The Imaginary Separation Between Link Building and Content Marketing

When you blog a lot, you notice things.

Sometimes they’re obvious things, but sometimes they’re strange things.

One particularly strange thing I’ve noticed has been around the words ‘Content [word for marketing or promotion]’ and ‘Link [words like building, acquisition, and/or development]’.

If a headline had “Content Marketing” in it, it appeals to one set of publications and people on social media.

And if it had “Link Building”, a completely different group of people would share it. It would appear in different industry round ups.

But the true irony of this, is that it could basically be the same article, with ‘content marketing’ swapped for ‘link building’, and ‘content piece’ swapped for ‘linkable asset’.

The SEOs Dilemma? Or Two Roads Diverged on a Whiteboard

Rand Fishkin and his team at Moz recently recorded a video called, “The SEO’s Dilemma – Link Building Vs Content Marketing“, talking about making the decision between content marketing and link building.

Rand said, “I want to address a dilemma that a lot of SEOs and a lot of marketers face and that is sort of choice between what should I be doing to move the needle on my search traffic? Should I be doing kind of classic SEO, the keyword targeting plus link building, which moves the needle? Or should I be thinking more broadly in terms of kind of a full content marketing spectrum?”

It’s a pretty good video, so I highly encourage you to cruise over to Moz and give it a watch. (Don’t worry – barring NSA intervention, this post will be here when you come back.)

Here’s his whiteboard:

But there was something about the video I (respectfully) disagreed with. In his whiteboard sketch, Rand showed link building and content marketing as disparate, deeply divergent paths – where online marketers had to choose one or the other.

The Content Marketing – Link Building Continuum

Content marketing and link building are a continuum. You can optimize for the far left or the far right, but tons of value can be captured in the middle by combining both approaches.

Can you do content marketing without building any links?

Yes, you certainly can. You can hide all of your content behind a log-in wall, or, for example, send people postal mail.

Can you do link building without content marketing?
If you put your mind to it, yes, you can.

On the white hat side, you can do resource page outreach (which often requires, you know, resources), you can do broken link building to your site and bask in your tiny response rate, and you can do things like submissions to high quality or niche directories.

You can also do things like market content irrelevant to your business to link rich segments. This was a popular tactic to build domain authority in the late 2000s, especially combined with Digg voting rings.

And if you want to go the grayer route, you can do mass submissions/mass social bookmarking or use any of the other no doubt reputable link building products available on the Warrior Forum.

(Disclaimer: We here at BuzzStream do not necessarily endorse any of the approaches just mentioned.)

Do Link Building and Top of the Funnel Content Marketing Go Together? Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate!

Content marketing can be optimized to achieve certain business goals.

You can optimize for things like search engine rankings, inbound links, conversion, retention, and the like.

However, these goals are not mutually exclusive. Top of Funnel content can both attract links and educate prospects.

Certainly you can build links without content marketing. You can do content marketing without building links. But neither of these is as efficient as it could be. As that forgettable Jack Johnson song told us, Some Things Are So Much Better When [They’re] Together.

If you’re optimizing for lifetime value, instead of one-time traffic, (something that would make Avinash Kaushik’s heart swell with joy), an approach that combines both link building and understanding search visibility with content that appeals to your target market, gets influencer attention, and moves prospects further down the funnel.

As Asana’s business chief Kenny Van Zandt shared on Quora while discussing their growth strategy:
Read Quote of Kenny Van Zant’s answer to Asana: What were the most successful customer acquisition strategies and tactics for Asana? on Quora

But Don’t Forget to Build Links to Your Content Marketing

While I was researching this post, I started looking for good examples of content marketing that ranked for things, and exploring their backlink profiles.

I found something interesting – very few of them reached their link acquisition potential.  

I looked companies famous for their content marketing, like Marketo and Eloqua.  And I found awesome resource hubs like this one with very few linking domains.  

You have to imagine that some university class would find those resources very useful – yet there are no .EDU links.  Moreover, there are only 9 linking root domains to that page, according to AHrefs.  With a page full of great resources from an industry leader on lead scoring – one of the hardest problems in scaling sales and marketing machines – there has to be more link opportunities than that.

If the marketers in charge of this content had done more link outreach, they would’ve gotten better results – more referral traffic, an opportunity to build more influencer relationships, and more search visits.

The idea that content in itself is enough to achieve successful marketing outcomes is fundamentally false.  Content should be promoted as much as possible.  Fundamentally content with great ideas and great production values will not achieve its maximum ROI without great promotion.

Well, that was quite the polemic. What do you think? Are content marketing and link building separate paths? Or can you work on both tactics together to achieve superior results?