Content or Backlinks

[BeckyKey]

HI

I have resource issues and need to prioritise my time, I know both content & backlinks are important for SEO, but where will it be most beneficial to spend my time?

We are a generalist site, so this also makes things tougher. I have some core areas to work on, but want to be the most effective in the time I spend on them.

Thanks!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Great, relevant content leads to great, relevant links. If you build it, they will come.

Focus on creating great content based on audience research and then focus your efforts on distributing that content in an effective way that reaches your audience where they are actively digesting content and having discussions.

After you get into the mode of developing your content, focus on link building tactics that gets your content placed in front of the right audience. Don't just build links to build links. Expect this to take time, as Rand says, it's a flywheel.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!
P

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Some great pointers from Patrick there, and this is something that is more common that you might realise - a question that is asked daily.

As a generalist, it does make it a little more awkward because the ideal scenario would be to be creating amazing content based on your niche, but if you have multiple, that makes it a little different.

Do you have particular industries you are focussing on?

-Andy

[BeckyKey]

HI

I've selected 6 areas to work on, but then I need to juggle other requirements in the business.

Those 6 areas are top level, within those there are any number of lower level categories - some of the businesses most important areas are hugely competitive.

At the moment for example, a priority is shelving - warehouse shelving primarily. I'm looking at what the competition do and I'm stumped - one ranking in first position hides content behind a tab and get their links from directories, so I can't see how they rank.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It's hard to say without doing some digging Becky, but for yourself, I would do the following:

• Create a content strategy. This should be articles of probably 1k words, well researched and informative. Perhaps half a dozen of them.
• See who is talking about / asking questions related to the niche and then fit these into your articles.
• Look on Social Media who is talking about these areas and reach out to them. Discuss this with them and ask them to take a look at what you have produced.
• Use something like Ahrefs content explorer to find other similar articles and where do they get links from - can you also get a link?
• Don't worry about asking for links, but be very careful how you do it - ask if you can be added as a resource and never mention the word 'link'

There is a lot more to this, but it should give you a few pointers to get started - however, it's not going to be a quick fix so expect to put a bit of leg work into doing this.

-Andy

[EGOL]

We don't do linkbuilding for any of our sites.  Instead we put all of our work into creating content.

If you are producing industry-leading content, have decent traffic already, and you have visitors who appreciate and spread the word about your content for you then this is a good strategy.

This is not a good strategy if your content is low quality or even medium quality because nobody is going to spread the word about it or link to it.  And, you gotta be honest with yourself about this... don't think that because you wrote an article that you have a good one.  You must compare it to the websites that hold the top positions in the SERPs and ask if yours is as good or better.

Someone might argue that if we added a linkbuilding service that we would do even better.  That might be true.   But instead of doing that I would rather pay someone to take over other duties and keep myself and my content team focused on more content and better content.

[BeckyKey]

Thanks Andy,

I've put together a couple of guides already, are there any tools I can use to find questions people are asking? I've used SEM rush but there isn't much around questions people ask.

Thank you for the pointers, I'll start putting some into practice.

Would you go for blogs & longer pieces of content or just the longer pieces?

[BeckyKey]

Thanks EGOL

What I find frustrating, is none of the sites in top SERPs have any long pieces of this content, or good shareable content & no quality backlinks.

Apart from the big players like Amazon & Ebay, I have no idea why these sites are ranking.

My struggle is also the amount of areas and trying to product well researched content for the different categories on my own

Thank you!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

First of all, one of the best tools to use to find questions is http://answerthepublic.com/ butMOZ also have a very nice tool as well now.

In terms of what I would consider best, it is whatever is going to sit well on the site and make the most sense to be there.

Tread carefully with longer content on your product pages and make sure that however it is done, it doesn't ruin the user experience. I would say you might have to do a bit of both.

-Andy

[EGOL]

It sounds like there is a lot of potential for you.

We have two types of sites, info sites with small stores and retail sites with large content libraries.

For the retail sites, our first source of articles is questions that we receive from our customers.  These are articles about how to select the right model, features, size, etc.....  how to make common repairs.... examples of how to use the products.   We used customer emails as starters for these articles and beefed them up to a formal article that included lots of photos, tables, video, etc.

You might be able to get people in customer service to write these articles.  Tell them that is a really important job.  If they get the same question over and over and over, then having an faq page on the site that links to these customer service articles will allow people to get their answers in a self-service mode instead of bugging your staff.

Make your site the one that has more of this type of content than all of your competitors combined.

[BeckyKey]

These are some great ideas

Really value your feedback so thank you

[BeckyKey]

Amazing thank you.

Yes product pages are definitely more focused on the user rather than having too much content, so it's just adding blogs or guides in other areas of the site, Thanks

[BeckyKey]

For http://answerthepublic.com/ where is the data from - I can't for example find any search volume related to some questions on here, but is that expected?

[EGOL]

Each one of these article pages has links and house ads on it that guide visitors to pages where the product and accessories can be purchased.  These customer service pages appear in the SERPs, pull traffic and are a source of the sales that show up in our shopping cart.

We also link to these pages from sales pages.  Some people would not do this because they think it is distracting, however, we know that people who land on our sales pages often follow these links.  On our site, the average person has a 13 day gap between their first visit to our site and the first purchase being made, so we think that these links on product pages give them confidence in us as a vendor and also answers any questions that they have about the product.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It's gets everything from Google but it doesn't give you search volume - just different types of questions / searches.

-Andy