Many people struggle with one aspect of content marketing: whether or not content alone is enough to rocket you up in Google. We know two things about the Google search engine:
- They reward unique, well written content.
- They reward incoming links.
At first glance, content marketing is the former only. It’s a method of developing as much unique content as possible to give your website a tremendous amount of depth and letting Google reward you with a higher pagerank. But what about the incoming links? How can content marketing be all you need to rank well in Google if you don’t have any incoming links?
How Content Marketing Creates Incoming Links
The reality is that content marketing creates incoming links in a variety of ways:
- Natural Links – When your website provides useful, readily available content, people will link to it. People link to their sources often in things like blog posts, online news articles, and more. The more valuable content you offer, the more likely people will link to you.
- Guest Posts – Guest posting can be difficult at times, as most blog owners are used to spammers asking to guest post on their blog all the time. But when you have an immensely valuable website, you build authority in a way that lends people to believing that you can write a valuable post. The more content you have on your site, the more people believe that a guest post from you is useful.
- Article Marketing – Posting in article directories isn’t the most popular way to market a website anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. The problem is that it’s less valuable then it was in the past, and a terrible way to market a website without any content. Once you’ve got content already completed, it becomes much more valuable.
There are also press releases, link requests, and numerous other ways to get incoming links, and while it may not seem like it, having a complete website that is full of content drastically increases the value of those incoming links.
Content marketing seems like only one part of the Google strategy, but it’s also one that creates its own natural incoming links, while making other, easy strategies more effective.
