Best to Spend Marketing Budget on High Quality Articles OR Link Building Services?

[Kingalan1]

Greeting MOZ Community:

My site has 400 domains linking to it of which about 180 are toxic and 180 are suspicious according to a site audit from a reputable SEO firm. The SEO firm is offering link removal and link building services to remedy the situation.

My question is this: if I can create and post high quality blog articles on a very regular basis, will this in and of itself create high quality links to my site? If the articles are of exceptional quality can I post them elsewhere to earn quality links?

Does it make more sense to use my budget on paying a PR agency to create high quality articles and posting them on my blog or elsewhere rather than spending on an SEO link building campaign? Should I do both?

I plan on having the SEO firm remove toxic links and optimize content using Yoast. But I want to be careful about not wasting my budget if the links will develop naturally if I post the content online myself. I am more inclined to have an SEO pro work on creating links but why pay if I can do it myself.

Any thoughts?
Alan

[KeriMorgret]

A bit cynical here, but would a PR agency be able to create high-quality content that's relevant to your industry? Or would your time and money (for that type of content) be better spent having someone with knowledge of your industry (perhaps in your company) writing and paying for an editor to polish the content?

[Kingalan1]

Hi Keri:

Thanks for your response!!

Well i am writing the content and have a PR agency making it more engaging, incorporating a strong call to action organizing in order to create a piece which is very informative while at the same time being entertaining.

So would something that is written more skillfully create more quality links than an article created by an SEO firm, maybe being better optimized but not as engaging? DO I spend my budget on superb content or on good content by an SEO expert who may have a better idea of where to get links?

Thanks,

Alan

[KeriMorgret]

I don't have the best answer here for that, and look forward to others chiming in. I was just afraid you were going to spend money to have someone who didn't know your field write up content for you, and glad to hear that people involved in the industry are involved in the authorship.

[EGOL]

If you have an article that is truly exceptional it can very slowly accumulate links as long as you have traffic into it.  If the article is truly exceptional and it gets shared on social media that can sometimes be like throwing gasoline on a fire - but this best happens when the content topic is a bit provocative, surprising, funny, beautiful or possesses some other attribute that triggers sharing.

If you have an article that accumulates just two natural links per year that can become a major force over time.  How? Because if you have two hundred of those articles on your site then you have four hundred natural quality links coming in per year and that is better than one new link every day.

Most important, the quality of the links that you will get from this are 10x as valuable as those produced by the typical linkbuilder.  The typical linkbuilder is going to get you into a Penguin problem in his push to produce results.  Now that is going to make most of the linkbuilders who read this reach straight for the thumbs down - but look around and see how many people come here crying about a Penguin problem and how many people come in here asking how to build links.

Most people will not take the content route, because exceptional content is really expensive and requires hard work.  But if you go that route you will eventually have enough content on your site that its performance will be equal to having one of the most highly skilled linkbuilders working on your site full time 24x7.

This is how great content can defeat SEO over time.  But most people will not try this because they fail in budget, creativity, content knowledge, time, patience or faith.

The greatest risks in taking this path is that your opinion of great content is set too low or you decide to start taking shortcuts.  You need content that is of the same quality as an article on National Geographic, the New York Times or one of the many posts that you read on the Moz.com blog.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

As far as I'm concerned, SEO link building today is content creation and distribution (social, etc).  So, to me it sounds like you are trying to choose between two of the same thing.  What other link building services are there out there these days that doesn't violate Google's guidelines?

If you accept my premise, then your choice is simply whether you think a PR firm or an SEO firm would do a better job of making sure the content you are creating is as engaging as possible and reaches as many people as possible.  It's all about creating remarkable content, building an audience, and trying to get social/search traffic (to further build your audience).

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[Kingalan1]

No that is an interesting!!!

So assuming I can create content that is unique interesting and engaging, where should I post it? My website blog, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn an off site blog?

So  if I can create the content, how do I address the issue of optimizing and submitting to the appropriate places. Would an SEO firm add value in this area assuming they are pros and only engage in white hat?

Obviously I would prefer to allocate my budget to creating high value content and more of it. Which not hiring an SEO firm would allow me to do. But I don't wan to be penny wise and pound foolish.

[EGOL]

**So assuming I can create content that is unique interesting and engaging, where should I post it? My website blog, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn an off site blog? **

I post my articles on my own site only.  I don't give them to anyone else.  I want my site to be the go-to place for the topics that I write about.    When I write an article my intent is that it will be the best on the web for that topic or truly exceptional for some aspect of that topic.

So  if I can create the content, how do I address the issue of optimizing and submitting to the appropriate places. Would an SEO firm add value in this area assuming they are pros and only engage in white hat?

I have a blog that gets a few very short posts each day about industry news.  These are simply a sentence or two about an interesting article and a link (these posts are noindexed btw but they do go on category pages).  That blog has slowly accumulated thousands of subscribers.  When I post a new article on my site I add a link to it in my news and that usually results in a blast of immediate traffic, shares etc.

I don't use social media myself.  My visitors do that for me without an prompt, request or incentive from me.  To make that happen you need content that they want to share.

Obviously I would prefer to allocate my budget to creating high value content and more of it. Which not hiring an SEO firm would allow me to do. But I don't wan to be penny wise and pound foolish.

You have to be honest with your self and have courage.  Honest that your content is good enough to merit sharing.  If it isn't then the method that I suggest will not be successful.  And you must be brave enough to stay on this path long enough to let it start building.

[94501]

Quality content properly promoted is the ultimate link building strategy.

Consider how many artificial link building strategies from the past have eventually caused site owners problems.

I'd post to your site first and when I was sure it was indexed, re-purpose it for social media.

Best of luck!