76% of SEOs say they have spent time in the past year setting up and running a Facebook business page, making this the most common inbound marketing-focused action among respondents to an SEOmoz survey of almost 6,500 of its readers from around the world. 64% reported having set up a Google+ business profile, in a tie for the 4th most-common activity. Analytics and competitive analysis also figure prominently in the equation. 74% of the survey respondents analyzed and/or tracked site speed and page-load times, 69% analyzed competitors’ back-links for opportunities, and 64% analyzed competitors’ content for inspiration/opportunities.
Rounding out respondents’ top 10 most common activities in the past year are: analyzing data in Google Analytics (63%); starting a new blog or investing heavily in blogging (59%); using rel=”canonical” to control duplicate content (58%); employing conversion tracking to improve ROI (57%); and focusing on Local SEO (e.g., Google Places, local keyword targeting).
Search marketers’ focus on social media is not new. According to a BrightEdge survey released in January 2012, 84% of search marketers said social signals such as likes, tweets, and Google +1s would be either more important (53%) or much more important (31%) to their SEO this year as compared to 2011, and 98% of the respondents said that social media matters to their organization’s marketing strategy.
Facebook, Twitter Tops Among Social Tools
Not surprisingly, SEOmoz found that Facebook leads the list of most-used social media tools, used by 88% of respondents, followed closely by Twitter (83%). There was then a significant drop in adoption to the next tier of activity, for Google+ (55%), YouTube (49%), LinkedIn, and blogging (both at 47%).
Pinterest is currently used by 21% of SEOs. This is higher than the proportion of agencies in the US who are currently using the site, according to a survey released in August by The Creative Group. According to those results, just 7% are currently using Pinterest, although another 10% plan to start using it. Even so, 18% have never heard of it, and 44% don’t plan to use it for business purposes.
Social Media High on Content Marketing List; Blogging Leads
While blogging was 5th on the top 10 list of social tools employed by SEOs, blog posts led among the types of content that respondents use (73% of all respondents), followed by social media content (e.g. tweets and status updates, 69.7%) and articles and guides (68.8%). SEOs are also active with press releases (47.1%), and e-newsletters (44%), with images and video next: 38.2% used graphics (excluding infographics) and photography, while 35.9% used video, and 25.7% used infographics.
About The Data: Data was gathered from an online survey, and from the SEOmoz readership (who, the researchers warn, are naturally biased toward SEOmoz analytics tools). 47.3% of respondents were US-based.