I know this thought is not a new one, but I figured I would write a post that I can direct people to as I am arguing this point more than I would like to. First of, content is not totally worthless, but writing good content and putting it on your site will not get you to rank, ever. It also won’t help to add to any of your social media profiles. You wont be like Kevin Costner in Field of dreams. If you build it, they wont come, ever.
Do any number of buying-related searches on Google and you will find something very consistent. Large companies dominate the searches. In fact, show me a small or medium sized company that shows up for any number of 1, 2 and 3 word phrases on Google and I will show you a company that is doing aggressive artificial link building. Why? Because naturally they have all of the incoming links due to natural links from large publications, blog haters that write about them, etc.
Google preaches whenever possible that if you build content, they will come. They are lying. They know they are lying, it drives me crazy. Content, on your site, does almost nothing in regards to rankings that will produce real traffic. Sure, you may be able to get an exact match, 5 word keyword phrase ranking that will produce a visit or two each month with content alone, but to get the keywords that drive real volume, the only thing that will get you there is inbound links from other sites. How do you get these? Artificially, paying for them, striking deals, etc. No one wants to say it, but its true.
Our clients are self-educating more and more and often times I am presented with posts and tips from Google preaching NOT to get a link to rank. And then I have to explain to them real reality, not Google’s lies.
They are giving small and medium sized businesses bad advice. In fact, unless you are a company with massive natural PR exposure, you have almost no chance of ranking ever if you followed Google’s SEO guidelines.
The bottom line is, you have to artificially create links in order to rank. Plain, simple truth that is indisputable.