At Boom we’re always looking for ways to grow the business and improve our own marketing strategies. We’re investing more time, effort and budget (although perhaps not equivalent to a Lamborghini in a year) into our blog.
And if we’re going to invest, we want to know that we’re focussing in the right areas. And as our blog is relatively new, instead of mining our own data, we looked to bigger and better blogs to discover what makes people link.
Econsultancy is undoubtedly one of the biggest and best-known blogs in our industry. We figure why start small? If we wanted to know how to create content people would care about, it made sense to investigate the guys at the top to find out what really drives links.
We analysed their 50 most linked to posts to see if there was anything we could learn about what drives links – was it topic, timing, type of post or some other as yet unknown factor?
With such interesting data at our fingertips, it didn’t seem fair not to share our findings (sharing is caring). So without further ado, here’s what we learnt from Econsultancy about creating content for link building wins:
Want this infographic for your blog? Sure, just copy and paste this code:
<img title="What Can We Learn from Econsultancy" src="http://boom-online.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/what-can-we-learn-from-econsultancy.jpg" alt="What Can We Learn from Econsultancy - an infographic" width="700" height="3610" ><br /> Infographic by <a href="http://www.boom-online.co.uk/what-can-we-learn-from-econsultancy" target="_blank">Boom Online Marketing</a>
Disclaimer
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Creating lists of ecommerce statistics and publishing it on a Wednesday before lunch Does Not Automatically Equal Link Building Gold. You still need great content. And correlation is not causation yaddy yaddy yada.
Great content is only half the battle (or maybe just a third, or an eighth) – Econsultancy has also worked on building up a following on Twitter. Make sure you’re also working on connecting with the people who will care enough to link to you if you want your list of ecommerce stats to reap links galore.
Methodology
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We didn’t pick Econsultancy at random – we analysed the top 10 Google search results in May 2012 for keywords that we were targeting. Econsultancy appeared the most times across the widest spread of keywords.
The SEOmoz Open Site Explorer provided the link profile information, which we gathered on 28 June 2012.
We defined the top 50 most linked to posts as the posts with the greatest total number of links. The link profile information for blog posts was aggregated – blog/, blog/uk/, blog/us/ and any URLs appended with tracking information was added together to create our aggregated list of the top 50 most linked to posts.
We recorded the following information for every post:
- Category (as defined by us)
- Type (as defined by us)
- Number of comments
- Date of publication
- Time of publication
- Day of the week of publication
- Whether the author was a guest or staff
- Number of external links in the post
To determine whether the top 50 categories were influenced by the volume of posts on the subject or the inherent popularity of the category, we collected the number of posts tagged with the following phrases:
- Social media
- Ecommerce or e-commerce
- Online advertising, advertising, adwords, ppc, google adwords
- SEO*
*Search engine optimisation does not appear on the first five pages of their tag results.
Where multiple tags were taken into account, de-duplication took place to ensure that any posts with multiple tags were only counted once.