Does social media presence + inbound links outweigh bad SEO?

[Closetstogo]

Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us for keywords that we're targeting. The SEO errors are duplicate content, titles, and 404 errors. We've successfully nailed down much of our SEO issues to a bare minimum, although not eliminated them completely, so we're at a loss as to why we aren't gaining much ground.

From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence. Can it be inferred from this that an active social media presence and large inbound link count outweigh bad SEO practices? What else should we be looking for to help pinpoint why we're not gaining rank with the keywords we're targeting?

[EGOL]

If you were hit by Panda... Google was telling you that your content was not up to their expectations.

**Now we're bouncing between the top 10 and the top 30. **

That probably means that you have not recoved from Panda.  I would be working just about 100% on content.  If you improve the content then you might get more links and more social shares.  People like to great sites, people share great sites.

[Closetstogo]

So the take-away that we should be looking at is worrying less about perfecting our technical SEO and focusing more on just creating a healthy and attractive user experience?

[Closetstogo]

We were hit pretty hard by Panda in 2012 and have been struggling to regain lost ground since then. Previous to that point, we were ranking in the top 5 for all relevant keywords. Now we're bouncing between the top 10 and the top 30.

Regarding the duplicate content, they're (the competitor's) created by parameters and dynamic content as is natural for ecommerce stores, but not canonicalized. Our links come from relevant sources, but it's a matter of around 150 links for us and depending on the competitor, 1,500 to 19,000 links. From what I've seen, many of their links appear relevant as well but I haven't had the time to comb through all of them.

What would you define as over-targeting or hyper-targeted? Is that the same as keyword stuffing? If so, we do have issues with that given as an niche ecommerce store many of our products share at least one keyword that we're targeting.

[EGOL]

Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us...

Some tools report SEO "errors" that don't mean anything.   Sometimes I think that just report a big load of errors for an "apparent value" effect.

From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence.

This makes perfect sense.  Bet your money on it.   People love them and their site so much that they are linking to them, socializing with them, etc.   If you don't have this then I would be looking at what you are doing to make visitors happy.

I think that making your visitors really happy is worth thousands of some of the SEO "errors" that are reported.  It's great that you cleaned up your errors.  Now you can work on pleasing your visitors.

[MikeRoberts]

There are numerous factors that could be doing this. Have they been around longer? Do they have any .Gov or .Edu backlinks? Are the tons of links that they have all from relevant sources? Do they have a better array of linking domains than your site does? Do they appear to be driving a lot of referral traffic from social media to their site? Are all those duplicate content pages you see actually created by parameters but canonicalized to the proper pages? Has your site ever been impacted by an algorithmic or manual penalty? Do your links come from relevant sources? Are you over-targeting your pages to keywords at the detriment of user experience? Is the anchor text of your backlinks all hyper-targeted or is the distribution more natural? And 404s aren't necessarily a bad thing if they're relevant 404s.