Getting head-to-head on the battle- Content v/s Links

 The marketing version of What comes first- Egg or Chicken is What comes first- links or content

Like egg & chicken, both- content and link have their own flavors. But putting one in the forefront is not possible, given the equal importance of both in SEO. But unlike the original question, we have an answer for our digital question. Let’s find an answer by strategically analyzing the pros and cons of these two.    

Content 

The first thing that might strike one’s mind upon hearing these words is- lengthy blogs. But in reality, the content consists of written content, images, video, and audio that can be displayed on a website. Content is an extremely important part of SEO, as without it the search engines won’t have enough information to index. Without a solid SEO plan, website pages will never be seen. It will be online, but with no visitors. Search engines want to deliver search results that are valuable & relevant to the readers. As a result, the aim of SEO content is to get considered valuable & relevant enough to be visible on the first page.       

Importance of Content: 

Content is simply important because you can’t rank in search engines without optimizing it. Optimizing the content can be done by ensuring that it is audience-centric. Audience-centric content means the ones which are focused on what the audience wants rather than what you have to give. To rank in the search engine, it is important to produce useful and relevant content, and content optimization involves a lot of technical stuff like keywords, meta titles, meta descriptions, and URLs.

Few Steps to optimize the content: 

  • Topic Related Keyword research 
  • Optimal readability 
  • Optimize the technical tags  
  • Include Backlines 

Link Building 

The process of building hyperlinks from other websites back to the original one is known as link building. Backlink to your site, allows Google to know the quality of your site and thus consider it to be a worthy citation. Sites with more backlinks tend to get higher rankings in search engines. Many link-building techniques might help as it is a time-consuming task. 

Even though it sounds like simply posting links back to the domain, such a scatter approach won’t get you anywhere. It needs to be properly strategized towards building relationships with authority and thus placing links where it is valuable & relevant to the users.     

Benefits of Link building 

When combined with a strong technical SEO foundation, on-page SEO, and excellent content, link building can be super effective to gain more organic traffic. Below mentioned are a few link building: 

  • Gives you more credibility 
  • Is used by Google to rank the site 
  • Increase in web traffic 
  • High SEO metrics 
  • Greater revenue opportunities 
  • Referral Traffic Source 
  • Lower bounce rate 

This leaves us with two possibilities of which one comes first. Let’s see them both. 

Possibility 1 – Content First

Let’s assume the one possibility to be that, content comes first. Good content is valuable in itself. It goes by the phrase- built it and they will come. With good content, you can build a long-term strategy. If the content hits to be an evergreen one, the lifespan becomes infinity. When people keep coming back to your content, you establish authority over the topic.  

If you start with a heavy link strategy without enough content, there is no reason to link anyone to the site. But instead, of linking after creating amazing content, people get a reason to visit the site. If the reader likes the content, they will share & that’s the power of content.  

Possibility 2 – Link First

Thinking about building the links first!? Sounds to be a fair idea, but how productive it is. Definitely good content is of no use, without a good audience. Audiences bring the content to life, by sharing & popularising it. A right backlink network will expose the site to many people, as just publishing doesn’t help the site. This is the strongest argument for building links first. 

When a reader visits your site and like the content, they will automatically consider your site as an authority. Link building does the work of bringing in viewers. This is an effective way of getting long-term fans.     

And the winner is…..

Again the main question arises, what comes first. Some SEOs support links, saying that one can’t do anything without links. But others will say that it’s the content that comes first. But when considering what comes first, the most important aspect to be considered in the search engine. So the actual question is- What does the search engine care about? 

Let’s see what the most popular search engine Google has to say about it. Google says that providing high-quality content has to be the most important thing to make the site Google-friendly. This is because the mission of every search engine is to help the readers to find the best content. 

We can conclude that links are fantastic, but in the end, it leads to your content. If there is no content for your links, the visitor bounce rate is likely to increase as you won’t be adding to any value.