You must be aware that a new website is built every three seconds. Therefore, to stay relevant in this rapidly growing digital era, you need to have an online presence that stands out. After all, you would want your website to be easily discoverable to your precious customers.
Every website owner must learn the top SEO techniques to drive relevant traffic, increase website ranking, boost visibility, and more.
In the blog, we will dive deep into both SEO strategies: content marketing and link building and measure their impact on the website growth. So, continue reading the blog till the end to learn which SEO strategy won the final battle.
Content Marketing
We are sure you must have encountered this phrase multiple times: In the marketing world, content is king.
But why exactly is content marketing given so much importance?
What role does it play in ensuring the success of your online business?
We will explore this and much more in the coming sections.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a digital strategy that utilizes content to engage, attract, and convert the relevant audience. This approach to marketing helps establish your brand in the market, thereby boosting customer trust.
As per the survey, 70% of B2C and 73% of B2B marketers use content as part of their marketing strategy.
When it comes to creating content, it is not just about marketing or advertising your products or services; it’s more than that. The content must help you build a long-lasting connection with your customer. It should offer a detailed insight into your brand that will convince the customer to make a purchase.
Nowadays, it has become so easy to create and launch a website. However, only a true marketer realizes the importance of content marketing and its role in improving website visibility.
Different Kinds of Content Marketing Strategies
Considering the data mentioned above, you must have realized the importance of content marketing. So, now let’s have a look at different kinds of content you can work with:
Blog
A blog is one of the widely used forms of content marketing. Around 65% of content marketers post blogs on their websites to spread awareness about their brand.
A well-written blog ensures the content is to the point, focusing on providing valuable information. A great blog post is more likely to produce the desired results.
The optimal length of a blog post should be around 1,000 words or more. The greater the length of a blog, the higher it will rank on Google search results.
For example, the blog posted on SEMrush websites has an average length of 1,000 or more words. Such kind of long-form content is successful in retaining the audience’s attention.
When writing a blog, be sure to include these key elements:
- Powerful headline
- Effective subheadings
- Compelling and informative body
- Attractive images
- Relevant call-to-action
- Provide internal links
- Right meta tags
- Include long-tail keywords
Blogs are a great way to define the personality of your brand.
Videos
Videos are a fantastic way to market your brand and increase website engagement. They are used by 86% of businesses for lead generation and to fulfill their marketing goals.
Investing in video content to reach relevant audiences and derive the greatest results is a good practice in today’s digital era.
Here are some of the video types that you can include in your marketing strategy:
- Product or Service Demo Video: When demonstrating your product or services to your customer, video works better than any image or infographic.
- Explainer Video: This type of video consists of a short and simple explanation of something related to your business. It can be why a customer should buy your product, whether it is worth investing in it, how it can add value to the customer’s life, why they need it, etc.
- Testimonial Videos: Well, what can be a better way for an audience to know the worthiness of your product or service than through other customers’ mouths?
For example, a famous entrepreneur, Neil Patel, uses videos to educate his audience about SEO and its components. Looking at the views on his video, one can get the idea that people watch video content to grab knowledge.
The above picture proves how smartly Neil Patel has utilized video marketing to share valuable information with its audience.
Some of the benefits of using videos as a form of content marketing are as follows:
- Increase online exposure and engagement to your website.
- It helps you stand out from the competitors.
- Boost product knowledge
- Improve your website’s ranking
- Enhance visibility
Video marketing is rapidly increasing in popularity. More people are including this content strategy to reach out to the masses.
So, what is stopping you from creating the next viral content?
Infographics
Infographics are a visual way of representing information with the help of graphic elements. These include images, pie charts, diagrams, bar graphs, etc.
As per the statistics, there has been a 12% increase in traffic after using infographics on the website.
This type of content marketing effectively conveys complex information easily to customers. With infographics, you can efficiently pass your message without relying on words.
Some of the reasons to use infographics in your next content marketing strategy are:
- It helps define the message clearly and quickly.
- Easily breaks down complicated information.
- It helps understand the data with statics and graphs.
- Summarized content
So, use this excellent tool to increase website engagement and build brand awareness.
Advantages of Content Marketing
Content marketing is an SEO strategy that offers several benefits to businesses to accomplish their marketing goals. Some of the advantages of using an effective content marketing strategy are as follows:
Drive traffic to your website
Well-written content is crucial in driving relevant traffic to the website. Attracting traffic without providing valuable and informative content is nearly impossible.
- Increase sales performance
Content marketing makes it easy for customers to make a purchasing decision. It allows customers to find the solution to their problems. In short, content offers an opportunity for businesses to bring the customer from awareness to the decision stage.
- Google loves content
Yes, you read that right.
Google is constantly updating its algorithm to provide the best experience to users. It ensures that they easily find what they seek in search results.
So, what can be a better way to appear in the good books of Google than content marketing?
Boosts conversions
Content marketing can boost conversions higher than other marketing strategies.
The ultimate goal behind publishing quality content is to drive the audience that converts. And remember that audiences will choose your brand only if you provide valuable content that matters.
Disadvantages of Content Marketing
We talked about benefits in the above section; now, let’s look at some of the challenges of working with content marketing strategy:
Results take time
Writing, editing, and publishing content is a lengthy procedure. You must do thorough market research to analyze the trend to know what works best to achieve the results.
Resources and skills
Content writing is a time-consuming process that requires research, planning, writing, publishing, and analysis of the content. You must create a certain type of content that works for your business. It can be a blog, infographic, video, case study, social media post, etc. Therefore, you must outsource your content or develop the in-house team’s skills.
Requires consistent efforts
While working with content marketing, always remember that consistency is the key. Regularly publishing content helps build a website’s credibility and trust.
After all, you would have to make your presence feel constantly.
Link Building
Link building is that secret ingredient without which the website can’t grow.
You must be wondering what exactly the need for this secret ingredient is. How will it help provide the right flavor to your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy?
Let’s find out everything about link building – what it is, its different types, and the pros and cons of working with this strategy.
What is link building?
Link building is an SEO strategy that helps website owners increase their ranking on Google search results. The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the better its ranking will be.
For Google to discover you, acquiring backlinks from high-domain authority websites relevant to your niche is essential.
While obtaining backlinks, ensure they are high-quality because Google pays more importance to quality than quantity of links.
In short, backlinks are a vote of confidence indicating to Google the worthiness of your website to rank higher on search results.
Different Kinds of Link Building Strategies
To build quality backlinks for your website, take the help of the following kinds of link building strategies:
Broken Link Building
Broken link building is a process that involves taking advantage of dead links or broken pages on prospective websites. The tactic involves contacting the website owner and recommending replacing your link with the broken one.
Here is the step-by-step process to find dead links on a website:
- Find a prospective website where you want to get your link placed.
- Use SEO tools like Ahrefs to find broken or dead pages.
- Create valuable content to replace the broken link.
- Contact the website owner and recommend replacing your content with the dead page.
This technique is effective because most website owners are willing to replace the link as they do not want a dead resource on their website.
Guest Post
Guest posting is a tactic that includes writing content for someone else’s website and, in return, earning a link back to your site. It is a simple and effective technique that you must use as part of your link building strategy.
Following are some of the advantages of using guest posts:
- Boost your website reach
- Helps you achieve a higher ranking
- Improve sales performance
- Enhance your content writing skills
- Helps drive target audience to the website
- Increase website credibility
Google uses backlinks as a signal for ranking and visibility. Therefore, you must earn links from different websites, which can be possible through guest posting.
Competitor’s Analysis
The ultimate goal of link building strategy is to leave your competitors behind in terms of sales and ranking on search results.
So, why not analyze their marketing strategy to learn and understand where they are acquiring backlinks from?
The competitor analysis process lets you peek into your competitor’s marketing strategy. You can use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Trends, etc., to learn and understand how they are performing. This helps you learn about their strong and weak points, products, marketing tactics, etc.
Let’s have a look at a few benefits of performing competitive analysis:
- It helps understand market trends.
- It helps formulate a good targeting strategy.
- Helps forecast market demand and market potential
- It helps track the economic trend.
- Helps analyze competitor’s product and their pricing strategy.
Advantages of Link Building
So far, you have learned what link building is and its different kinds.
Now, we will learn about the advantages of link building and how it will help you grow your website.
Boost your Google ranking
As per the statistics, 75% of people don’t visit the second page of search results. Therefore, it is essential to mark your presence on the first page itself. This is where link building strategy plays its role.
The quality of backlinks determines your positioning in Google search results.
Drive organic traffic
Link building provides an opportunity for website owners to rank higher on search engines, resulting in more organic traffic. The key is to put more focus on building backlinks the right way.
The link building process takes time, but, in the end, all the efforts are worth it.
Increase referral traffic
The link on the high-domain authority page significantly impacts driving referral traffic to your website.
A good link will fetch relevant traffic, resulting in more sales. In contrast, a link placed on a different niche website will bring in non-relevant customers, increasing the bounce rate.
Improve your domain authority
Domain authority helps people determine the worthiness of a website. The more high-quality link a website contains, the higher its domain authority score will be.
That is why 79.7% of SEO experts give importance to link building in order for their website to grow.
Disadvantages of Link Building
Every SEO strategy has two sides, a positive and a negative.
Similarly, while being beneficial for your website, link building comes with its own downside. Here are some of them:
Process is time-consuming
Link building does not guarantee overnight success.
The facts state that the average time to see the results of the link building process is 3 to 12 months.
So, you must put your time, effort, and resources into building backlinks correctly for your website.
Can be penalized
Misusing link building strategies can get your website penalized by Google.
The term “misuse” here refers to relying on a black-hat link building strategy to build backlinks the illegal way.
Therefore, it is better to utilize white-hat link building strategy to acquire backlinks like Google accepts.
Low-domain authority websites can negatively impact your ranking
Not all backlinks are of the same value.
Backlinks earned from high-domain authority websites have a much more positive impact than those obtained from lower-ranking sites. And even Google considers backlinks from top websites when it comes to ranking and visibility.
Therefore, it is better to research and invest your time acquiring links from high domain authority websites.
How to build links using content marketing?
Let’s state the fact: link building is a complex and time-consuming process.
And with every other company relying on link building to grow their websites, the competition is even tougher.
Therefore, you need to up your SEO game and focus on a strategy that will help you gain maximum returns.
One such link building strategy is content marketing.
Currently, 45% of marketers are putting effort into their content marketing strategy. From this data, you can see how valuable content has become for marketers. So, it’s time for you to jump into the content marketing bandwagon and utilize it to obtain links.
The following are some to help you take this approach to build high-quality backlinks for your website:
- Choose the right format
While working on a content marketing strategy, the first step is to decide the content format that will work best for your website.
The following are 4 different kinds of content formats:
Interactive
Interactive content is designed with the motive to retain the customer’s attention. Examples of this content form include infographics, videos, quizzes, games, image sliders, calculators, eBooks, maps, etc.
In this content format, users are prompted to take action, which leads to them getting engaged with the post.
Long-form Content
As per OkDork, content of 3000 – 10,000 words gets more engagement than short-form content. Long-form content allows the website owners to share more information that will be valuable for the audience.
Instead of simply explaining the topic, the content writer should provide detailed insight to add value. Here are a few steps you can follow to write engaging long-form content:
- Before finalizing the topic of the content, analyze these questions:
- What type of audience will read the content?
- How will your content help solve customer issues?
- Does it align with your content marketing strategy?
- Which online channel are you using to promote your content?
- Include statistics, real-time reports, case studies, pictures, and examples, to make your content more engaging.
- Don’t write content for ranking purposes. Instead, write to educate and answer your audiences’ queries.
GIFs
GIFs are an effective and creative way to convey your message to the audience. With today’s generation obsessed with short videos, GIFs are an excellent method to attract their attention.
For example, you can see how Animagraffs, with the help of GIFs, demonstrated how an engine of a car works. This way of showcasing data is great for your link building strategy.
Static Format
Like infographics, static content format refers to providing information with the help of images, graphs, and statistics. This format of content can help you efficiently earn backlinks from third-party websites.
- Decide a topic for content
Well, you have decided to write content for your marketing strategy. But do you have a topic in mind?
Deciding on a topic is the first step in content marketing strategy. Here are some tips for selecting the topic for your content:
- Identify your target customers because you are writing content to make them aware of your brand.
- Ensure the content is relevant to your niche, audience, and marketing channel.
- Take the help of the blogs trending on Google search results.
- Use content tools like Google Analytics, Google Trends, Semrush, Grammarly, etc., to find trending topics.
All these steps require you to do detailed research to develop a successful content marketing strategy.
Write great content
Make it a point to create informative and valuable content free of grammatical errors. Include the latest statistics, surveys, and research to generate highly reliable content for the audience to engage with.
You can make your content appealing by including images, videos, GIFs, tutorials, etc. Remember that writing high-quality content increases the probability of accomplishing a backlink from top websites.
Include the latest information
No one wants to engage with outdated content.
Customers are always on the lookout for fresh and latest information.
So, refresh your content from time to time to meet the demands of present users.
While publishing content, website owners always make sure that the content addresses present-day situations with relevant statistics.
Use link building strategies to market your content
After your content gets a thumbs up from a proofreader, now is the time to market your content using link building strategies.
There are various strategies one can choose from to acquire backlinks from websites. A good number of high-quality backlinks indicates Google to rank the page higher on search results.
Research top websites in your niche and reach out to owners with a compelling pitch deck. Mention in your pitch how your content can provide value to their website.
In short, build a strong profile of backlinks with techniques like guest blogging, infographics, broken link building, PR, and much more.
A well-formulated link building and content marketing strategy can work wonders for your website.
Content and link building are directly related to each other. It is impossible to grow your website in the absence of any one of them.
You can only create a successful link building strategy with powerful content. And content written adds no value if it doesn’t help build backlinks for your website.
Content Marketing and Link Building: Similarity and Differences
Content marketing is done to provide valuable information to customers, while link building focuses on making your content rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Despite being a part of SEO strategy, both are entirely different from each other.
Let’s look at some of the differences between content marketing and link building strategy:
| Content Marketing | Link Building |
| Writing content requires creativity. | Link building involves more technical aspects. |
| Consume fewer resources and is low in cost. | The process is time-consuming and costly. |
| It can be measured accurately. | Difficult to measure the success rate. |
| Can produce quick results. | It takes time to deliver results. |
| You are only required to write trending and relevant content. | It takes more effort to research and find websites to acquire backlinks |
| It does not get affected by Google algorithm update. | Google algorithm updates always impact link building process. |
While we listed the differences between the two major SEO strategies, let’s learn about the similarities between the two marketing efforts.
| Similarities |
| Both work best when combined. |
| Both help generate organic traffic. |
| Content is the critical element in both marketing strategies. |
| Quality content is equal to increased ranking in SERPs. |
Comparison Analysis of Content Marketing and Link Building
In the earlier section, we saw the differences and similarities between two powerful SEO strategies.
This section includes a detailed comparative analysis of content marketing and link building on various factors. It will help us decide which techniques work best in SEO.
In terms of SEO
Content marketing is the soul of SEO, without which it is impossible to:
Content Marketing
- Drive traffic
- Increase website visibility
- Improve ranking on search results
- Make people aware of your products or services
In short, there is nothing you can do if your website doesn’t have high-quality content. Every aspect of the SEO technique requires content for all marketing activities.
As per the statistics, every day, some sort of content is created by 60% of marketers. They produce unique, fresh, creative, and engaging content to lure the audience to the website.
SEO and content marketing require each other for website growth. Without content, SEO cannot be done. And without SEO, content has no value.
Link Building
Link building is a vital aspect of SEO that helps search engines determine the ranking of a website.
Search engines like Google consider backlinks as one of the important identity signals for ranking.
A website containing high-quality links will climb the ranking ladder, whereas the ranking will decrease for a website with low-quality links.
Some of the ways through which link building makes a difference in SEO strategy are:
- Important for building website credibility.
- Considered a valuable ranking factor by Google.
- Helps lure target audience.
- Increase Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR).
- High-quality links equal greater sales opportunities.
- Backlinks from relevant niche lead to lower bounce rates.
Backlinks ensure search engines and your audience that the website contains credible information.
In terms of traffic
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an effective way to increase website traffic. Well-written content can retain the audience’s attention, who will engage with your brand.
There are multiple ways to utilize the content for driving website traffic; some of them are:
- Blog
- Article
- Website landing page
- Infographic
- Social media post
- Presentations
A successful content marketing strategy is a building block of the sales funnel. Providing the right content at the right buying stage can help generate more leads resulting in a better return on investment (ROI).
Link Building
The link building process is important for businesses to earn more traffic with a higher probability of converting.
A statistic has revealed that websites on the first page have an average of 3.8x more links than those on the 2nd to 10th position. High-quality backlinks tend to attract more traffic, leading to a higher ranking on Google search results.
Despite being a time-consuming and complex process, link building is worth the effort.
In terms of results
Content Marketing
Although there is a different time for every business, on average, it takes around 4 to 5 months for the content marketing results to reflect.
The competition to deliver quality content has increased, with more people relying on content marketing strategies.
In the 2015 benchmark report, HubSpot saw an increase in traffic of websites and leads consisting of 400+ blogs than those with fewer blogs.
Impact of content on website traffic:
Impact of content on lead generation:
A successful content marketing strategy requires consistent efforts on the part of marketers. This is not a one-time thing that will provide results for a lifetime.
You must regularly deliver valuable information for the customer to take action.
Link Building
Link building takes around 3 to 12 months to reflect the changes on the website. Various factors go into consideration for the results to take effect:
- Site Indexing: Refers to your website pages being available for Google to crawl and index.
- Link Velocity: Refers to the frequency at which you generate backlinks.
- Crawling Time: Refers to the time Google takes to crawl your website.
- Domain Authority (DA): Indicate how strong a referring website is.
- Link Type: Google analyzes the website’s no. of do-follow and no follow links.
- Anchor Text: Refers to the clickable text.
- Relevancy of the link: The link should be from a website or topic relevant to your niche.
In link building, remember that Google gives more priority to quality than quantity of links.
In terms of cost
Content Marketing
Depending on the company’s business goals, content marketing strategies, on average, can cost up to $50,000/month.
Along with business goals, here are some factors on which content marketing cost depends:
- Hiring in-house team/freelancers/content marketing agency.
- Paid tools and software
- Promotional activities
Nowadays, content is an excellent way to reach the target audience and engage them with your brand. With the right content marketing strategy in place, it can help:
- Spread awareness about your brand.
- Enhance online visibility.
- Build brand awareness
- Encourage visitors to make the purchase.
Investing time and money in the right strategy can take your website a long way.
Link Building cost at Outreach Crayon
| Link Building Strategies | DA 10+ | DA 20+ | DA 30+ | DA 40+ | DA 50+ |
| Blogger Outreach | $60 | $80 | $100 | $150 | $250 |
| Infographic Outreach | $80 | $100 | $120 | ||
| Niche Edit Service | $60 | $80 | $100 | $150 | $250 |
| Broken Link Building | $60 | $80 | $100 |
As per the statistics, businesses spend anywhere between $1,000 to $15,000 per month on link building strategies.
In case you are hiring an in-house team, here is the estimated cost of managing a team:
- Link Building Manager
- Link Building Executive
- Writer
- Editor
- Proofreader
- SEO Expert
- Link Building Tools & Software
And if you are going to work with an agency, you are required to purchase the package, and the rest will be taken care of by them.
In terms of experts/team required
Content Marketing
From drafting valuable content to designing an effective strategy, the content marketing process requires the skills of more than one person. An ideal team includes the following experts:
- Content Marketing Manager
- Content Writer/Copywriter
- Editor
- Proofreader
- Social Media Manager
- SEO Manager
- Graphic Designer
The skills and talent of all the above-mentioned people are responsible for creating a successful content marketing strategy.
Link Building
Starting an in-house team to carry out link building strategies includes hiring people on the following posts:
- Content Writer
- Editor
- Proofreader
- Social Media Manager
- Link Building Expert
- Link Building Manager
- SEO Executives
- Graphic Designer
- Software & Tools
If you decide to outsource link building agency, they already have experts to look after your website needs.
Conclusion: Which strategy won the battle?
The answer is evident based on the above metrics, case studies, statistics, and reports.
To take your website to the top of Google search results, you must use both SEO strategies.
Link building and content marketing are vital aspects for the success of website SEO.
Without content, link building cannot be done. And without link building, the content will not perform well.
But if you need to start working on your SEO strategy, begin with writing quality content.
So, instead of arguing over which strategy to choose, you must embrace the best of both worlds.
