The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Relevance continues to be a hot topic in search, especially since John Mueller[1] broke the internet last year by saying that the “number of links doesn't matter at all”, and that relevant content trumps the quantity of content.
I head up the team at JBH the Digital PR Agency[2], and whilst growing the team and working with a huge range of brands over the last four years, I've realized that we wear many, many different hats.
For some of our clients, we are their link building agency. We achieve specific links that adhere to specific criteria to support SEO objectives. For other clients, we’re there to help build their brand, create thought leaders, and develop beautiful, shareable content. For those clients, SEO is secondary.
And for other brands, we’re somewhere in the middle.
What has become overwhelmingly clear is that the relevance of the links we build sits under each of these hats, and it’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time working on at JBH, in order to improve our delivery all around.
Who cares about relevance anyway?
If you’ve ever had your content outranked by a tiny, hyper-niche site, then you’ll definitely care about relevance. Even Google prioritizes relevance when deciding where to rank pages.
The good news is that we can learn from this, and apply certain processes to our own activity. In this post, you’ll see how the team here at JBH bakes the principles of topical relevance[3] into our content, outreach, and link building strategies.
I ran a (very scientific) poll on Twitter earlier in