Business owners who are looking into improving their website’s SEO eventually all come across a series of conflicting articles that praise one ranking method as the “king.” One expert may claim that you need to immediately start building a stacked catalog of backlinks, while the other insists that you focus on creating a comprehensive content strategy. So, which should you invest in?
Spoiler alert…it’s both of them. Here’s why:
First let’s talk about backlinks and why they come up so often in the SEO conversation. When another website links to a page on your site, you gain a backlink, and in the Wild West days of the internet (when a high quantity of backlinks simply resulted in a better search ranking) SEO strategies were centered around gathering as many of these links as possible. But since Google’s Penguin 2.0 algorithm release in 2013, search rankings have become less dependent on the total number of links to your website, and more focused on where those links are coming from. Though it’s definitely still important to grow a diverse list of backlink sources (more on how to do that in a future post), search engines favor links that come from high ranking and authoritative domains.
How do you get links from these high ranking domains? Quality content (See where we’re going with this?). When you publish content that’s helpful for your potential clients, or that benefits others in your industry, people will be eager to share it and link to your website. Spend time up-front researching what content is already out there and what your audience is searching for, and use your expertise to fill in the gaps with regularly scheduled blog posts based on those subjects. When your content is discovered, the links to these posts from other domains will create organic backlinks, and a healthy combination of these organic links with a growing list of manually submitted links will boost your search ranking over time.
Tip: You can speed up the “discovery” process by developing relationships with high authority websites in your niche and asking them to share content you’ve written that may be helpful to their website visitors.
When deciding what aspects of SEO to focus on, it’s important to spread your efforts between various strategies that will work in tandem to attract both search engines and organic website visitors. Quality backlinks will help improve search rank, and engaging website content can also be used on social media, email campaigns, and more, while functioning as a crucial part of your backlink strategy.
Keep an eye on our blog for more information on SEO strategies.
