Social Media Analytics Tools Need Better SEO-Impact Reporting

Radian6 and other monitoring platforms need to improve their reporting of the SEO  impact / ROI of social media engagement.

Radian6 and other monitoring platforms need to improve their reporting of the SEO  impact / ROI of social media engagement.

I’ve tested literally dozens of social media monitoring and analytics tools over the past few years. Radian6 has always been at the top of my list in terms of overall power and functionality for major brands. SproutSocial is pretty slick for small businesses and agencies. Engage121 is among the best I’ve seen for national brands and franchises with lots of local storefront local sales or storefront outlets.  But there are literally thousands of tools on the market. (SocialMention is among the best free tools I’ve seen).

And maybe it’s just me but I cannot for the life of me understand why none of the major social media monitoring and analytics platforms are focusing on providing helpful ROI analytics related to the search engine optimization (SEO) impact of social activity.

Even newly emerging star SocialReport.com (which looks to me to be among the best-in-class in overall social media ROI reporting) seems to miss the boat on SEO. (Please do correct me if I am wrong!)

Notice the focus of their ROI feature set is on conversions:

Please, don’t get me wrong: I think it’s FANTASTIC that tools like Radian6 and SocialReport are helping marketers track conversions. But if Radian6, SocialReport and others are only focusing on tracking conversions, share of voice, sentiment and other metrics that link back to specific social mentions then they are missing entirely the crucial analysis and reporting of the SEO impact of those mentions and the conversions. For example, did Company ABC just improve its Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ranking as a result of Joe Blogger’s latest blog post? What impact did ABC company’s 200% increase in fans have on its ranking? Was there a change in MozRank that correlates with the SERP ranking change?
It is extraordinarily difficult to isolate social mention variables in order to correlate them with SEO impact but it seems to me monitoring analytics tools, perhaps in partnership with best-in-class SEO analytics tools like SeoMoz, need to be moving much more aggressively to tackle this analytics challenge.

Am I the only one? Is SEO impact not an important part of the ROI measurement puzzle that is being overlooked by Radian6 and other monitoring platforms? Search is where the rubber meets the road. I’m thinking social media marketers could put the pedal to the medal with better SEO insights.

And you? What do you think?