Determining what to focus on to improve your website’s ranking can be a challenging task. Many people are stuck between choosing content or link building. Each choice has its pros and cons and generates website traffic. However, you should evaluate your business needs and choose what benefits you most. Knowing what will be more useful for your website helps you invest in a strategy to help make your business grow the most.

Most website owners often ask, “Should I Invest in Content or Backlinks?” Well, both content and backlinks are important for driving traffic to your website. While you can choose to work on both, investing more in content can ultimately have better benefits. However, every business has different priorities. In this article, we outline different reasons and pros and cons on which is more beneficial for your business to invest in. Let’s dive in!

What Is Content?

Marketers define content as information of relevant use to the reader. Website content should be high quality and offer relevant and useful information to solicit emotion or engagement. The content you post on your website should provoke the reader to engage in your business or leave them feeling like they want to come back. Content is what makes your services marketable and appealing to your audiences.

How Does Content Affect SEO?

Developing content for your website helps you grow organically the most over time. The effect will mainly be an increase in organic search visibility and improve rankings. You get to achieve such by creating optimized content consistently. Not all content you post on your website will get you the results you want. Go with content that matches your marketing needs and implement keywords that can be effective.

Benefits of SEO Content

Here are some reasons you should go with content creation for your website.

  • It Helps Validate Your Customer’s Decision to Buy

The end game for marketing your website ensures that clients buy your products. Content creation helps ensure your services and products validate the customer’s decision to buy. Clients are always looking for some convincing before buying products that they have not used before. Content offers valuable information to the client, with the call-to-action section directing them to a specific purpose to do so. Having high-quality blogs creates authority online and aligns you as an industry expert. All of these additions help validate the customer’s decision to trust and buy from your business.

  • Ensures Your Marketing Is Goal-Driven

Marketing is not all about getting traffic. There is so much more than one can gain. Content ensures that you achieve the set-out goals for your business enterprise. Some of the content helps your business generate more leads of high quality. Other content helps define a page’s topic using the internal links and schema. Some content can help answer an individual’s question. You can also use content to gain better traction on social media. Goal-driven marketing supported by content SEO helps you stick around for longer and stay competitive. Great content on your site is an important asset for creating a lasting impression.

  • Establishes Credibility and Builds Trust

Content is the surest way to engage your audience. It is why content marketing has had resounding success over the years. You can effectively build trust with your target audience and establish credibility through constant engagement. Most of the content focused on answering questions and offering recommendations for clients’ various problems can build trust. Content practically elicits a reaction from the right audience, which improves your brand’s reputation.

  • Ensures You Stay Top-Of-Mind for Prospects

As the website owner, you need to be aware of the prospects that visit your site at all times. Most of them are clueless about what they need and will begin by looking for the necessary information. The content presents valuable information for them, meaning you can easily turn them over. SEO content is informative making prospects come time and time again. Their numerous visits increase website traffic, and, in the end, they might buy. You should ensure your content is keyword rich to increase the number of prospects.

  • Content Helps with Site Structure

Your internal linking structure is useful for guiding potential clients around your website. By using content and aligning it in the right places, you can inform clients where important pages on your website are. The effect is more seamless navigation for website visitors and content spiders.

Cons of Investing in Content

Below are some setbacks your business might want to be mindful of when investing in SEO content for your website:

  • Requires Lots of Writing

Content marketing involves so much writing, which can feel like torture if you hate writing. The search engine also favors high-quality content sites, making every detail vital. The creation process will involve constant editing to achieve the perfect content. If you don’t have a dedicated content employee, this can be a setback for you. You can skip the hassle by hiring numerous freelancers to create quality blogs for you. They offer you versatile content, but it is an investment by itself, so you have to spend more. That type of copywriting can help improve traffic.

  • No Instant Results

Content creation is a highly competitive way for better website ranking. As a result, it may take some while to rank favorably. If you are after instant results, this is sometimes not the way to go. It requires patience and commitment for a long time. All SEO aspects require patience and time to see the best results.

  • Algorithm Changes Necessitate Content Change

The ranking algorithm rarely changes, but your content might not be enough to rank favorably when it does. You can beat this by investing in versatile content types to fit within algorithm shifts technically.

How Do Backlinks Affect SEO?

Link building is also essential for increasing traffic, but it can be difficult to quantify. It affects SEO by sending readers and website visitors to your website. Directing visitors has the effect of generating traffic and sometimes results in sales.

Benefits of Investing in Backlinks

Investing in backlinks for your website can have some interesting benefits, including:

  • Faster Ranking

The fact that backlinking is inorganic means that you can access results faster. You can use already drafted content from other bloggers to increase traffic to your website. Link building freelancers also ensure faster results, but the quality is not always guaranteed.

  • Simpler and Cheaper Compared to Content Marketing

Unlike with content, backlinks skip some processes and still get the results. It is simpler for most website owners since they do not have to create content. If you are after a less stressful process and working within a budget, quality backlinks are ideal for you.

Cons Of Investing in Backlinks

Here are some reasons why it is unwise to invest in backlinks:

  • It Is Unnatural

Backlinks are inorganic since they rely on the content that others put out to link to a website. A decline in the website traffic for sites you have linked to can hurt your business. Putting your website down the pecking order can have some uninteresting results.

  • Harder to Find Quality Link Builders

Gone are the days of buying cheap backlinks for your website. Doing so can have some serious consequences on your website’s ranking. It would be best to find quality link builders for top-of-the-line backlinks. Finding quality link builders is a budding challenge today. Those who are available charge a fortune for their services, so it might end up costing you more.

  • Doesn’t Invest in Creating Credibility

Unlike content, backlinks skip the step of engaging the potential clients. In essence, building trust with the audience is a lot more challenging. Failing to create credibility can affect the business in the long term since not most clients will identify themselves with you.

Developing Content and Link Building

The decision of choosing content vs link building for your website doesn’t always have to be challenging. When it comes to improving your SEO, investing in building content will get you amazing and lasting results. Link building is also great, but you don’t get as much as content creation. At Boostability you can get the best of both worlds! Learn more about partnering with Boostability to help improve your content, links, and SEO for your clients!

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Ansley is the former Content Marketing Manager at Boostability. Since graduating from Utah State University with two degrees in Communication Studies and Journalism: Public Relations, Ansley specializes in creating engaging and informative SEO content for readers, customers, and partners through different marketing channels. Along with creating new content, Ansley works to keep content organized and creates and executes new content strategies. When she’s not writing, she loves to travel, visit National Parks, and loves all things Disney.