[Build Backlinks Online] SEO's Dilemma - Link Building vs. Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'SEO's Dilemma - Link Building vs.
Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday'


Posted by randfish

Today's web marketers face a difficult decision: Do they stick with the
classic link-building and keyword-marketing techniques they know have worked in
the past, or do they opt to spend time on the broader realm of content
marketing?


In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the reasons you might choose one
path over the other.






SEO's Dilemma - Link Building vs Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday





For reference, here's a still image of this week's whiteboard:



Video Transcription



Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I want
to address a dilemma that a lot of SEOs and a lot of marketers face and that is
sort of choice between what should I be doing to move the needle on my search
traffic? Should I be doing kind of classic SEO, the keyword targeting plus link
building, which moves the needle? Or should I be thinking more broadly in terms
of kind of a full content marketing spectrum? I'll describe these two, and I'll
talk about why it's so tough for these guys who are at this fork in the road.


So, in link building land, we research some keywords to target. We know we
want to go after those. Maybe we've already been assigned them by our boss or
our team or our client if we're doing consulting. Then we try and go out and
find potential opportunities to earn links. Maybe we do a little bit of
comparative analysis. We'll run the Keyword Difficulty tool and look at how
people who are ranking for that keyword have done in terms of link metrics
versus how we're doing, and maybe we'll do a little bit of on-page optimization
as well. But mostly it's around this link opportunity stuff.


I think a lot of folks in the classic SEO world do this, even today, and it
does work. They go out and get those links. Maybe they do outreach, find
competitive links, find open link opportunities around the Web, whatever it is
that can move the needle on the links. But it's really about that
push-for-direct outreach and direct link building, not kind of passively sitting
back and letting the links hopefully roll in.


Then you move up in the rankings. Slowly, but steadily, you will move up
because links are still a big portion of the search engines' algorithms, Google
and Bing both. Over time, if you are moving the needle on links more than your
competition, chances are good that you will be able to outrank them, assuming
you are doing other things right.


On the flip side is the content marketing world. In content marketing land,
this is a very, very different approach. We kind of take the broad view at the
beginning of: Who is the audience that I want to reach? Who are all the people
in that audience group? Then, what do they use? What channels do they use to
discover content, to share things, to influence one another and to be
influenced, and to discover new stuff, like the products, services, mission that
I'm trying to fulfill or that I'm trying to sell them?


That could be things like Twitter and Facebook. It could be blogs that they
read. It might be influencers that they follow on social networks or through
email channels or whatever it is. Obviously, it's going to be a lot of Google
searches. Google is still quite a bit of the Web's search traffic. Maybe it's
YouTube, people using video to find these things.


Then, I'm going to take from this audience and where they are and what
they're doing. I want to create content that will appeal to my target audience,
the people I'm directly trying to reach and to their influencers. That might be
a webinar, a video, a blog, a free tool, whatever it is.


Now I'm going to go out and do influencer outreach. I'm going to try and do
good, smart keyword targeting on Google. I'm going to promote my stuff on
social. I'm going to reach out to my community, maybe through email or directly.


Then, I'm going to hope to get the results of a little bit of increased
traffic. I'm going to hopefully grow my community. If I'm producing valuable
content stuff, more people will follow my social accounts, more people subscribe
to my email, more people will be personalized by the connections that they've
got to me through Google, so that their Google search results will be biased in
my favor. I'll move up a little in SEO because my domain authority hopefully
grows some and I get a few links and referring traffic.


Then, I rinse and repeat this model over and over until I feel like, hey,
now I need to go target new audiences, and I'm going to repeat this process all
over again.


The challenge here is that . . . and I've seen this discussion happening in
the SEO world and, in fact, I think it's a very fair discussion to have. There
are folks who are kind of in link building land who say, "This works for me;
this doesn't work for me." You hear all sorts of reasons why it doesn't work for
them. Maybe it's who their client or who their team or what their product is or
who they're trying to reach. They say, "Well, they're just not interested. They
don't do a lot of content consumption. They're not influenced by social channels
and by YouTube and by blogs and by industry news or trade shows and events, or
whatever these things are that I can use to amplify my content. I'm not getting
value from this, and so I'm going to stick to this. I get some links. I move up
in the rankings. I get more visits for the key terms I'm going after. That turns
into conversions. This is what I'm after."


Actually, I think it's okay. I know that in the past many folks have kind of
assumed that oh, well Rand is really against this, or Moz is really against this
world. But that's not actually the case. If this is working for you, I don't
have a problem with it.


What I have a problem with is when people don't think holistically and don't
make the conscious choice and simply stick to what they have been doing because
they've seen it work in the past. Even if it is not working as well or if it
keeps getting harder or if something like Penguin comes along and penalizes a
bunch of the tactics that you were using to get those links, you just stay on
the treadmill. That's where I think things get really dangerous, and I've got
some ideas here about how you can choose.


One of the things that I think you should be conscientious about is goals
and metrics. Are your goals tied to broad marketing efforts? Are we trying to
get lots of people aware of our brand, aware of our product? Are we trying to do
some positioning? Are we trying to get people to change their minds about how
they solve a problem and come over to our world? Or is our metric just are we
ranking well? Are we getting traffic directly from Google for the rankings, for
the keywords that we care about, and are we converting them? If that's your
whole goal and metric, maybe link building land is the right way to go. Maybe
this is a little bit broad.


Secondary, are you thinking long term or short term?


In the long term, one of the things that I do worry about is a lot of these
tactics and a lot of Google's algorithm has been getting more and more focused
on things that are outside of just how many linking root domains do you have,
and does the anchor text include your keywords, and is it pointing to a page
that you're targeting?


They're getting a lot smarter. They're using a ton more signals than they
were just three or four years ago. They're doing a lot more rich data options,
rich snippets, different types of results. The classic 10 blue links, I think
Dr. Pete found that was like 15% of search results are ten blue links and that's
it. That's not a lot of opportunity. Even if you are moving up, boy, you've got
to be pretty hopeful that they stick with this model and that the algorithm
doesn't change too much and that links continue to be a huge powering force and
that nothing else overtakes those.


Multi-channel versus single. If search, in particular search rankings on
primary keyword targeted phrases, are really the only channel that's producing
any kind of results and you don't even see that in a multi-channel attribution,
that social or that content or email or referring links or something else, long
tail searches or whatever, are having a positive influence, then link building
land looks a little more attractive and content marketing land doesn't.


Finally, if the breadth versus depth of your skill set, your team, your SEO,
your web marketing team is really around, "Hey, we're good at this. You know, we
haven't quite figured out this stuff yet. We don't have the people, the staff,
the resources, the time, the energy, the buy-in from management to do these
things."


Well then, I understand going after link building land. I think that what's
important is that we have a conscious conversation and we understand the
dichotomy and the different reasons we might choose one of these paths, not that
we always pick one or we always pick the other.


In fact, there might be times when you are in content marketing land and
you're right here in and doing some SEO and you really move over to doing this
cycle a little bit continuously because that is the focus of your efforts right
now. It could be that you're over here and you do some analysis. Maybe you're
doing your analysis around your keyword targeting and you say, "Boy, we've got
good links to our page, but our domain authority just doesn't help us. We need a
broader set of influencers and of links and of people using our stuff. We really
need to boost our overall domain and brand awareness. Maybe we want to get into
content marketing land for a little while.


So, this choice is certainly up to you. I'm sure there will be a great
discussion in the comments, and I look forward to that. Thanks for joining me.
Take care.




Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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