Content marketing and link building are two strategies companies use to work toward the same goals – driving qualified traffic, converting visitors into buyers, and building long-lasting relationships with those customers.
The effectiveness of each strategy is amplified when implemented together.
If you’re not taking a content marketing mindset into your link building strategy, your inbound marketing and SEO campaigns aren’t living up to the fullest of their potential.
What’s The Difference Between Link Building and Content Marketing?
Content Marketing
A good content marketing strategy is important these days for providing value to your customers that might translate into a better bottom line. You give consumers helpful information about your product and/or service through channels such as blog posts, case studies, eBooks, microsites, newsletters, and social media, providing them with a true resource.
In return, customers are more likely to turn to you for their consumer needs. Content marketing allows companies to build trust by creating quality, consistent content that consumers can rely on.
Link Building
Put simply, link building is the process of earning links to your content from other sites around the web. Link building is a strategy designed to increase visibility and building confidence and authority in your brand.
Link building isn’t just about manipulating hyperlinks and anchor text, rather it is about earning links by creating exceptional content, cultivating relationships with influential people and and industry relevant websites. Link building can work in a symbiotic way with content marketing to advance your overall business strategy.
How Link Building Helps Content Marketing
The fact is, there is so much informational noise on the Internet – and a lot of it is thin, worthless content – that it makes it difficult for your content to rise to the top unless it’s exceptionally well thought out, well written, and well promoted.
Successful link building utilizes elements of sales, programming, psychology and content to create as much inbound traffic as possible.
It includes developing contextual links, earning attention from ranking sites, social media promotion, conducting outreach to outside sources, broken link cultivation, and competitive link analysis among other strategies.
In short, link building provides more ways for people to find the great content and valuable information you have to offer. What is the point of developing great content if nobody can find it?
How Content Marketing Helps Link Building
It’s important to note that search engines value quality over quantity, which means taking short cuts and buying a bunch of spammy links isn’t going to cut it.
If your company is not producing quality content, developing quality links is going to be very difficult, so be sure that your company is working to produce content worth reading. Whether the content is meant to be informational, promotional or just plain funny, producing content that rocks makes users want to share it and link to it.
If you are tasked with developing a link building or inbound marketing strategy for your company, be sure to keep in mind that link building and content marketing truly go hand-in-hand. Without quality links pointing to your content, the content doesn’t get found. Without having great content, nobody is going share their link love with you!