First of all, I have no doubt that good content marketing and well-made link magnets can lead to links. We have had this positive experience in the last 4 years of content marketing for ourselves and our clients. But we have never done content marketing with an exclusive focus on link building .
Back to the statement from the beginning and another quote from the communication with the interested party already mentioned at the beginning of this article as a supplement:
I asked another well-known agency and they basically offered to generate posts tailored to target groups with the intention of generating discussions and links. In the long term, the idea is to create a honduras phone number data series of posts with a specific topic. The prices for the content generated, some of which will be in the form of high-quality infographics, seem a bit high to me for the mere possibility of generating a few links.
Actually, I need links.
And this quote describes the problem quite well. Content marketing is not scalable in terms of the number of backlinks and is expensive compared to classic link building... But it only seems expensive if you have pure SEO goals in mind, such as link building or better findability in search engines, i.e. search engine optimization (SEO).
And this is where a conflict arises. Companies that exclusively pursue SEO goals need backlinks. Content marketing, no matter how well it is done, does not guarantee these backlinks or better findability in search engines . This means that the alternative to link building proclaimed by many SEO agencies quickly becomes shaky and can completely miss the SEO goal.
Especially when you are just starting out with content marketing, backlinks are a rarity, no matter how good the content is, as the readership or reach, reputation and trust on the part of potential linkers such as editors, bloggers, webmasters... is often lacking. This requires "artificial" support, particularly in the initial phase, via outreach via earned media , content promotion via PPC , etc. This increases the readership, discussions arise via comments, social signals, and perhaps even social buzz. You develop into a trustworthy authority or source of information that is worthy of being linked to.
Once all these medium to long-term goals have been achieved, it becomes easier to build organic backlinks through your own content (although there is no guarantee ). They are a positive effect of the previous investments.