jhaynes

What’s More Important to You, a Web Content Writer or Link Builder?

I am often asked by clients, prospects or simply friends and colleagues, What is the single most important thing I should be doing for my online marketing and promotion? The answer I give may seem self-serving, but you’ll see in a moment that it’s not….Add More Quality Web Content.

SEO is a changing discipline, constantly evolving and changing to reflect the most contemporary view of what a “good” website is, and also to disallow folks to “game” the system, simply by using tricks and black hat techniques to take advantage of the ranking system. Thus, what’s important today can be very different from what came before. What was the most important thing before? Links.

Links to your site, from other highly-ranked and respected websites, was the major contributor to your SEO score not long ago. Actually, there are an untold number of variables that are factored in to give your site its rankings…some very critical, others very minor. But links have always been near the top of the list, and they are *certainly still important. And it makes sense to use them as an indicator obviously – if these other well respected websites find your content valuable enough to link to it, well organic searchers should find it valuable too.

But this brings us to the root of why these sites are popular with others: Their Web Content.

Those other sites linked to yours because of the high-quality and value of content you provide, that their own readers would find once they visited your pages. And this has caused the sea change in what Google finds most important once again. Links can be manipulated (to some extent), while content cannot. You either have fresh, SEO-unique, high-quality and frequently updated content on your website – or you don’t. Pretty simple there.

More Content is Better than More Links

Once again, links are an important part of your website’s authority, even with the changing link landscape.

But too often, when businesses hire someone to do link building, they focus on the quantity of links rather than their quality – and linking is not a numbers game anymore (far from it, actually). You should focus on having relevant and diverse sources that link to appropriate pages.

However, if you have budget to invest in your website, I’d say, “Hire a web content writer to write for you.” This is where the self-serving thing from above comes in. My first piece of advice to clients in the past WAS “Write for yourself, or hire a web content writer”, but I’ve learned over time that having the client 100% responsible for the writing rarely works.

Why?

Because most business owners and other internal folks are busy doing, well….their “real” day to day jobs….and very often don’t have the long-term time, patience, skill or basic desire to stick to a regular publishing plan or writing calendar.

I like to check in with client blogs on occasion, to see how things are coming along for them. Sometimes they start off strong, with a number of posts.. but then I see the frequency starts tailing off. And they haven’t made a single post in weeks, or months.. (or even years!). I’ve found this time after time with clients, which is why I highly recommend hiring a pro, or assigning someone internally to be responsible for your future content.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be me! Though if you’d like to learn more or have questions, of course please contact me. But whatever you decide, have SOMEONE creating and posting web content on a frequent basis. It’s the most important thing for your site’s ranking going forward, so you cannot afford to ignore this…if having online business and revenue is important to you that is.

When you invest in content, that content can be used for webpages, blog posts, Youtube videos, images, social media posts (*becoming critical as well), lead generation offers, and guest posts on other sites — all content types that will bring more links with them over time. So your content is performing double duty – organically creating more links, instead of paying for them artificially – and giving you high quality web content, which hopefully CONVERTS too. We haven’t even gone into the MAIN purpose of web content – not SEO, but to MAKE YOU MONEY, RIGHT? More on that sometime very soon.

So when clients ask “Which should I invest in, link building or content generation?” the answer is clear. Content.