Why Content Marketing and Link Building Services Make the Perfect Combo for High

Posted by Joseph Dyson on March 16th, 2020

His Majesty Lord Content—because content is king—has ruled supreme over all SEO arena all this time. Regardless of how much more popular video marketing continues to become or how much more important voice search optimization now is, content has always retained the top spot when it comes to SEO.

But SEO specialists—and even laymen—know that there’s another element that is just as crucial. And that is link building. It’s the links that help web pages rank higher and it is thus the links that make your page prop up in priority Google pages: making sure your viewer is reading the content.

Both equally important and both equally demanding of serious attention, content marketing and link building are critical foundation stones of professional SEO services.

For many businesses that are just beginning their SEO stints, there’s always one digital dilemma that looms large: should they go with focusing on content marketing or should they go with link building instead?

Our take on this is rather simple: why not both?

What’s Causing the Dilemma: They’re Time Consuming

If you’re thinking there’s no reason for businesses to worry about eitheror, there actually is. Both content marketing and link building are time-consuming, serious, and taxing tasks that need to be done professionally if they are to be done right.

Link building is a classic method of ensuring your web page is referencing authentic sources and that other authentic sources are referencing you. Search engines catch on, and propel you to the top of the rankings—if, that is, you’re doing certain other things correctly as well.

Content marketing, on the other hand, is more than simply getting professional SEO writers to update blogs for you. It’s broad realm of its own that takes into account audiences, consumer behavior, rapport with prospective customers, customer retention, and more.

While one has to do with validating the authenticity of a web page for search engines, the other has to do with understanding the psyche of prospective customers and devising a marketing model around that.

How They’re Different

While it’s true that most businesses know both are important, almost all businesses lean toward either one or the other. The reason behind this is rather simple: every business model is different, and has different milestones to achieve.

Link Building

With link building, it’s all about looking at how certain keywords rank and what the link metrics tell us. It’s about on-page optimization and comparative analysis. It’s about using the Keyword Difficulty Tool to find the best link building opportunities available to us. This method is used by most major businesses to this day, although it’s a pretty old procedure. And it works. Through outreach, link opportunities, and other means, SEO strategists hunt down the links they need and ensure that search engines will take into account the efforts they’re making.

Eventually, if you’re getting more links than your digital rivals, you can successfully outrank them, and appear in the top searches on Google, Bing, or whichever search engine you’ve chosen to go with.

Content Marketing

The approach when it comes to content marketing is different altogether. If with link building you’re taking it from the keywords and then narrowing your search down, with content marketing you’re widening it and reaching further out.

You come up with a target demographic (such as new mothers) and then ask yourself a string of questions:

•  How likely are new mothers to be interested in my product?
•  Are new mothers already using something like this?
•  What social media websites are new mothers most likely to use in order to discover my content?
•  Do new mothers have time enough for email newsletters or are text notifications a better idea?
•  Which influencers are new mothers most likely to follow?
•  What blogs do they read?

Once you have this massive amount of data sorted out, you’ll create a content strategy that’s based on consumer behavior and the psyche of your target audience. You’ll optimize your content based on what your ultimate object is, and that too is usually in a series of steps. For example, you’ll write a content piece that you want a certain social media influencer to find.

Once it makes to them, they’ll share it—link back to you—and will acquaint their (new mother) audience with your content piece. Your target demographic will visit your page out of curiosity, and your traffic will increase. Eventually, you can expect visitors to turn into conversions and customers.

But, Why Not Both?

The problem with sticking to link building strategies alone is that you’re manually and mechanically hunting for links. It’s an active effort on your part, because the links aren’t rolling in of their own accord. Since link building still makes up for a big part of how search engines decide which pages to rank higher, your page will eventually crawl up those ranks. Once you’re up in those ranks, you can be sure that your target audience will find you and click on the top results or the zero rank on Google—for example, if a new mother types in “buy breast pump online” and you rank high for that keyword, chances are the new mother will buy (or at least check out) your product.

Link building services and content marketing are both effective strategies, and are both viable in terms of getting you greater traffic and better business. The reason why businesses and SEO strategists go with either one or other is because they’re both time-consuming—it takes an equal amount of time and effort to hunt down links as it does to devise a content marketing strategy.

While it’s safe to say that your website will eventually rank better with both content marketing and link building strategies, by taking them on together you can catalyze the process of ranking better. Not only are you doing due outreach and being smart with targeting the right keywords, you’re also marketing your content where it needs to be marketed. As a result, the organic reach on your page will increase, and links will come rolling in not just because you’re doing link building well—but because your content marketing is reaching out to the very people who are likely to link back to you.