Search, Social and Street Fighter

A Correlation Study

Do signals from social media networks affect search engine rank?

Rich KirkHead of SEO, Performics

Search, Social and Street Fighter

A Correlation Study

Rich KirkHead of SEO, Performics

Do signals from social media networks affect search engine rank?

Search, Social and Street Fighter

A Correlation Study

Rich KirkHead of SEO, Performics

Is there a correlation between visibility in natural

search and a website’s social media equity?

1.25m

SEO Visibility... You need a big dataset

And lots of social data...

• Facebook Likes• Facebook Shares• Facebook Comments• Tweets• +1s• Stumbles• Delicious bookmarks• LinkedIn shares

For some big name UK sites...

Domains

SEO Visibilit

y Score

Referring Links,

Domains etc

Social Links By Channel

My Dataset

Lets pose some questions...

Is there a correlation between visibility in natural search and a

website’s social media equity?

Lets pose some questions...

Why can’t we say conclusively that social

equity is impacting visibility in natural

search?

A basic theory...

Data we’ve seen proves no conclusive link...

Social Links

A Better theory...?

Social Links

A more realistic theory...?

Social Links

Unfortunately it doesn’t prove this...

A concrete example... July 2011

Vote for Roland!!

Does this boost domain SEO Visibility...? Over 80% of all

next.co.uk social links point at Roland

Well over 70’000 social links

No game-changing uplift in links

Does this boost domain SEO Visibility...?

...Not really

Big social link surge ≠ a big rankings jump

Lets pose some questions...

Why all the fuss about social & SEO?

Think of relevance as a currency...

Think of relevance as a currency...

So what...?

Don’t succumb to the hype around social links = SEO

Get Positive RoI from Social

Think about the half life of socially sourced content

Get Positive RoI from Social

Think about the half life of socially sourced content

Short LongHalf Life of Content

Retu

rn o

n Invest

ment

Low

Hig

h

Generic Tweeting

20+ product reviews on major retailers websites

Discounting through social media

Conducting consumer research

Thanks.Dataset on Google+Blog @ performicsworldwide.com

Rich KirkHead of SEO, Performics