Are you wondering how SEO and Link Building stack up against High-Quality Content? SEO and content are two of the most critical aspects of digital marketing, and if you manage to leverage both, your chances of achieving the marketing outcomes you’re aiming for you are high.
Whether you’re a marketer, blogger, or business owner, you want the most effective strategies to have your campaigns succeed without breaking your budget. So, it’s essential to understand the benefits of both SEO and content marketing. But which one should you focus on more in your initiatives? Below, we’re going to breakdown the advantages and shortcomings of both SEO and content. Then, we’ll give you the one you should put more focus towards to take your digital efforts to the next level.
What Are The Benefits of SEO?
It’s no doubt SEO is one of the best traffic sources for your business. It can lead to more targeted customers, help increase your revenue, and build your brand awareness. Virtually every business needs to invest in SEO. Otherwise, you’ll be losing out on customers.
1. SEO Increases Brand Awareness & Credibility
Let’s face it, SEO is one of the most effective ways to boost your brand awareness and credibility. Ranking first place for several keywords will give your business more visibility and engagement with customers who are actively searching for your products and services.
If you’re a local business, GMB (otherwise known as Google My Business), gives you the ability to showcase your company with reviews, posts, and other useful information, so you can entice customers to visit your location or website and stand tall above your competitors. As long as you maintain your top position, your targeted audience will become more aware of your presence, and you’ll be able to grow in market share over time.
2. SEO Results In A Higher Conversion Rate
Prospective customers that come from your SEO efforts can have a high conversion rate for your business compared to other digital traffic streams such as social media, newsletters, and direct visits. The beauty of search engines is the ability to rank your products and services for highly-relevant buying intent keywords, which matches what you’re selling to what customers are trying to find purchase online. So, no matter how low or high a given keyword’s volume is, you’re pretty much guaranteed targeted customers to your business without much guesswork.
3. SEO Is A Long-Term Marketing Strategy
Investing in SEO is a long-term strategy that can compound into amazing results over time. Most successful campaigns can take up to 6 – 12 months to see effective traction, but once things take off, you will see a *mountain* of traffic and conversions. Since your investment in SEO stays constant and the results compound with time – the ROI (return-on-investment) increases exponentially.
What Are The Benefits of High-Quality Content?
High-Quality Content doesn’t get the respect it deserves because many businesses and marketers don’t understand the value of quality content in today’s digital economy. For years, no one defined what exactly is ‘quality’ and why it matters for your content strategy. So, what exactly is High-Quality Content? It’s content with a specific goal or plan of action.
It’s that simple!
There are individuals, brands, small businesses, and corporations producing a tremendous amount of content every day. Content without a plan or goal in mind is just “stuff” on the internet. So, you need a content strategy to lift your business from all the noise and get the results you deserve. Below, we’ve listed the top 3 benefits of High-Quality Content and why it should matter for your business.
1. Gain More Credibility With Search Engines
About 73% of internet marketers describe content marketing as their most effective content strategy. But, Why? Because it gets Google’s attention in a significant way. Without content, there is no “stuff” for the Google bot to rank. When you combine SEO efforts with high-quality content, you’re giving a better user experience in Google’s eyes alongside establishing more authority in your line of business – and therefore, you’ll get to enjoy more ranking power. The end goal is to provide the best possible answers to your prospective customers’ questions about your products, services, or line of business.
2. Foster Customer Retention And Loyalty
Producing high-quality content can have a unique impact on your brand. Customers appreciate when you’re not always selling to them, but providing consistent streamline of value. Once you give customers helpful information or create content they’re interested in, they gain more trust and loyalty towards your brand. Since you’re becoming an authority, your customers will often talk to their friends and family about your company and how satisfied they were. In turn, this leads to further exposure and more customers and revenue for your business down the line.
3. Helps Generate Leads And Improves Conversions
Let’s face it, it’s very unlikely that all of your customers just impulse-bought from you, isn’t it? Generally, no matter the product or service someone is planning to purchase – there is a lengthy purchasing journey involved in them going from becoming aware of their need to finally choosing a particular company’s offering. And during that purchasing journey, they’ll have questions, lots of them.
If you’re not creating content to address your customers’ questions or concerns ahead of time, you’re losing out on a valuable opportunity to not only help more prospective customers choose you as their go-to resource, but you’re also missing out on reaching new customers at various points of their journey. With a proper Call-To-Action (CTA) placed naturally in your valuable pieces of content, you can turn any content marketing initiative into a lead-magnet for your visitors. Since these leads are warm, it’ll also significantly increase your conversions as they already received value from your brand.
High-Quality Content vs. SEO & Linkbuilding: Which One Takes The Crown? You’ll Be Surprised!
For most marketers and business owners, the intuitive focus would be SEO. It generates the traffic and sales you need through the hyperspace of Google. Once you add link building into the equation, you can have a very effective foundation for your digital marketing strategy, but it can be a very costly approach.
Your typical SEO campaign may cost anywhere between $1,000 – $20,000 per month, which is out of the budget range for most small businesses. Overtop of this, link building is usually an added cost. And once you add a monthly surcharge by an agency, it still doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the results you’re aiming for. However, by comparison, with high-quality content, you’re paying a fraction of an average SEO campaign!
But, is content an effective strategy?
The good news is, SEO has changed for the better, and the focus on content is becoming even more critical for businesses. It’s Google’s main objective to show relevant, quality information in response to user searches. If you’re not producing high-quality content, there is no amount of link building or SEO you can do to suddenly show up everywhere your prospective customers might be. However, by creating relevant, informative content that provides value to your audience – you’re not only creating an engagement tool, but you’re also creating content that Google can and will naturally index and rank for relevant queries, search terms, and keywords.
In addition to this, Google Algorithms have become smarter over the years. And they’ve become particularly good at identifying low-quality, irrelevant content. That’s why you’re now seeing businesses distribute or outsource their content generation to professionals with the aim of producing more articles, videos, guides, and tutorials for their audience of prospects. While it’s certainly not an understatement to say that there is an overwhelming amount of content on the web, you’d be surprised at how little of a fraction of this content focuses on user value and quality. In turn, this creates a competitive opportunity for you and your business.
But what if you don’t know where to get started with content?
It’s always a good idea to introduce a new strategy for your content reservoir. Here at TopContent, you can get high-quality content quickly and without any hassle. And you don’t have to spend an arm and leg to see your site grow. Each content piece is SEO-ready, handwritten, and entirely unique, allowing you to increase your traffic and sales, practically on autopilot!