£1.5k budget per month

[Oceanic]

Well, I was giving my opinion and all I can say is that I have been doing SEO professionally for a living for 15 years and have found that the suggestions I have given work at every level of competitiveness. I have done it on my own sites and I have done it for clients, big well known brands through to SMEs.


Yes I agree that in ultra competitive niches link building is important but if you are going to build links en masse, you better have something decent to point them at (content)!

I guess we all have different points of view, content marketing seems to be a contentious subject here for some reason despite that it is proven to work, it is advocated by pretty much all well known and respected SEO's and it is low risk.

 

[Edwin]

Part of the problem is that there's "content" and "content" - many/most sites seem to go for the shovelware approach where they either grab the nearest warm body passing through the office to scribble down a few lines, or else they outsource it for £10 an article or whatever it costs to get an Englishish speaker to "customise" somebody else's content/rewrite Wikipedia these days. Either that, or they let the marketing department lard the copy with so many hollow buzzwords that it's unreadable.

On the other hand, well-written on-topic interesting pieces by subject experts (the "interesting" part is paramount) can still attract attention via social media, PR etc. especially if they're taking a new slant on the topic or revealing information that's not common knowledge.

But of course that costs anywhere from 10x to 100x or more what the "rotate this content through a thesaurus" approach does - so many companies won't even consider it...

 

[Oceanic]

I totally agree Edwin.

Only quality, well written content that is of "interest" to the reader is likely to win the day. Perhaps that is why people are not so interested in content marketing, because they are not happy to invest in quality. Everyone wants to rank highly for little amount of money as possible.

The OP has a good budget for creating some awesome content that would be a sound investment when it comes to content, however I am not sure you are going to get much for your money for link building on the same budget if he is outsourcing to someone who knows what they are doing.

 

[topcat]

and there is what White Hat truly is. Content development by subject matter experts.

Health articles by doctors
Finance articles by authorised advisers
etc.

It's certainly not £15/article that many people look to pay for.

For £1.5k/month you could develop your own link network or you could spend it on manual outreach or you could spend it on content.

It's almost certainly going to be more effective spending it on the links than on the content, but it depends what risks you want to take.

 

[thudufushi]

It's non-dirty finance. End-user site.

Stephen - Interesting you think the move from 4 -1 would be negligible in terms of traffic.

We are currently below the fold - I would have thought we a missing out on at least 60% of traffic....?

Cheers

You are right and Stephen is wrong, there would be an order of magnitude difference in traffic. You may be able to reach one of the 1-3 positions just by having a proper SEO expert look at onsite improvements that can be made.

 

[denchomsky]

I would spend it on decent content, then promote that content via social media and relevant respected channels.

Build your site for the user not for Google.

 

[max99x]

ultimately it depends on the goal of the site, moving up a few places for a certain keyword the tactic you'd want to use will vary in comparison to wanting a general uplift across all keywords or wanting to bring more long tail in etc.

I do the occasional bit of freelance for a friend and I vary the work I do depending on what his goal is.