Link Building Vs. Content Marketing

One thing to keep in mind is that Google search algorithms keep getting updated and increasingly how many linking root domains you have is becoming less important. The search engines are getting smarter. But one thing that has remained relatively constant over the years is the huge powering force of quality content.
Content marketing is a powerful technique in itself. It helps in acquiring new customers, build long term relationships with the present ones and creating engagement by providing quality information. It can help a business in building authoritative brand presence online as well as credibility, which, most people are on the lookout for in this online world.

You need a combination of the two. Content marketing has many benefits that link building doesn't provide and link building helps you gain authority links faster than content marketing does unless you already have a popular blog where you can just publish a new piece of content, share it on Twitter, and get hundreds of backlinks within hours.

Nevertheless, I don't incorporate content marketing into my promotional activities unless I'm building an authority site or blog. Link building alone is enough for small niche sites.

Best practices rapidly change within SEO as technologies (and Google's guidelines) evolve. But one thing hasn't changed: the importance of links.

Obviously there are other fundamental concerns (e.g., indexation, crawlability, duplicate content, site architecture), but link acquisition needs to be an active consideration.

Links are still the strongest signal we can give to Google about the importance of our content and site. So, if you're working to increase search visibility, links need to be a primary consideration.

The water is muddy right now though with Google's war on spam links, and from what I've observed recently, I think a few messages need to be addressed within SEO:

Links are still the core of Google's search algorithm.
Link building and content marketing are fundamentally different.
Content marketing is difficult to do well. SEO pros often don't have the required skill set for high-level content creation.
Link building can supercharge your content marketing efforts.
You can still build links even if you don't have great content.

Best,
Monaseer.

Common sense should tell you.

Great content will always increase ROI.

This was true before the internet was even around. The ONLY different is in medium, but people haven't changed. If they read your content and love it, they'll want more. It's that simple.

Good content gets shared. Good content gets into people's heads. Good content sells. Not to mention that link building has been frowned upon by Google for years now. Many of the people who kept doing it anyway got sunk during the last few updates.

There will be more stories like this, as long as there are people building links.

You can get out of this rat race by becoming a good content marketer.

If you're freelancing for smaller businesses like your local dentist, building links to rank for local search terms are best. It doesn't make much sense to pour time and money into content marketing. It's just not that type of market, unless you can find creative ways to do so.

If the type of business is more national or global, then that is where content marketing makes more sense.

Good content seems to be the way to go, no matter how you look at it. It gets shared, it might go viral, it is better for the ROI in general.

Keep in mind what Google is trying to accomplish. They want to lower the importance of link building and praise good content.

All for the sake of having "natural traffic". Currently they just started punishing blackhat but also backlinking tactics and it will only get worse

I haven't read all of the responses but yeah it really comes down to the resources you have available (time and money). As more and more people focus on content marketing it becomes harder and harder to create content that stands out (aka it becomes more expensive).