Should I embark on this long term link building campaign?

[ryj]

I've been planning to set out on a massive link building campaign for the term 'how to start a business' and I can't decide if it's a good idea or not. (Metrics attached - my site is the last listed and the ones above it are the top ranking for that term)

The sites ranking for that terms are on very authoritative domains, but the page link profiles on each of them are poor. This is one of those moments where you think, 'Am I about to waste a tremendous amount of time?'

My guide is extremely thorough and I had hoped with a MASSIVE amount of elbow grease outranking pages that had poor content value + only has 4 referring root domains. The problem is, I'm not sure if the powerful overall domain authority would still outrank my newer site.

Should I follow through with that general guide or focus on less hard to rank and less searched content?

Argh confusion  GB3jcsJ.png?1

[EGOL]

'Am I about to waste a tremendous amount of time?'

If I am interested in ranking well for a keyword, I don't look at those numbers.  Instead, I go straight to the search results and look at the quality of the content that is currently ranking for my keywords of interest.  If I am confident that I can beat their content then I attack.  Great authors with strong content area expertise should not look at those numbers.  If you can beat their content soundly (like Rand describes here) then you have a chance.   If you can't beat their content then is the time to evaluate.

Judging by the quality of the writing in your question, I think that you might have a shot at it.  You say that you have an extremely thorough "guide".  Does that mean you have hundreds of pages about hundreds of topics that speak to how to launch a business?  Is it clearly written for the average person?  Is it unique content that you own, found nowhere else on the web?  Do you have it on the web with all of the pages optimized, each for specific queries?  If you have that do you plan to  continue writing for this topic, on this site, into the foreseeable future (meaning at least a few years)?   Is this site already pulling in a little traffic?

If you have a confident "yes" answer for all of those questions, then my advice would be... Forget about this keyword.  Look at the analytics for your website and identify the pages that are pulling in traffic and producing income from adsense.  Identify the keywords of these pages.  Now you see what's working.  You have discovered a vein of gold.  Mine it 'til it plays out.  Instead of spending your time building links, find more veins.  Mine them.  If you are producing better content than what is out there I would keep attacking it.  As long as your traffic and income are growing month over month keep at it.

Instead of launching a massive linkbuilding campaign I would launch a massive quality content campaign.

That is what I would do.  I am sure that plenty of people will disagree.  Most of those people have never been able to answer a confident "YES!" to the questions posed above and kept attacking the content.

[AlanMosley]

I wont disagree, links can be good, but links that you can just go out and get are usually not worth it.
Quality and unique content described by Egol is what you need.

Click data will eventually get you ranking better and better for the keywords that your content deserves not necessarily the ones you wont to rank for. Search engines look at the activities of users, they see what keywords they enter and what results they click on, did the user come back and click on a different result, what was the last result they clicked on. From all this click data they can start to see what results served the users needs for each keyword and rank you accordingly.

I create many websites for people, from their content and purpose I can just tell if they are going to successful. I make sure the site crawls perfectly with no errors no redirects and mess, I make sure the content is described to the search engine well using structured data, its the clients job to supply good content. If that content is good. I will see over the next few months it continually rise in the rankings.

click data will eventually overrule everything, of your site does not satisfy the users needs the search engine will eventually know this no matter how many links you have, and visa versa

[ryj]

My gosh guys, thanks so much for the thorough and insightful answers!

Ironically you both cleared up my game plan in other parts of my business indirectly. So now, aside from my initial question - I've got a better plan for that as well.

Brilliant. Thank you so much!