Content marketing is the rage the past few years, and for good reason. It works…if also complemented with a solid off page strategy to ensure the content is indexed, ranked, and visited.

1. White Paper
Copyright 2009 – 2017, Austin Return On Now Internet Marketing, LLC
All rights reserved. http://returnonnow.com/
Why Content Is Not Enough to Get You Ranked
By Tommy Landry, President and CEO of Return On Now
Introduction
For several years now, content marketing has been a top priority for marketers.
How many times have you heard the phrase “Content is King?”
Well, yes, content is important. A good website should have a flow of high
quality, engaging content. Freshness, after all, is a factor in how the leading
search engines rank your website.
But is content enough to rank your website all by itself?
In most cases, the answer is a resounding “no.”
You’re Not Alone
We hear it all the time:
“Everyone says content marketing is the way to get your website
ranked.”
“We started publishing content months ago, but can’t seem to get
traction.”
“I’ve been blogging religiously for months and months, and my traffic
sucks. What’s the point in working so hard on a blog that no one reads?”
Why is it that so many of us are doing what the experts recommend, but few of
us are benefitting from it?
Simple answer: You’ve been sold a simplified version of how SEO works.

2. White Paper
Copyright 2009 – 2017, Austin Return On Now Internet Marketing, LLC
All rights reserved. http://returnonnow.com/
SEO: What Goes Into It
You see, a lot of people think SEO is all about keywords and content.
Maybe they understand that there are structural and technical aspects as well,
but that’s for the developers to figure out, right?
Both of these areas matter, absolutely. But neither of them will work in a vacuum.
Let’s look at the three areas in order of priority, and analyze impact.
1. Technical SEO
Any good web developer or search engine optimization expert will tell you that a
well-performing and well-structured website is a prerequisite to ranking.
Think of technical SEO as the “gateway” to ranking. It won’t help you increase
your visibility by itself.
But what it will do is get you in the game. Before Google can rank you, they have
to be able to crawl the site in the first place!
So crawlability and indexability are both dependent on a technically sound
website. The user experience and overall architecture are also huge impacts on
whether or not Google will want to index your content.
And one can never overlook the impact of performance and page load times. A
long-standing rule of thumb in the industry is that visitors will give up waiting for a
page that loads in seven seconds or longer.
But that’s on a desktop computer.
On mobile? Three seconds. You read that right: 3 seconds.
Don’t Forget Mobile…
Also of note in 2017 is that mobile-friendly (i.e. responsive) websites are
mandatory if you want to show up on mobile device SERPs. And well over half of
searches today are conducted on a smart phone, tablet, or other mobile device.

3. White Paper
Copyright 2009 – 2017, Austin Return On Now Internet Marketing, LLC
All rights reserved. http://returnonnow.com/
It’s not a terrible idea to approach your website with a “mobile first” mindset.
What’s the commonality between all of these items?
If you mess up your technical SEO, you won’t even be in the game in the first
place. And you can’t rank if you aren’t even in the game.
So get the technical right. Let’s say it accounts for 10% of your overall SEO
success to keep it simple.
But it’s a 10% that is super important in that the rest doesn’t matter until get this
right.
2. On-Page SEO & Content
Next, let’s turn our attention to the most popular and understandable bucket of
SEO strategies: On-Page.
On-Page includes both how keywords and topics are used on your website, as
well as the actual content itself (how much content, word length, etc.).
This is what most marketers think of as “SEO” when they hear the term.
Keywords. Content. Blog posts. On-page optimization.
Fortunately, on-page is far from rocket science. If you take a little time to study
up on how to manage it, you can learn. Many marketers have already developed
a strong grasp of on-page.
And even if SEO isn’t your thing, you can easily find a content marketing agency
to help build out your keyword and topic list, create a content calendar, and even
write / post / optimize content on your behalf.
If this is the main thing people associate with the term SEO, then surely it’s the
most important part of it, right?
Wrong.
On-page and content account for closer to 30% of your overall ranking (again, a
rough swag based on our own observations; not a scientific number). Content
alone won’t move you to the top of the SERPs.

4. White Paper
Copyright 2009 – 2017, Austin Return On Now Internet Marketing, LLC
All rights reserved. http://returnonnow.com/
Now, it will get you on the search engines’ radars for which topics and keywords
are relevant to your content. That’s a start.
But you might rank on page 78, 92, or even 125. You want traffic, right? Being on
page 125 is like looking for fish in the Sahara Desert.
You need to be on the first page if at all possible. That’s where over 70 percent of
clicks go on average. And nearly all of those clicks (>67%) go to the top five
natural results.
So content marketing alone will rank you. Just not where you need to be to earn
traffic (unless you happen to work for a powerhouse site with a killer domain
already).
3. Off-Page SEO
If Technical (10%) and On-Page SEO (30%) account for around 40 percent of
your overall SEO success, that leaves a whopping 60 percent attributed to Off-
Page (i.e. other websites linking to your own content).
Searchmetrics does an annual “Ranking Factors” study, where they look at the
correlation between a slew of things such as links, content, on-page, technical,
engagement, and more. For the fourth straight year, their most recent study
found number of backlinks from unique domains to be among the strongest
correlations to page one rankings.
Ignore any of the naysayers who keep screaming “Link building is dead!”
That’s just untrue. It is alive and well, and still the most impactful weapon in your
SEO arsenal.
And we’ve witnessed this firsthand in working on off-page for clients. Within only
three-to-six months, you can see progress, depending on how authoritative the
domain was at the beginning of the effort.
Speaking of authoritative – this is an important point: SEOs benchmark relative
strength of domains based on an indexed score called Domain Authority (DA).
Earning links from sites with high DA help you much more than those with lower
DA. Your goal is to grow your own DA by way of links from other high DA
domains.

5. White Paper
Copyright 2009 – 2017, Austin Return On Now Internet Marketing, LLC
All rights reserved. http://returnonnow.com/
But don’t just take my word for it. Look at this correlation study completed by
Ahrefs, showing that links rule the roost over on-page for ranking your web
content:
Here’s how it all fits together
• Technical (10%) gets you in the game.
• On-Page (30%) gets you on the right SERPs (albeit not on page one).
• Off-Page (60%) breaks the tie between your domain and other websites
pursuing similar keywords and topics (your “SEO Competition”).
Realistically, it’s dumbfounding how little attention off-page gets these days.

6. White Paper
Copyright 2009 – 2017, Austin Return On Now Internet Marketing, LLC
All rights reserved. http://returnonnow.com/
Maybe this is the reason: It’s hard. Really hard.
Off-page is labor-intensive. It requires a combination of opportunity identification,
well-crafted pitches, relationship building, process flexibility, and patience.
And not to be ignored – it requires a thick skin, persistence, and resilience.
And that’s just the work you have to do to earn the placement. You still need to
write content that they will accept!
Most marketers are inexperienced at managing off-page SEO campaigns. And
really, even if they knew how, would they even have enough time and brain
space to take on something so big?
The reality: they’d need to look at hiring a full- or part-time employee to manage it
on their behalf.
That’s assuming it is to be kept in-house. Many enterprises do have it in-house,
but small and mid-sized businesses simply don’t have that luxury.
Flip to the agency side, and most agencies don’t want to take on white hat link
building. They want to make a lot of money for very little work to maximize profit
margins.
So they adopt black or gray hat methods. They automate link building. They build
private blog networks (PBNs), within which they own domains that they bought
with existing domain authority and manage links on “owned” properties.
Google doesn’t want all of those tricks. They reward links that are contextual – in
other words, embedded in quality, original content that is relevant to the place
being linked. They want natural links.
But you can build natural links, just like you can build automated link spam. It just
takes concentrated time and effort.
Or you can hire an experienced agency like Return On Now. We specialize in
all-White Hat off-page SEO to help boost your content marketing efforts.

7. White Paper
Copyright 2009 – 2017, Austin Return On Now Internet Marketing, LLC
All rights reserved. http://returnonnow.com/
Summary
Content marketing is the rage the past few years, and for good reason. It
works…if also complemented with a solid off page strategy to ensure the content
is indexed, ranked, and visited.
Stop fretting about a lack of results with your content marketing. Boost it today
with a strategic linking program, and you’ll be enjoying more visits and
conversions before you know it.
Ask About Our Content Marketing Booster Program
Today!
Contact us today at http://returnonnow/contact-returnonnow/ to discuss your
search engine optimization needs, and to learn about how we can help you
enhance conversion rate and increase organic traffic to your website in the
coming months.