New evidence that social media marketing supports SEO

Showing how great content generates more backlinks AND social shares

Value: [rating=4]

Recommended link: SEOmoz post by DanZarrella

Dan Zarrella, the “social media scientist” who works for Hubspot these days, has created a lot of interesting analysis over the years which is great for giving practical ideas of how to improve social media communications - the infographic at the bottom of this post on what is effective in Facebook is one example.

He recently wrote a guest post on SEOmoz I thought was worth sharing since it gives some evidence to help answer the often-asked question - “(How) does Social media marketing support SEO?”

Of course, the number (and especially quality) of inbound links is vital to effective SEO in competitive markets, so this research looks at the correlation of sharing on the social networks with number of backlinks for content share. The results show some positive correlation:

It suggests that LinkedIn is potentially most effective in generating links. The research is perhaps more convincing when looking at the individual charts for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, for example:

You’re probably thinking, “but correlation does not equal causation” and you’d be right to think so; as some commenters point out, you could turn it on its head and say that URLs with a lot of links tend to get shared more on social media. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The research really only confirms the power of quality content in gaining links AND shares. That’s why effective content used to be called linkbait and is now sometimes called sharebait!

Here is the other recent research summary from Dan I thought you might find interesting: