Surviving SEO Agencies #2: The "Content Is King" Delusion

Another thesis that some SEO agencies love to throw around is that "content is king". What they mean by this is that you should simply write "good quality content" (or even better: pay for their services to write it for you since they know for sure what "good quality content" is) and that alone is enough to make your website rank higher on Google. This automatically implies that backlink building is not necessary or important. This is a very dangerous delusion, which is very widespread as I see from discussions on r/SEO, comments on YouTube, etc. In this article, I will approach this topic from various POVs, and show proof of my claims.

Where does it come from and why does it seem reasonable?

First, as I mentioned in the beginning, you see this claim a lot in various discussions. It's easy to believe that if so many people say it, it must be true, especially when it comes from alleged professionals. But the truth is that people who say this are either those who fell for this delusion themselves or those who work as content managers for an already established brand with a high-authority website (of course whatever they write will rank high, often without additional linkbuilding, because the website already has a ton of backlinks, not because the content is so good, which they don't realize). And of course, there are agencies who want to sell you their content writing services, who benefit from spreading this delusion.

Anyone who ever dipped their toes in SEO at least a tiny bit and actually tried to rank a website for even a moderately competitive keyword knows that this is absolutely not the case, so those comments are obviously coming from people who have no idea what they're talking about, but they're very confident in their ignorance, which annoys me the most.

Second, Google says that basically, any linkbuilding is against their spam policies. Well, except for 2 types of links.

1. "Natural" links, i.e. those that you didn't ask for, but people just linked to your website because they found it useful. So in an ideal world, better content naturally attracts more attention, goes viral, and consequently gets more backlinks. Sounds good on paper, but anyone who's just starting out gets stuck in a vicious circle: without backlinks, you don't rank high, and without high rankings, you don't even get noticed to get the needed attention to get backlinks. But it surely works well for already established, well-known brands. So it's kind of a "the rich get richer" situation.

2. "Outreach" links, i.e. links that you asked for, but didn't offer anything in return. Yeah, good luck with that.

So since Google heavily implies that you should not purposefully build backlinks, the natural conclusion you can make is that you should just focus on content, and Google will reward your efforts.

Third, following the previous point, it's easy to assume that Google is smart enough to understand that your content is good quality and that it should rank you higher because of that. There's a lot to unpack here, let's dive right in.

POV #1: Simple reasoning - What does "good quality content" even mean?

Let's try to think of a definition of this term. It may be somewhat easy to define for some topics/niches, for example, if you're writing a scientific article, it's easy to say that "good quality" in this context means that it should be scientifically accurate, well-researched, contain citations from authoritative sources, etc. (although even here the question remains, for example, how can Google confirm if there's a real credible author behind the article with a real degree in the field, but let's not go too deep in this rabbit hole). But what if we pick a topic that is not so clear-cut? For example, if you're writing a movie review, it's obviously going to be subjective, biased, and may even be considered offensive by some people who disagree with your opinion (if they liked the movie you are bashing in your review, for example). There's no way to say that one review is "better content" than another, it's all a matter of personal preference.

Here's another example: let's say that there are 100 eCommerce websites that sell the same product, a smartphone of a certain brand for example. What can be considered "good quality content" for the product page? Obviously, what interests the potential buyer are specifications, price, delivery time, etc. However, all 100 websites will have this information, so how can you say that one website has "better content" than another? You can't, it's all the same, and nothing can be added to make it "better". I'm sure we all agree that stuffing the page with the history of microelectronics, the biography of the company's CEO, etc. is not going to add any value, it will just annoy the visitor who came to buy a phone, not to read a novel.

As we see, "good quality content" is a very vague term, and it's impossible to say what it means in general. It's mostly subjective, and what one person considers "good quality" may be considered garbage by another person.

POV #2: Observing the SERPs - Real-world examples of subpar content that ranks high

You have probably seen a lot of such examples yourself: articles that are very generic, contain no useful information, or very thin and non-comprehensive, sometimes even factually incorrect, not to mention grammar mistakes, awkward phrasing, etc. Yet they rank high on Google. How is this possible if Google is so smart and can tell good and bad content apart?

Let's take a look at one example I stumbled upon recently. There's a page on Hubspot's blog called How To Update Node Versions Using Mac, Windows, and Linux that currently (at the time of writing this article) ranks #3 in the US (and a bunch of other countries) for the keyword "update node windows" and a lot of its variations, like "update node js windows", "upgrade node windows", "how to update node on windows", etc. Overall the article is not that bad, but the first thing it recommends for updating Node.js on Windows is to use the npm package called n. But if we visit the package's page on npmjs or Github the first thing we see is that "n does not work in native shells on Microsoft Windows". Anyone can confirm this by trying to run npm install -g n on a Windows machine (presuming you have Node.js and npm installed), and see that it fails with an error. So the advice given in the article is factually incorrect, and it's not a minor detail, it's the main point of the article. Yet it ranks high on Google.

There is another great example of this provided by Lars Lofgren in his article about site reputation abuse under the "Terrible First-Party Content is Just As Problematic" subheading, check it out. It also shows a well-known, authoritative website that ranks high for a very competitive keyword, but the content of the page is not only very generic (and possibly AI-generated without any human input), but also contains advice that can be considered harmful to the reader.

POV #3: Observing the market - What SEO services are in demand?

The mere existence of the market for backlinks is proof that content is not enough to rank high on Google. If it was, there would be no need for backlinks, and the market for them would not exist. But it does, and it's pretty big.

There are several research articles that give us an idea of how much people are willing to pay for backlinks. Authority Hacker's survey shows that the average cost for a paid link is $83. I'd say from my experience that this figure is very conservative, probably because people who are willing to get backlinks from websites on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of authority were included in the survey, and the average is skewed towards them. Ahrefs' study shows us a figure of $361, which I think is closer to reality, especially if you are in a more competitive niche and target websites with higher authority for your backlinks, as the article explicitly states.

Also anyone who ever played around with expired domains knows that the prices for the good ones are in the thousands of dollars. Even though Google is blabbering about how they are fighting expired domain abuse, it still works (this probably also deserves a separate post). And it's getting harder and harder to get them, because the demand is so high and the prices are skyrocketing, especially in the last couple of years. I don't have any research to show the exact figures, but I can tell from my own experience that the prices for worthy expired domains at least doubled in the last 2 years. Their value is of course in the backlinks they have.

Since we know how markets work, it's obvious that the prices reflect the demand. And if people are willing to pay several hundred dollars for a single backlink, it clearly shows how important those are for rankings.

Another thing to consider: why such huge businesses like Semrush ($1.79B market cap as of December 2024) and Ahrefs ($149.1M revenue as of December 2024) whose main product basically is backlink analysis, even exist and are so extremely successful, if all you need to do to rank high on Google is just write "good quality content"?

POV #4: Observing the competition - What do your competitors do?

This one is a "see for yourself" proof. Just look at the websites that are currently ranking for the terms you're targeting. There's a chance that you will consider the content of at least some of those pages to be not that great. Then analyze their backlink profiles (I've shown how to do this and what exactly to look for in my "How to Conduct a Competitor Backlink Analysis" article). If you target even remotely competitive keywords, I can guarantee you that you will find that their backlink profiles are much more impressive than their content. So you should strive to improve your backlink profile if you want to outrank them.

I can also show that approaching this from the opposite side doesn't work either. I conducted a case study, picking one page from my website which was relevant enough to its main keyword (because it ranked for it, but not as high as I wanted it to), identifying what the content was lacking compared to competitors and filling all the gaps, inflating the article's volume from 2,000 to 8,000 words, essentially transforming "worse content" into "better content". Spoiler alert: didn't work.