Professional SEO Services - The ROI of High-Quality Content vs. Backlink Building
- Oindrila Dev
- Apr 4, 2024
- 5 min read
The market has gone online. Most, if not all, of your customers are connected via the information superhighway and look for products or services online using search engines. Naturally, your exposure, therefore, depends directly on tipping the search results in your favor. Only professional SEO services can do that.
SEO stands upon two massive pillars: content and backlinks. High-quality content engages your target demographics, while strong backlinks suck authority from reputed sites. Both are extremely important in upping your game on the SERP.
However, as a marketing manager, your challenge lies in identifying the strength of either in your campaign. Is your site more dependent on other valuable sites that link back to you? Does your product or service come with a learning curve that your customers often look for? And which of them gives the best return on investment (ROI)?
Today, we will learn how the best SEO services juggle content and backlinks and measure either ROI.
The Power of High-Quality Content
Look, content is king. That is indisputable. Search engines favor organic traffic above all, and organic traffic - meaning actual human “reads” loves high-quality content. If you are providing textual and visual matter on your pages that are informative, well-researched, data-driven, and engaging, chances are there’s somebody out there wanting to read it. Clever writers can funnel that into CTAs.
Think about content as an identifier of your brand. If people know that you’re an authority figure on a particular subject (think WebMD, PubMed, Mayo Clinic, etc, on health topics), then people are going to just flock to your site - you will be an authority on the subject. All thanks to the excellent, trustworthy content on the site.
There’s something more. Like a live shoal of fish, your traffic changes shape and size over time depending upon what you’re feeding them. People love to share stuff these days, and if they like what they see on your pages, they will share it with their friends and family. Let’s say a dude has 2000 friends on Facebook and liked your article or infographics on bodybuilding so much that he shared it on that platform. That means you got a possible 2000 impressions of your brand, instantly!
The Value of Backlinks
Still dependent upon good content, think about backlinks as votes of confidence from other sites. Just as people like to share good stuff, other websites like to link to high-quality sources for reference. If your page has what it takes to talk about, chances are there’s somebody who is indeed talking about it on their blog - and providing a link back to that page. That’s a backlink.
The links that come back to your pages have weight to them. If a site that’s linking to you has good authority and reputation, obviously, what they cite as a source or reference gets importance, too. Search engines understand this very well and, therefore, have been placing high importance on who’s touching you from afar. A website with many good backlinks will rank higher on the SERP than a younger site with few references.
Link-building services leverage this behavior of search engines and demand attention from other sites. There are many ways to do this, mainly with guest blogging and broken link building services. Here comes what we say as “black-hat” and “white-hat” SEO. There are many unethical ways to farm backlinks, and while they will give you a quick reputation boost, they will soon be detected as unethical work, and your site will be penalized. Stick to white-hat SEO practices, and you’ll be safe.
The ROI Debate
All those songs and dances mean nothing if they aren’t working for you. The ROI of backlink building and content creation can vary wildly depending on what exactly you are doing with your strategy. But after all is said and done, the modern trend seems to be favoring content more. And there’s a good reason for that.
Traditionally, backlinking has been the backbone of the SEO sector. I still remember the big halls full of executives busily doing massive amounts of directory submissions like a freight train, and people frantically working out deals with other SEO workers around the world trading two-way and three-way links. But those days are almost gone.
While a good backlink from a reputed site citing you as an authoritative source carries a great deal of weight, there’s always the chance of the owner of that link changing their mind. They can update their article with a different source, choose to amputate that section altogether, or simply just update the page with a do-over. Even whole websites can go down or have technical issues. Bang, there goes your precious backlink!
However, if you have published good quality content that is packed full of very useful information, is able to capture eyeballs, and is trustworthy, that content will “live long and prosper.” Indeed, the SEO force is strong with high-quality content, and Google is favoring them more and more, overlooking the simple count of links.
Also, what’s the point of a bunch of links to your site if they’re not drawing customers? At the end of the day, it’s the responsibility of the content on that linked-to page to convert the visitors to leads. Backlinks are still tremendously important, but their role is to support good content, not the other way around.
Finding the Right Balance
The professional SEO services of the contemporary, therefore, rely upon a two-pronged approach. While favoring quality over quantity, they flood the audience with lucrative content while they seek links backing up those good content on battleground SERP. High-quality content offers a sustainable and reliable path to a strong ROI for ecommerce SEO services while securing high-quality backlinks to shore up brand reputation.
Indeed, according to a report by Smart Insights, around 63% of the marketing budget in any sector goes to content marketing. B2C favors it somewhat more than B2B companies, but no matter, the role of content marketing is paramount. Only a third of the parties working with a digital marketing agency think that the agencies truly understand their customers’ needs and pain points.
The referral traffic value coming over your backlinks is, however, not to be ignored. A professional SEO service will instantly recognize the SEO value of a backlink - or find a gap where one should be. Establishing and nurturing that link can mean a whole rank up or down for your web portal.
At the end of the day, the authority, trust, and relevance of your pages are what’s going to rank them. These are not to be measured by numbers but rather by human emotional quotient. Any way you can leverage that - content, guest blogs, backlinks - is going to add to the ROI of your digital marketing strategy.
Writer: Oindrila Dev
Date: 30.03.2024
Word count: 1136
Time taken: 3 hours
Readability: 63
AI/Plagiarism: none
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