Should online sellers dedicate budget to building backlinks or on site optimisation?

Every regional marketing team reaching a crossroad in their growth strategy asks the exact same burning question: where should the money actually go? 

Should you pour your hard earned budget into securing high tier external backlinks, or should you spend it meticulously polishing your site’s technical structure, content, and user experience?

It is easy for Lancashire based ecommerce players to get caught up in the classic SEO debate. Off site purists will tell you that external votes of confidence are the ultimate currency on the web. 

On-site advocates will insist that even a mountain of backlinks cannot salvage a broken, slow, or paper thin website. 

The reality is that both arguments hold truth, but dumping 100 per cent of your resources into just one bucket is a fast track to a burnt budget and stagnant organic growth.

To make an informed decision, you need to understand what each half of the equation actually buys you and how to balance them for the best return on investment.

Think of your website as a physical retail store. Off site backlinks act like highway billboards directing thousands of drivers towards your front door. 

But if your shop floor is cluttered, the cash register is broken, and the products on the shelf don't match what the billboard promised, visitors will turn around and walk right back out.

On-site SEO encompasses technical site health, site architecture, internal linking, and content quality. Google explicitly details in its official Search Central documentation on helpful content that its automated ranking systems prioritise comprehensive, original, and people-first information over pages created primarily to manipulate rankings. 

If your content lacks depth, intent match, or clear expert value, no amount of backlink outreach will keep you on page one for long.

Beyond content quality, technical health acts as the gateway to indexation and retention. According to Google’s official Core Web Vitals guidelines, performance metrics that measure real-world user experience, such as keeping Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, directly influence how search algorithms rate your page experience.

If search crawlers struggle to navigate your crawl budget or users bounce due to poor responsiveness, building external links is essentially pouring water into a leaky bucket.

If on site SEO builds the store and stocks the shelves, backlinks provide the distribution. Search engines were fundamentally built on hyperlinking algorithms, treating links from reputable external websites as digital votes of trust, relevance and industry authority.

Without sufficient off page authority, even a perfectly optimised site risks remaining a hidden masterpiece. 

In competitive niches across the region and beyond, dozens of competing websites might all have pristine technical speed, sleek UX, and thoroughly researched articles. 

When the on page playing field is completely level, off page domain authority becomes the ultimate tiebreaker.

However, link building has evolved dramatically. The days of buying cheap directory links or relying on automated networks are long dead. Modern search algorithms are sophisticated at ignoring or penalising artificial link manipulation.

Effective off-site SEO today looks much more like digital PR, producing original research, expert commentary, or unique data assets that naturally attract editorial mentions. 

Because acquiring authentic backlinks requires manual outreach, relationship building, and high level PR, it often demands a higher cost per placement than standard on page updates.

How should you split your budget? The ideal allocation depends entirely on your website's current lifecycle stage rather than a rigid, universal formula.

• New or rebuilt sites - 70 per cent on site and 30 per cent off site: If your website is under a year old or undergoing a major redesign, front-load your investment into site structure, topical coverage, and technical performance. Fix crawl errors, construct clear content hubs, and ensure fast load times before spending heavily on external promotion. 
• Established sites with healthy user experience (40 per cent on site and 60 per cent off site): If your site indexes cleanly, performs well technically, and already covers core topics, your primary growth bottleneck is authority. Shift the weight of your budget towards earning high impact digital PR mentions and authority-building links to outrank entrenched competitors.
• Mature brands in high competition verticals (50 per cent on site and 50 per cent off site): For mature sites, maintenance and off-page momentum must run in parallel. A split budget ensures technical debt never accumulates while keeping your brand visibly authoritative across major industry publications. 

Ultimately, SEO isn't an either/or decision, it's a system of compounding gains. Fix the leaks on your own digital property first, and only then fire up the off-site engine to drive traffic through a door that is truly ready to convert.

Navigating the budget split between on-site SEO and backlinks isn't about declaring a definitive winner: it is about timing and site maturity.

Treat your website like a high performance vehicle. Build a solid, reliable engine first, and then fuel it with authoritative external links. 

By aligning your spending with your site’s real-time baseline needs rather than arbitrary rules, you ensure every pound spent builds compounding, long-term organic growth.

Not sure where your own site sits on that curve? An audit of your current foundation is the fastest way to find out, and it is where we would start before recommending a single pound of spend either way.