will correspond to a big jump in the other. But the math involved is far more complicated than that. It’s not that linear. Other factors to considerLink building alone won’t improve your rankings. There are a number of other influential factors at play. At a high level, these include:
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I wanted to mention that you need to consider these factors and more when reviewing the impact of link building on a site’s rankings. Below is the graph from SearchMetrics for Concert Hotels, also via the original post. This is another site to which Distilled built a high volume of links. As you can possibly tell from the large drop before Distilled started working with Concert Hotels, the site was suffering from an algorithmic penalty. We proceeded under the hypothesis that building high-quality links, alongside other on-site activity, would be important in the site’s recovery. However, after three or four large link building successes without any corresponding uplift, we recommended to the client that we stop building links and shift all resources to focus on other activities. As you’ll see at the end of the chart, there appears to be some positive movement happening. If and when the site fully recovers, we’ll never be able to tell exactly what contribution, if any, link building made to the site’s eventual rankings. You can’t take the above as proof that link building doesn’t work. You have to consider the other factors that might be affecting a site’s performance. How can we improve our approach?As I mentioned at the start of this post, I actually agree with a lot of the points raised in the original post. In particular, there were some strong points made about the topical relevance of the content you create and the way in which the content sits within the site architecture. Ideally, the content you create to gain links would be:
This can be a challenge, though, especially in certain industries, and you might not hit the sweet spot every time. But let’s look at them in turn. Topical relevanceIf you can create a piece of content that gains links and is closely relevant to your product and what you do for customers, that’s great. That’s the ideal. To give you an example of this, Distilled created a career aptitude test for Rasmussen, a career-focused college in America. This page earned links from 156 linking root domains (according to the Majestic Historic Index), and the site continues to rank well and drive relevant search traffic to the site. Another example would be Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors. Building lots of links to that page will certainly drive relevant and valuable traffic to the Moz site, as well as contributing to the overall strength of the domain. However, your content doesn’t have to be about your product, as long as it’s relevant to your audience. In the case of Simply Business, the core audience (small business owners) doesn’t care about insurance as much as it cares about growing its businesses. That’s why we created several guides to small business marketing, which also gained lots of links. As Jasper Martens explains:
Integrating the content into the site architectureDistilled often places content outside the main architecture of the site. I’ll accept this isn’t optimal, but just for context, let me explain the reasons behind it:
While it worked for Simply Business, it would make sense, where you can, to pull these things into the normal site architecture to help distribute link equity further. Content that’s valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)Google is always changing. What’s working now and what’s worked in the past won’t necessarily continue to be the case. The most future-proof way you can build links to your site is via activity that’s valuable in its own right — activities like PR, branding, and growing your audience online. So where do we go from here?Link building via content marketing campaigns can still make a positive impact to domain-wide rankings. However, it’s important to enter any link building campaign with realistic expectations. The results might not be as direct and immediate as you might hope. You need to be in it for the long haul, and build links to a number of pieces of content over time before you’ll really see results. When looking for results, focus on overall trends, not month-to-month movements. Remember that link building alone won’t solve your SEO. You need to make sure you take other on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors into consideration. It’s always worth refining the way you’re building links. The closer the topics are aligned with your product or core audience’s interests, the more the content is integrated into your site’s architecture, and the more the content you’re creating is valuable for reasons beyond SEO, the better. It’s not easy to manage that every time, but if you can, you’ll be in a good position to sustainably build links and improve your site’s rankings over time. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! Article source here: What Link Building Success Really Looks Like via Tumblr What Link Building Success Really Looks Like Posted by Alex-T SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it. Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here’s what I’ve learned so far:
In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels you’re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your site’s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, organic channels bring more traffic to SMM-focused blogs than to SEO-focused ones. Data and methodsTo conduct my research, I included in my sample 10 well-known blogs. Five blogs that specialize in search marketing:
And five blogs that focus on SMM: During all stages of my research, I also used the following tools:
Without further ado, let’s begin our analysis! How effectively do SMM blogs trigger user engagement?First, I went to SimilarWeb to learn which sources drove traffic to these sites in order to determine “winners” and “losers.” I expected that social media-focused blogs would perform much better when it comes to SMM traffic compared to SEO blogs. It sounds reasonable that SMM blogs know better than others how to attract and build relevant communities on social media and then convert them into loyal readers. Below you can find a graph that represents the distribution of SMM traffic across all the resources studied: The absolute winner is socialmediatoday.com with 2.6 times more visitors from social media channels compared to seroundtable.com, which follows it. It’s also worth mentioning that the other two leaders are blogs that are not from the SMM niche: seroundtable.com (11.63 percent of traffic coming from SMM channels) and searchenginejournal.com (10.75 percent). The top three sites that are leading in organic traffic are all SMM-focused blogs that get more visitors from organic results than social media sites. This data supports my assertion about the role of SMM in the SEO process that I mentioned in the first part of this article: Blog.bufferapp.com, razorsocial.com, and socialmediaexaminer.com received 5 times more organic traffic compared to social media traffic. And the main reason is because users interact with content shared on social media channels. From examining my own clients’ Twitter and Facebook analytics insights, it’s clear that users are more likely to like or share content rather than click on it. To earn a sufficient number of visitors from social media sources, you need to keep a close eye on what kind of posts not only engage users, but also get clicks. And if your goal is to drive traffic, then you need to focus on writing engaging tweets that will make your followers want to click on them. At the very least, you have to make sure that you actually include a link in your post. Because — let’s face it — we’ve all forgotten to share a link in our tweet at least once. Speaking of search marketing blogs in organic results, they’re also performing nearly the same as SMM blogs:
After learning how much traffic those blogs received from social media channels, I was quite keen on finding out exactly how they attract visitors. In particular, I was interested in whether the virality of content, as well as the engagement of particular SMM sites, influence the number of visitors these sites get from those traffic channels. Ideally, if users are actively sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, etc., then it should bring users to your site. Due to the difficulty of collecting data, I was forced to narrow down the list of SMM sites and focus on analyzing how well content performs on Facebook and Twitter. In order to measure the virality of the content on those blogs and the engagement these blogs receive on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I took the following steps:
As we can see from the table above, SMM websites are leading not only in levels of engagement, but also in traffic. Therefore, websites that successfully build and share content also receive the highest volume of traffic. However, it is important to have relevant, active users following your social accounts. And you can always evaluate them with the help of Rival IQ, which helps you measure your audience’s engagement. Yet engagement on its own is a very vague measurement, should you need to understand how much traffic you can receive from your social media accounts. For the next step of my research, I was interested in discovering how many interactions you need, on average, to get your followers to click a link. Based on the numbers from the table above, I found out that, on average, for every 40 interactions, you will only get one click (in case of an SEO community). Despite the fact that SMM communities usually have more subscribers than SEO communities, it’s even harder for SMM communities to get clicks: one click occurs for every 80 interactions on social media. Hence, the problem lies not in the small number of subscribers, but in the small number of active, relevant followers. Relevant users are those who are interested in your content and will click on your links and share them. My tip here is not to grow your audience via “follow-back” strategies; to drive traffic, you need to connect with people who are interested in your message, so that they can spread it further. If content works so well for SMM blogs, then it should generate a good number of links. This brings us to my next questions: How many links do those sites generate, and who leads the competition? How well do SEO blogs perform in organic results?As you remember, at the very beginning of my research, I made the assumption that SEO blogs were more likely to receive referral traffic than SMM blogs. Also, I assumed that SEO blogs should also have a good backlink profile with a large number of authoritative links. It seems only logical to suppose that SEO blogs are outperforming SMM blogs in terms of SEO. To find out whether this is true, I used Ahrefs to check the backlink profiles of the sites from my sample. Ahrefs has an awesome feature called ‘Batch Analysis’ that allows you to pull backlink metrics for several individual URLs and easily compare them. The screenshot below gives us a clear picture of the domains’ rankings and their number of backlinks: Interestingly enough, searchengineland.com has gained the highest number of referring domains, and it has shown the highest rate of Facebook and Twitter engagement. In terms of referral traffic, simplymeasured.com has the highest rate (17%) and is followed by two blogs from the search marketing niche: seroundtable.com (15%) and searchengineland.com (13%). However, all the analyzed sites receive relatively the same number of visitors from referring domains, because all of them are actively sharing content on SMM channels. With the help of this strategy they’re getting links and traffic. After analyzing all this data, I concluded that social media helps you to get you content seen, which in turn can substantially increase your number of brand mentions on the Web. The better you promote your content across SMM channels, the more referring domains you will receive. The case of socialmediaexaminer.com supports my statement about the importance of social media channels in link building. As you remember, this blog is focused on SMM, but it has relatively the same number of backlinks as searchenginejournal.com and marketingland.com. To check the relevance of my results, I decided to ask an expert’s opinion on the importance of harnessing social media as part of an overall SEO strategy. Kelsey Jones, executive editor of Search Engine Journal and Founder/CEO of StoryShout, was very kind to share her insights on how social media is powering searchenginejournal.com:
Conclusion
In this post, I wanted to shed some light on how leading digital marketing blogs focused on SMM and SEO niches attract visitors, and what traffic sources work best for them. It’s quite logical to assume that blogs focused on search marketing should be getting significantly more organic traffic compared to blogs that write about SMM. Accordingly, SMM blogs should be receiving the majority of their visitors from social media channels, since social media marketing is their area of expertise. Yet, I found out that the situation is much more nuanced than that. Drawing on examples using these ten well-known SEO and SMM blogs, we can see that SMM-focused blogs perform better in organic search than SEO-focused blogs. The high levels of engagement SMM blogs receive from social media allow them to get more backlinks and referral traffic, which, in turn, helps them rank higher organically. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! Article source here: The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing via Tumblr The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing Posted by Alex-T SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it. Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here’s what I’ve learned so far:
In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels you’re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your site’s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, organic channels bring more traffic to SMM-focused blogs than to SEO-focused ones. Data and methodsTo conduct my research, I included in my sample 10 well-known blogs. Five blogs that specialize in search marketing:
And five blogs that focus on SMM: During all stages of my research, I also used the following tools:
Without further ado, let’s begin our analysis! How effectively do SMM blogs trigger user engagement?First, I went to SimilarWeb to learn which sources drove traffic to these sites in order to determine “winners” and “losers.” I expected that social media-focused blogs would perform much better when it comes to SMM traffic compared to SEO blogs. It sounds reasonable that SMM blogs know better than others how to attract and build relevant communities on social media and then convert them into loyal readers. Below you can find a graph that represents the distribution of SMM traffic across all the resources studied: The absolute winner is socialmediatoday.com with 2.6 times more visitors from social media channels compared to seroundtable.com, which follows it. It’s also worth mentioning that the other two leaders are blogs that are not from the SMM niche: seroundtable.com (11.63 percent of traffic coming from SMM channels) and searchenginejournal.com (10.75 percent). The top three sites that are leading in organic traffic are all SMM-focused blogs that get more visitors from organic results than social media sites. This data supports my assertion about the role of SMM in the SEO process that I mentioned in the first part of this article: Blog.bufferapp.com, razorsocial.com, and socialmediaexaminer.com received 5 times more organic traffic compared to social media traffic. And the main reason is because users interact with content shared on social media channels. From examining my own clients’ Twitter and Facebook analytics insights, it’s clear that users are more likely to like or share content rather than click on it. To earn a sufficient number of visitors from social media sources, you need to keep a close eye on what kind of posts not only engage users, but also get clicks. And if your goal is to drive traffic, then you need to focus on writing engaging tweets that will make your followers want to click on them. At the very least, you have to make sure that you actually include a link in your post. Because — let’s face it — we’ve all forgotten to share a link in our tweet at least once. Speaking of search marketing blogs in organic results, they’re also performing nearly the same as SMM blogs:
After learning how much traffic those blogs received from social media channels, I was quite keen on finding out exactly how they attract visitors. In particular, I was interested in whether the virality of content, as well as the engagement of particular SMM sites, influence the number of visitors these sites get from those traffic channels. Ideally, if users are actively sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, etc., then it should bring users to your site. Due to the difficulty of collecting data, I was forced to narrow down the list of SMM sites and focus on analyzing how well content performs on Facebook and Twitter. In order to measure the virality of the content on those blogs and the engagement these blogs receive on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I took the following steps:
As we can see from the table above, SMM websites are leading not only in levels of engagement, but also in traffic. Therefore, websites that successfully build and share content also receive the highest volume of traffic. However, it is important to have relevant, active users following your social accounts. And you can always evaluate them with the help of Rival IQ, which helps you measure your audience’s engagement. Yet engagement on its own is a very vague measurement, should you need to understand how much traffic you can receive from your social media accounts. For the next step of my research, I was interested in discovering how many interactions you need, on average, to get your followers to click a link. Based on the numbers from the table above, I found out that, on average, for every 40 interactions, you will only get one click (in case of an SEO community). Despite the fact that SMM communities usually have more subscribers than SEO communities, it’s even harder for SMM communities to get clicks: one click occurs for every 80 interactions on social media. Hence, the problem lies not in the small number of subscribers, but in the small number of active, relevant followers. Relevant users are those who are interested in your content and will click on your links and share them. My tip here is not to grow your audience via “follow-back” strategies; to drive traffic, you need to connect with people who are interested in your message, so that they can spread it further. If content works so well for SMM blogs, then it should generate a good number of links. This brings us to my next questions: How many links do those sites generate, and who leads the competition? How well do SEO blogs perform in organic results?As you remember, at the very beginning of my research, I made the assumption that SEO blogs were more likely to receive referral traffic than SMM blogs. Also, I assumed that SEO blogs should also have a good backlink profile with a large number of authoritative links. It seems only logical to suppose that SEO blogs are outperforming SMM blogs in terms of SEO. To find out whether this is true, I used Ahrefs to check the backlink profiles of the sites from my sample. Ahrefs has an awesome feature called ‘Batch Analysis’ that allows you to pull backlink metrics for several individual URLs and easily compare them. The screenshot below gives us a clear picture of the domains’ rankings and their number of backlinks: Interestingly enough, searchengineland.com has gained the highest number of referring domains, and it has shown the highest rate of Facebook and Twitter engagement. In terms of referral traffic, simplymeasured.com has the highest rate (17%) and is followed by two blogs from the search marketing niche: seroundtable.com (15%) and searchengineland.com (13%). However, all the analyzed sites receive relatively the same number of visitors from referring domains, because all of them are actively sharing content on SMM channels. With the help of this strategy they’re getting links and traffic. After analyzing all this data, I concluded that social media helps you to get you content seen, which in turn can substantially increase your number of brand mentions on the Web. The better you promote your content across SMM channels, the more referring domains you will receive. The case of socialmediaexaminer.com supports my statement about the importance of social media channels in link building. As you remember, this blog is focused on SMM, but it has relatively the same number of backlinks as searchenginejournal.com and marketingland.com. To check the relevance of my results, I decided to ask an expert’s opinion on the importance of harnessing social media as part of an overall SEO strategy. Kelsey Jones, executive editor of Search Engine Journal and Founder/CEO of StoryShout, was very kind to share her insights on how social media is powering searchenginejournal.com:
Conclusion
In this post, I wanted to shed some light on how leading digital marketing blogs focused on SMM and SEO niches attract visitors, and what traffic sources work best for them. It’s quite logical to assume that blogs focused on search marketing should be getting significantly more organic traffic compared to blogs that write about SMM. Accordingly, SMM blogs should be receiving the majority of their visitors from social media channels, since social media marketing is their area of expertise. Yet, I found out that the situation is much more nuanced than that. Drawing on examples using these ten well-known SEO and SMM blogs, we can see that SMM-focused blogs perform better in organic search than SEO-focused blogs. The high levels of engagement SMM blogs receive from social media allow them to get more backlinks and referral traffic, which, in turn, helps them rank higher organically. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing published first on your-t1-blog-url via Tumblr The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing Posted by Alex-T SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it. Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here’s what I’ve learned so far:
In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels you’re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your site’s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, organic channels bring more traffic to SMM-focused blogs than to SEO-focused ones. Data and methodsTo conduct my research, I included in my sample 10 well-known blogs. Five blogs that specialize in search marketing:
And five blogs that focus on SMM: During all stages of my research, I also used the following tools:
Without further ado, let’s begin our analysis! How effectively do SMM blogs trigger user engagement?First, I went to SimilarWeb to learn which sources drove traffic to these sites in order to determine “winners” and “losers.” I expected that social media-focused blogs would perform much better when it comes to SMM traffic compared to SEO blogs. It sounds reasonable that SMM blogs know better than others how to attract and build relevant communities on social media and then convert them into loyal readers. Below you can find a graph that represents the distribution of SMM traffic across all the resources studied: The absolute winner is socialmediatoday.com with 2.6 times more visitors from social media channels compared to seroundtable.com, which follows it. It’s also worth mentioning that the other two leaders are blogs that are not from the SMM niche: seroundtable.com (11.63 percent of traffic coming from SMM channels) and searchenginejournal.com (10.75 percent). The top three sites that are leading in organic traffic are all SMM-focused blogs that get more visitors from organic results than social media sites. This data supports my assertion about the role of SMM in the SEO process that I mentioned in the first part of this article: Blog.bufferapp.com, razorsocial.com, and socialmediaexaminer.com received 5 times more organic traffic compared to social media traffic. And the main reason is because users interact with content shared on social media channels. From examining my own clients’ Twitter and Facebook analytics insights, it’s clear that users are more likely to like or share content rather than click on it. To earn a sufficient number of visitors from social media sources, you need to keep a close eye on what kind of posts not only engage users, but also get clicks. And if your goal is to drive traffic, then you need to focus on writing engaging tweets that will make your followers want to click on them. At the very least, you have to make sure that you actually include a link in your post. Because — let’s face it — we’ve all forgotten to share a link in our tweet at least once. Speaking of search marketing blogs in organic results, they’re also performing nearly the same as SMM blogs:
After learning how much traffic those blogs received from social media channels, I was quite keen on finding out exactly how they attract visitors. In particular, I was interested in whether the virality of content, as well as the engagement of particular SMM sites, influence the number of visitors these sites get from those traffic channels. Ideally, if users are actively sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, etc., then it should bring users to your site. Due to the difficulty of collecting data, I was forced to narrow down the list of SMM sites and focus on analyzing how well content performs on Facebook and Twitter. In order to measure the virality of the content on those blogs and the engagement these blogs receive on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I took the following steps:
As we can see from the table above, SMM websites are leading not only in levels of engagement, but also in traffic. Therefore, websites that successfully build and share content also receive the highest volume of traffic. However, it is important to have relevant, active users following your social accounts. And you can always evaluate them with the help of Rival IQ, which helps you measure your audience’s engagement. Yet engagement on its own is a very vague measurement, should you need to understand how much traffic you can receive from your social media accounts. For the next step of my research, I was interested in discovering how many interactions you need, on average, to get your followers to click a link. Based on the numbers from the table above, I found out that, on average, for every 40 interactions, you will only get one click (in case of an SEO community). Despite the fact that SMM communities usually have more subscribers than SEO communities, it’s even harder for SMM communities to get clicks: one click occurs for every 80 interactions on social media. Hence, the problem lies not in the small number of subscribers, but in the small number of active, relevant followers. Relevant users are those who are interested in your content and will click on your links and share them. My tip here is not to grow your audience via “follow-back” strategies; to drive traffic, you need to connect with people who are interested in your message, so that they can spread it further. If content works so well for SMM blogs, then it should generate a good number of links. This brings us to my next questions: How many links do those sites generate, and who leads the competition? How well do SEO blogs perform in organic results?As you remember, at the very beginning of my research, I made the assumption that SEO blogs were more likely to receive referral traffic than SMM blogs. Also, I assumed that SEO blogs should also have a good backlink profile with a large number of authoritative links. It seems only logical to suppose that SEO blogs are outperforming SMM blogs in terms of SEO. To find out whether this is true, I used Ahrefs to check the backlink profiles of the sites from my sample. Ahrefs has an awesome feature called ‘Batch Analysis’ that allows you to pull backlink metrics for several individual URLs and easily compare them. The screenshot below gives us a clear picture of the domains’ rankings and their number of backlinks: Interestingly enough, searchengineland.com has gained the highest number of referring domains, and it has shown the highest rate of Facebook and Twitter engagement. In terms of referral traffic, simplymeasured.com has the highest rate (17%) and is followed by two blogs from the search marketing niche: seroundtable.com (15%) and searchengineland.com (13%). However, all the analyzed sites receive relatively the same number of visitors from referring domains, because all of them are actively sharing content on SMM channels. With the help of this strategy they’re getting links and traffic. After analyzing all this data, I concluded that social media helps you to get you content seen, which in turn can substantially increase your number of brand mentions on the Web. The better you promote your content across SMM channels, the more referring domains you will receive. The case of socialmediaexaminer.com supports my statement about the importance of social media channels in link building. As you remember, this blog is focused on SMM, but it has relatively the same number of backlinks as searchenginejournal.com and marketingland.com. To check the relevance of my results, I decided to ask an expert’s opinion on the importance of harnessing social media as part of an overall SEO strategy. Kelsey Jones, executive editor of Search Engine Journal and Founder/CEO of StoryShout, was very kind to share her insights on how social media is powering searchenginejournal.com:
Conclusion
In this post, I wanted to shed some light on how leading digital marketing blogs focused on SMM and SEO niches attract visitors, and what traffic sources work best for them. It’s quite logical to assume that blogs focused on search marketing should be getting significantly more organic traffic compared to blogs that write about SMM. Accordingly, SMM blogs should be receiving the majority of their visitors from social media channels, since social media marketing is their area of expertise. Yet, I found out that the situation is much more nuanced than that. Drawing on examples using these ten well-known SEO and SMM blogs, we can see that SMM-focused blogs perform better in organic search than SEO-focused blogs. The high levels of engagement SMM blogs receive from social media allow them to get more backlinks and referral traffic, which, in turn, helps them rank higher organically. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! Article source here: The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing via Tumblr The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing Posted by Alex-T SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it. Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here’s what I’ve learned so far:
In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels you’re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your site’s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, organic channels bring more traffic to SMM-focused blogs than to SEO-focused ones. Data and methodsTo conduct my research, I included in my sample 10 well-known blogs. Five blogs that specialize in search marketing:
And five blogs that focus on SMM: During all stages of my research, I also used the following tools:
Without further ado, let’s begin our analysis! How effectively do SMM blogs trigger user engagement?First, I went to SimilarWeb to learn which sources drove traffic to these sites in order to determine “winners” and “losers.” I expected that social media-focused blogs would perform much better when it comes to SMM traffic compared to SEO blogs. It sounds reasonable that SMM blogs know better than others how to attract and build relevant communities on social media and then convert them into loyal readers. Below you can find a graph that represents the distribution of SMM traffic across all the resources studied: The absolute winner is socialmediatoday.com with 2.6 times more visitors from social media channels compared to seroundtable.com, which follows it. It’s also worth mentioning that the other two leaders are blogs that are not from the SMM niche: seroundtable.com (11.63 percent of traffic coming from SMM channels) and searchenginejournal.com (10.75 percent). The top three sites that are leading in organic traffic are all SMM-focused blogs that get more visitors from organic results than social media sites. This data supports my assertion about the role of SMM in the SEO process that I mentioned in the first part of this article: Blog.bufferapp.com, razorsocial.com, and socialmediaexaminer.com received 5 times more organic traffic compared to social media traffic. And the main reason is because users interact with content shared on social media channels. From examining my own clients’ Twitter and Facebook analytics insights, it’s clear that users are more likely to like or share content rather than click on it. To earn a sufficient number of visitors from social media sources, you need to keep a close eye on what kind of posts not only engage users, but also get clicks. And if your goal is to drive traffic, then you need to focus on writing engaging tweets that will make your followers want to click on them. At the very least, you have to make sure that you actually include a link in your post. Because — let’s face it — we’ve all forgotten to share a link in our tweet at least once. Speaking of search marketing blogs in organic results, they’re also performing nearly the same as SMM blogs:
After learning how much traffic those blogs received from social media channels, I was quite keen on finding out exactly how they attract visitors. In particular, I was interested in whether the virality of content, as well as the engagement of particular SMM sites, influence the number of visitors these sites get from those traffic channels. Ideally, if users are actively sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, etc., then it should bring users to your site. Due to the difficulty of collecting data, I was forced to narrow down the list of SMM sites and focus on analyzing how well content performs on Facebook and Twitter. In order to measure the virality of the content on those blogs and the engagement these blogs receive on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I took the following steps:
As we can see from the table above, SMM websites are leading not only in levels of engagement, but also in traffic. Therefore, websites that successfully build and share content also receive the highest volume of traffic. However, it is important to have relevant, active users following your social accounts. And you can always evaluate them with the help of Rival IQ, which helps you measure your audience’s engagement. Yet engagement on its own is a very vague measurement, should you need to understand how much traffic you can receive from your social media accounts. For the next step of my research, I was interested in discovering how many interactions you need, on average, to get your followers to click a link. Based on the numbers from the table above, I found out that, on average, for every 40 interactions, you will only get one click (in case of an SEO community). Despite the fact that SMM communities usually have more subscribers than SEO communities, it’s even harder for SMM communities to get clicks: one click occurs for every 80 interactions on social media. Hence, the problem lies not in the small number of subscribers, but in the small number of active, relevant followers. Relevant users are those who are interested in your content and will click on your links and share them. My tip here is not to grow your audience via “follow-back” strategies; to drive traffic, you need to connect with people who are interested in your message, so that they can spread it further. If content works so well for SMM blogs, then it should generate a good number of links. This brings us to my next questions: How many links do those sites generate, and who leads the competition? How well do SEO blogs perform in organic results?As you remember, at the very beginning of my research, I made the assumption that SEO blogs were more likely to receive referral traffic than SMM blogs. Also, I assumed that SEO blogs should also have a good backlink profile with a large number of authoritative links. It seems only logical to suppose that SEO blogs are outperforming SMM blogs in terms of SEO. To find out whether this is true, I used Ahrefs to check the backlink profiles of the sites from my sample. Ahrefs has an awesome feature called ‘Batch Analysis’ that allows you to pull backlink metrics for several individual URLs and easily compare them. The screenshot below gives us a clear picture of the domains’ rankings and their number of backlinks: Interestingly enough, searchengineland.com has gained the highest number of referring domains, and it has shown the highest rate of Facebook and Twitter engagement. In terms of referral traffic, simplymeasured.com has the highest rate (17%) and is followed by two blogs from the search marketing niche: seroundtable.com (15%) and searchengineland.com (13%). However, all the analyzed sites receive relatively the same number of visitors from referring domains, because all of them are actively sharing content on SMM channels. With the help of this strategy they’re getting links and traffic. After analyzing all this data, I concluded that social media helps you to get you content seen, which in turn can substantially increase your number of brand mentions on the Web. The better you promote your content across SMM channels, the more referring domains you will receive. The case of socialmediaexaminer.com supports my statement about the importance of social media channels in link building. As you remember, this blog is focused on SMM, but it has relatively the same number of backlinks as searchenginejournal.com and marketingland.com. To check the relevance of my results, I decided to ask an expert’s opinion on the importance of harnessing social media as part of an overall SEO strategy. Kelsey Jones, executive editor of Search Engine Journal and Founder/CEO of StoryShout, was very kind to share her insights on how social media is powering searchenginejournal.com:
Conclusion
In this post, I wanted to shed some light on how leading digital marketing blogs focused on SMM and SEO niches attract visitors, and what traffic sources work best for them. It’s quite logical to assume that blogs focused on search marketing should be getting significantly more organic traffic compared to blogs that write about SMM. Accordingly, SMM blogs should be receiving the majority of their visitors from social media channels, since social media marketing is their area of expertise. Yet, I found out that the situation is much more nuanced than that. Drawing on examples using these ten well-known SEO and SMM blogs, we can see that SMM-focused blogs perform better in organic search than SEO-focused blogs. The high levels of engagement SMM blogs receive from social media allow them to get more backlinks and referral traffic, which, in turn, helps them rank higher organically. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing published first on your-t1-blog-url via Tumblr The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing |
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