Many techniques are being used and advertised lately as ways of boosting a website’s SEO. While most strategies do actually give results, this article aims to compare the pros and cons of two of the most popular - content marketing and link building.
Search engines such as Google, the most used these days, base their ranking on many and different factors. Content marketing is based on creating quality, original and branded content for your website, as well as for offsite distribution. Meanwhile link building is more about publishing your relevant keyword not only on your site, but also “spreading” it around the wide world of the Internet.
Both strategies work and have proved their results in terms of SEO. Here is a clear comparison between these two popular SEO and marketing strategies:
Price - Most of the time, paying writers is cheaper than paying bloggers for posting your links. Writers can often also provide better quality content than bloggers, which will be tailored to your site; so you have much to gain with content marketing in this sense.
“Share-ability” - The key to get your SEO content shared is to write linkable content. Next time you are going to publish content (either in your site or in someone’ else’s blog), ask yourself: is this worth sharing? If the answer is no, then change the topic, the perspective or the style until you consider it to be relevant and engaging.
Authenticity - Branded SEO content, written specifically for your site, is more likely to read naturally than stories posted in blogs just for ‘the sake of a link’. Link building, however, also can read very naturally, but that will always depend on how skilled bloggers are when it comes to writing. Obviously, link building guest posts titled “Paid advertising” will automatically lose its sense of authenticity and influence over a consumer.
Complementing each other
Both marketing techniques have many SEO advantages for brands. In fact, content marketing and link building complement each other, and actually offer better results if they are used together.
The goal should be to seek natural linking building through quality and “shareable” content marketing, although publishing quality content in different blogs is also an aim to pursue.
Never underestimate the SEO benefits that being linked in a high quality authority blog or page can give to your website, but always start by creating original brand content yourself.
