Content or Backlinks

I am ftne asked about this. The question and even the dollar amount can vary, but essentially people are trying to get to the heart of “what is the best way to spend my SEO budget?”

Now I can’t give a simplistic answer to such a vague question, because that would just be bad advice and probably a waste of 25,000.

But this isn’t all that complicated either.

Keep in mind that this is an assumption of a business looking to hire a subcontractor to do this work for them.

Essentially SEO discussions always break down into 3 topics that are constantly debated.

  • Technical Improvements
  • Content
  • Backlinks

I am going to give you my overall assessment of each as they relate to the question so we have some context for multiple answers near the end of this article.

And I will give you some pretty solid answers.

Now, It is doubtful that a marketing team with an Enterprise website is looking to spend such a limited budget, so we are probably talking about smaller businesses or even solopreneurs like affiliate marketers.

So I will focus the answers for small business.

And quite frankly, If you are having any major technical issues, these can usually be addressed pretty affordably by purchasing a $50 WordPress template for most small companies, or by moving your ecommerce website to something like Shopify.

This is why I won’t even make technical issues a part of the discussion here.

First, you need to be objectively honest. Is your content quality and is there a sufficient amount of it? Is it relevant and are people searching for the topics that are written about?

Now that you have looked at the content, let’s discuss the last element… backlinks.

With a little bit of effort, you can use a platform like Ahrefs to determine how authoritative your website is in comparison to the competition. And yes, they have a free version you can use.

If your Domain rating is noticeably lower and you have good content, then your primary focus should be on backlinks.

$20k Backlinks / $5k Onsite Optimization

Optimization would consist of some keyword research, rewriting title tags, implementing a strong internal linking strategy, etc. 

In another scenario, If your website does have quality backlinks and multiple pages on your website are receiving these links, but it is the content that is lacking, then I would focus there.

$5k Backlinks  / $20k Content creation

For the limited budget, I would have backlinks built for those new pages that you are creating.

All in all, most websites owners that ask this question suffer from a lack of content and hardly any backlinks.

This may seem like I am compromising here, but if you aren’t going to do any of this work yourself, then I would go with 

$12,500 Backlinks / $12,500 Content Creation and Onsite Optimization

What would you focus on?

By Marketing, Your Doing SEO Wrong!