Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience, to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School, I'm Eric Siu ...

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about quantity versus quality, what is better for link building? So Neil, I mean, you and I, we've tried everything. Yeah, we've tried [crosstalk 00:00:36] where we go very hard with quantity and then also for quality too. I'm curious, what's been better for you?

Neil Patel: Neither, funny enough times are the best for me. It doesn't matter if I build high quality links or I build a lot of 'em, I found that slow and steady wins the race, and not slow and steady wins the race because Google wants you to be building links over time for 12 months. But I found that slow and steady wins the race, whether it's 10 links in a month, or five high quality, or 100 high quality, or 200 medium quality. I've just found that time heals most things, they wanna see you be consistent with your marketing, in addition to the link building.
So, take out link building from the equation. Yes, they want you to be building links, but more importantly they wanna see you continually push out content, build your brand, have a good user metric score from the bounce rates, a high time on site to many pages per visitor. But I found that it really isn't quantity or quality, it's more so time than heels most things with link building.

Eric Siu: Yeah. There's often a lot of friends that come up to me and then they just started the business, and it's like, "Well, Eric, do you think it's time for link building?" And there's just a very weird effect when I get asked that question. And if you think about it, when you're starting a business, you don't think about link building out the gate. It's just like, why would you ever think about this link building thing. Well why do you think about how you can go out there, and then create something that helps other people, and then you just continue to build up? Yes, it's not sexy, it takes time whether you're doing video, but in this context we're talking about SEO, so you're writing content. It's just gonna take time.
Like in the very beginning I was spassing out. It was like, "Matt, I gotta build all these links, I gotta focus on reaching out to people all the time." But look, nobody really knows who you are yet, so why don't you focus on the base first, the foundation, on the content and then you can start to build in this link building process. But it just feels weird. Ask yourself that, if you're just starting out right now, why would you ever think about this link building thing? It just kind of, it's a chore to even think about it, and it just doesn't seem right, internally, to even ask yourself that question.

Neil Patel: Yeah Eric, what site do you build most of your links on? Is it single grain, or your retirement homes, or your gun site or, which one?

Eric Siu: Single grain.

Neil Patel: Okay, with single grain, on any given month to you try to hit specific numbers, like you want X amount of links or X quality links?

Eric Siu: We used to.

Neil Patel: And now, what do you do?

Eric Siu: No it's just, let's just keep building content, let's just keep acquiring links.

Neil Patel: Yes, and you don't care if it's medium quality, and you're getting a ton of them, or you're only getting a half full of really high DA ones, right?

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: And what have you found that happened to your traffic over the last 12 months?

Eric Siu: It continues to go up, so I'll tell you, in the very beginning, five years ago when I first joined single grain, traffic was about 4,000 a month. Now we're approaching 100,000 a month.

Neil Patel: Yes. And the key is, as we mentioned earlier on this podcast, time. Don't worry about quality, don't worry about quantity. Now we're not saying go get junk, irrelevant links. Your links should always be relevant. They should always be contextual, so within the content, and your links should stay there, and they shouldn't be bought. So if you do that, in general, your links are good enough and in time your rankings are gonna go up. And you don't always wanna build links to your homepage, it could be to any page. The link should go to the most relevant page, don't stress anchor text. Just stress, hey, this is a relevant good link and get as many of them as you can, and the higher quality, the better. But just go for whatever link quantity, whatever velocity, and just do that over time. Year over year, you should see your traffic go up.

Eric Siu: And I'll go with other sites too. So Neil's built two sites that get over a million visits a month, and then there's other sites have helped get to that point. And it's just, again, it's not like we are focusing on links. It's the same exact template, every single time, and there's no reason it's gonna change any time soon. It's the same thing in real life too, you're building relationships first and then things start to compile, but again, it's not the sexiest answer, it's probably not what you're expecting for this podcast, but that's just how it really is. So, before we go, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, to check out our marketing goodies, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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