If you are in a moderate to highly competitive niche, on-page alone will not take you to the promised land on it's own without an incredible amount of time and content publication.
Sure, quality on-page optimization is easier than quality backlink building, faster and cheaper, so it should be done in the early days. But, very few sites have been able to compete on content alone.
The recent algo changes favor quality content and quality backlinks, not one OR the other, but rather BOTH. Brand mentions and social signals are very important in the weighting scheme, neither of which can be handled from internal content....
Companies are going to have to spend an increasing percentage of resources in building content, that's probably not something to be debated by many SEO practitioners.
But if you claim on-page trumps off-page, then pick 5 or 6 competitive industries and show #1 sites who rank based on their content alone and not their backlinks. For every 1 example you find, there's what... 10, 100, 1000 or more who rank because of their offpage / backlinks?
Project out this scenario further into the future.
Where's the algo going to be in 2 or 3 years? As the landscape changes, people build more and more content and less and less links. Suddenly Google is left weighing the number of pages of content in site A vs number of pages in site B, all other things being equal. Instead of massive link-building going on, there is massive article publishing, hailing the content era. Suddenly, the sites with the most written pages are now #1.
Following closely behind this is the age of quality. Which site has the better written content wins the rankings battle, all other things being equal. Suddenly now it's a battle of who has the best AND most writers, as companies churn out volumes of worthless linkbait which reads well but has no real value in the world. Some would argue companies like Hubspot are already in this phase, throwing out reams of content in hopes some of it sticks.
Suddenly Joes Garage has a 250 page site with 247 pages of information that no one needs in their quest to find a garage for their auto repairs...
Content proliferation is already rampant and will undoubtedly escalate at a much higher rate. Is it the be all and end all which will determine rankings forever? No.
Is it likely to carry more weight in the next few years than it does now? Yes.
Will it create a new set of problems as companies have to find other ways of setting their site apart from the competition? Yes.
How will they do it? Backlinks... Social Signals... Content quotations, citations, references, syndication? (think backlinks)... Sure.
How else will they do it? I'd love to hear the answers to this!
Note: I'm a big believer in content marketing / inbound marketing, and agree with a lot of the fundamentals about content being king. However, I also don't see Google, or any other major search engine, dropping their external votes system anytime soon.
The voting system is being 'cleaned up' so as to try and restore the legitimacy which it once claimed. As poor quality links play less and less a role in the rankings, an ever increasing focus on quality backlinks will make the difference between #1 and #10 or #100.
I believe that quality content + quality links will dominate the rankings for the next 2 to 5 years.
