Content Quality vs. Backlink Quality: Which Matters Most?
Which is more important, content or backlinks? Find out which matters most and where to focus to get more and better-converting traffic.
Adam Riemer Adam Riemer / May 18, 2021 / 4 min read
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Content Quality vs. Backlink Quality: Which Matters Most?
Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Swet in California, who asks:
“What matters the most in SEO: quality of content or quality of links?”
Great question, Swet!
It’s all about the quality of your content and not the quality or quantity of your backlinks. But that isn’t just from an SEO standpoint; it’s from an all-channel standpoint.
Lots of people will disagree, but the bottom line is that you have to provide a quality experience on your website if you want quality backlinks.
If you take the other route and you do get a ton of traffic from the quality backlinks, that traffic is useless if your website’s content doesn’t satisfy the visitors’ needs.
Backlinks are important because they help to build trust and authority for many search engines.
Quality backlinks also bring you new customers, readers, and leads, because they come from topically relevant sources such as major media, trade publications, and niche blogs.
But what good are backlinks if the experience on your website is poor and your visitors just bounce?
That is why quality content is more important than backlinks (whether good or bad).
More SEO News
How SEO And Content Marketing Work Together?
For content marketers, SEO can be a hassle. Are they the same? Is SEO at odd with content marketing? Can you forcibly make them work together?
It is easy to get lost in how they work together. In certain blog posts, they sometimes even seem at odds with each other and no one really ever drew the line between the two.
The simple answer is that SEO and content marketing do go hands-in-hands together. They compel each other in the sense that SEO is all about content marketing and vis-versa.
But in reality, the answer is much more complex. Even though they overlap, the main problem between SEO and content marketing is that they are not integrated.
To understand the problem, let us break them down separately.
So How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a collection of techniques that ensures that any web content is visible to a specific audience a marketer wants to target.
Simply put, SEO aims to get the right pair of eyes in front of the right content. This is done through regular adjustments of targeted optimization and technical tunes-ups.
An SEO expert would then uses those techniques to help drive traffic through organic sources, such as search engine.
Hence, Search Engine Optimization.
So without content, such as web pages, blogs, product descriptions, images, or videos, SEO wouldn’t work.
Why?
Because it needs content to match search engine research with specific keywords.
14 STRATEGIES FOR CREATING SEO CONTENT THAT LASTS
Members of the Young Entrepreneur Council explain how to craft SEO content that will withstand trends.
In a world of changing algorithms and content trends, it’s important to prioritize search engine optimization (SEO) to keep up with competitors and let your audience find you. When creating content, you’ll want to appeal to current trends so that you’re actually able to reach your target audience. Following proven best practices that give your content staying power is also important, however, no matter how many times search algorithms are updated.
To help, members of the Young Entrepreneur Council shared tips for creating long-lasting, SEO-friendly content. Follow their advice to publish pieces that stand the test of time.
14 STRATEGIES FOR CREATING SEO CONTENT THAT LASTS
Be authentic.
Create a landing page with core searchable phrases.
Make your content relevant to your site.
Focus on the customer journey.
Balance quantity and quality.
Create long-form content.
Publish useful content.
Invest in what your target audience is already reading.
Prioritize helping your customers.
Have a plan to recirculate your content.
Maximize the value you provide.
Keep up with consumer behavior.
Add visuals to written content.
Get to know your local audience.
How to Use The Inverted Pyramid for SEO Copywriting
The Inverted Pyramid is used in journalism to hook readers and create more engaging articles. Learn how to use it in SEO copywriting.
Effective SEO copywriting requires not only a deep knowledge of how to write for your target audience but the skill to craft content optimized to rank in Google.
This delicate balance between engaging readers and optimizing for search is a game marketers play often – sometimes well, and sometimes… not so much.
Applying the Inverted Pyramid from journalism to our writing can help SEO copywriters create content that is readable, scannable, and SEO-friendly.
In this column, you’ll learn all about the Inverted Pyramid model and how to apply it in your own content.
What Is the Inverted Pyramid?
The Inverted Pyramid is a model used by journalists to describe an article structure in which the most important information is presented first.
Applying the inverted pyramid means you structure your content to highlight the most important principles and keywords in the first paragraph, then gradually create a hierarchy of content throughout the page.
Essentially, your introductory paragraph subtly leads into deeper topics, more complexity, and finally a summarizing conclusion.
Front-Loading Your Content
In the inverted pyramid model, you front-load information in your content to grab the reader’s attention as quickly as possible.
This can have positive implications for your website’s SEO and engagement metrics, as readers are more likely to be hooked on your content than to venture elsewhere.
