Just how far SEO evolved? "Good content is the new SEO" has been the new motto for a few years. But is it true to the point where you can ignore link building? 

Moz's Rand Fishkin gives his view on the question in this video.

The short version of his answer is that "yes it's possible but it's very tough". Up to the point where he admits to admiring these sites:

"I find looking at websites that accomplish SEO without active link building fascinating, because they have editorially earned those links through very little intentional effort on their own. I think there's a tremendous amount that we can take away from that process and optimize around this."

While I feel it's a little disappointing that he doesn't give any numbers or more conclusive arguments, I also think the interesting question is:

What should you focus on first? Good Content or link building?

The case for good content is that from the shear quality of the content you publish, you will create opportunities for people to link back to it and build links naturally. While this may sound crazy to old fashioned SEO's, the odds can be in your favor if you engage in strategies that let you scale your content volume significantly while maintaining quality - in particular using content curation. By publishing more content you not only create more opportunities from a simple number game perspective but you become a resource for your audience: chances are they'll identify you as the go-to place to get educated or informed on their topics of interest. And as you grow the amount of recurring readers, you multiply the opportunities of link building exponentially. Building readers loyalty through content email newsletters will also further augment that. 

We're not an SEO tool like MOZ so we can't give metrics on how the above works vs betting on link building across a series of representative websites. But let me give one statistic though: more than 40% of visits to Scoop.it pages are coming from search. And that's without link building from our end (or from our free users, most of which being professionals with no time for that).

Here's a final argument. Again, I'm not denying the importance of link building but I'm merely addressing the question of what you should focus on first. By focusing on good content first - and perhaps more importantly on scaling it - you increase your SEO footprint. More content means more pages. More pages means more links indexed in Google. This doesn't mean that these links are well positioned on SERP just because they exist but they obviously can't rank high if they don't exist. To rank high they will need several things including back links. So let's consider what happens if you now start by link building. Without many pages on your site, you simply give very few options for people to link back to. This means you will always try to get backlinks to your home page. And by having a one-size-fits-all approach, you will limit your options. In addition, you will also limit the engagement your visitors can have with your website as they'll have only a few pages to browse.

In other words, why start building links if you don't have content to link back to? And if your don't have content to engage and convert?

I'm not disagreeing with Rand Fishkin: he's more an SEO expert than I am. But to summarize, I observe that:

1. There are ways to scale content to get SEO results independently of link building: content curation is one and on average it brings 40% of search traffic to Scoop.it users' pages (without focusing on link building).

2. The more important question might be: what comes first between good content and link building? Which, when considering one option vs the other, makes a clear case for starting with publishing good content, irrespectively of the merits of ethical link building practices such as the ones MOZ advocates.

@Tommy Landry articulates another argument for the use of content curation by content marketers: while the main argument is saving time and resources, there are other benefits of content curation such as adding credibility to your brand message or engaging with influencers. But on top of using curation as a way to publish content, he argues that content curation is also a way to generate content ideas that will fill the gaps and be more original and impactful. In short, content curation informs content creation as others also noted. 

To build on Thomas'  points, I would add that the 3 following ways to practice this from my point of view. Try to look back at your own curation work and pause on a weekly basis to reflect on the following:

1 - what are the developing trends that people have been publishing on? Can you elaborate on them? 

2 - can you do roundup posts with top 5/10 pieces of content you've curated this week? 

3 - what are the things your customers or prospects are asking and that the content you've been curating does not cover: why not write a post on exactly that?  

The Google algorithm changes over the past few years have completely disrupted the SEO field so that it's not clear who's using old-fashioned and useless advice, who's really helping and who's simply giving BS advice.

If you're not sure whether you need an SEO expert or not or if you're just getting started with your inbound marketing strategy, I would just recommend focusing on publishing great content to get started and build experience.

But if you're at the point where you strongly feels about recruiting an SEO agency or if you already have one, that post by @Shannon K. Steffen - an SEO consultant herself but who insists on the human aspect of it - is a great read.

Impressive case study by Lee Odden that should convince you that not only traditional SEO is dead but also how content, social and influencers are the new SEO. Curating influencers content tent helps getting in their radar and will open opportunities to engage with them before they eventually amplify your content or co-create with you. 

Lee Odden gives a ton of great ideas in this inspiring post on how to source content, what type of content are the best to curate and where to publish curated content. 

If you're struggling with where to start your content curation efforts or if you're tired of the practices you've been using, you should definitely check this out. 

How effective is content curation related to content creation for SMBs? We wanted to find out and here's what we found.

Another post that details why focusing on publishing relevant content to your audience is the only thing that matters from an SEO standpoint. 

So don't fall for any of the quick wins and put a strategy in place for consistently publishing content that matters to your audience. 

Does your business blog need a little revamping? It's likely. Try out these 6 tips and let me know what you think!

Or why Content Marketing needs to  reach beyond the marketing team (as I also wrote about in that post). Now, where I disagree with John Jantsch is when he uses the word "creation". I talk to hundreds of business owners, entrepreneurs and even VP Marketing at larger companies which all tell me how incredibly hard it is to get non-marketers to create content. 

Don't fool yourself: you won't get everybody to create content. 

So yes, as Jantsch writes, this is also about creating a content culture and he recommends a number of useful steps to foster it which don't involve creating content specifically but there's one that he misses: collaborative content curation. 

While it's extremely hard to constantly remind people they have a blog post to finish, it's much easier to have them curate the content they read and they feel is valuable to the content strategy. Your coworkers have expertise; and they read content which is valuable. Empower them to easily curate it and share it so you can make your content strategy stronger. 

From a practical point of view, think about the following concrete ideas:

- create a weekly newsletter from the best posts that your team read this week;

- create private content hubs where everybody can share content without too much overthinking and then curate this pre-curation to your blog;

- identify champions who naturally share content (tip: they're the ones  already sending links by email to the rest of the company) and give them ownership: make them responsible to create a weekly roundup of curated posts. 

There are many other ways to involve more people in your content strategy - a premise I can not agree more. But any of the above will be more efficient than waiting forever for one of your engineers to write that epic blog post. 

What are the content marketing trends for next year? The Content Marketing Institute asked thought leaders around the world for their predictions and compiled that in this ebook. 

You can read mine above but there I encourage you to read the ebook for others as well. 

Jay Baer's (slide 10) is particularly interesting: "2015 will bring decentralized content creation programs with participants across the company (not just marketing), as well as content initiatives that rely on user-generated content in expanded and highly strategic ways. The best source of content in most companies may be right under your nose: your employees and customers."

This reflects trends we've already seen at work:

1. Making content "everybody's job" within companies. Which starts by content being better understood outside of marketing as CMI's Michele Linn points out (slide 33). 

2. Involving influencers in your content marketing strategy, something Lee Odden (slide 11) also calls participation marketing and that he elaborates on in his own prevision also included in that ebook: "The value of co-creating content with the very audience you want to do business with is very powerful".

The increasing importance of ROI that I've been commenting on and included in my own prediction is also something that's reflected by others as, for instance, LinkedIn's Mike Weir highlighting how lead generation through content will become easier and easier (slide 5). As Maggie Patterson also points out in her own prediction (slide 27), this will make content marketing not just an opportunity but a must have for smaller businesses - something I completely agree with.

To deliver this ROI, the content marketing ecosystem will evolve to be better integrated with CRM and marketing automation says Alana Fisher-Chekoski (Slide 47): if lead generation becomes the main KPI of B2B content marketing success, it certainly makes sense as content is the fuel of marketing automation which drives CRM these days. 

What other trends did you pick up for Content Marketing in 2015?

It's not uncommon for marketing teams to feel overwhelmed by or confused as to how to move forward with their content strategy.

Typically, when a new year arrives, marketers (and pretty much everyone) are inspired to do new things, try new strategies, and aim for the stars in terms of objectives. These four tips for content marketing are extremely useful for those marketers trying to do something new and figure out the best possible ways to get their messages across.

From working with influencers to focusing on relationship building and keeping all methods of media consumption in mind, these tips from Caitlin Roberson are useful for getting started on the next stage of your content marketing strategy.

We've talked about how having a healthy content curation vs creation mix is important for optimized ROI: here's a timely recap of how to tackle the main issues associated with that. 

This is the experience shared by Amanda Clark who's the President of Grammar Chic - a company who helps SMBs with writing content. Of course, she's not advocating to move away from content creation: after all it's her bread and butter as small business owners outsource content creation to her. But the fact that as a content creator, she advocates content curation so strongly is very interesting and shows how important curation is in the content marketing mix. This notion of having a mix of several types of content sources (created, curated, contributed ...)  and formats (blog, visual, video...) isn't new but in our latest study, we wanted to measure the relative importance and ROI they had in that mix: here's the white paper that details our findings.

As many have observed for some time now, SEO has completely changed over the past few years. From being machine-centric, it became people-centric. But what does it mean concretely to content marketers?

This infographic by Neil Patel gives a number of interesting points, a couple of which I want to comment:

1. It's about the long tail:

70% of search traffic comes from long tail keywords. So while you (or your CEO) might be fascinated by that one keyword that you'd like to rank #1 for, you might exhaust yourself doing that while missing opportunities. 

One way to naturally cover the long tail is to curate content as explained here. By defining a topic you're curating on, you will naturally create connexions between keywords. This page by EcoVadis for instance makes natural connexions between words like "sustainable development", "supply chain", "child labor" or "procurement". As such EcoVadis' target audience - procurement managers, sustainable development directors, etc... - are more likely to search for keywords that include these combinations and which results will show EcoVadis' curated content on the first page. As I write this, EcoVadis actually shows as #1 for "supply chain sustainable procurement benchmark" - a combination that might seem very long tail but that describes precisely what the company does... and what potential buyers are interested in. 

2. Integrate Content Marketing and SEO:

Old-school SEO tactics were obscure, technical back-linking techniques. Not only does this not work anymore but as Neil shows, it's dangerous. The way to solve this is to stop considering publishing content is one thing (creative, marketing-driven) and SEO is another (technical, outsourced). 

Integrate content and SEO: it's more and more the same thing.