Where is my time best spent ?

[Sexandmetal]

Greetings,

I am a new aspiring SEO for a niche market company I helped create. Both the company and website launched in 2007. From 2007 till mid March 2012, the website was amateur hour with no SEO whatsoever. I have spent years building social media profiles. In doing so I have built quite an online presence and created brand awareness. Therefore our domain has some authority and some inbound links.

Since I started my first campaign on SEOMoz my organic search traffic has gone from around 0-5 hits to 35-50 hits a day in around 4 weeks. I have been submitting to directories that are targeted toward our niche market.  I have contributed to community forum posts as well as talking to blog authors to write about our company and products, none of which seem to have any impact on our page or domain authority.

If I am already ranking for 50% of my targeted keywords in one of the most competitive markets there is, with only very few links compared to my competition, would my time be best spent starting to work on inbound marketing strategies/link building (to build my domain and page authority) as opposed to outbound marketing, content building and UX? I know all is necessary, but the company really needs to start making some ROI. (So my position as a SEO doesn't get shelved and I can continue using tools like SEOMoz.)

There are still some UX details we need to improve on the site (e.g., there are only product descriptions on half of our products on the new version of the site) but the product pages or categories the search traffic is landing on are all described (mostly)

I guess my question to the community is, if you were in my shoes (the only person in the company who is somewhat savvy to any of this), on what would you focus your time?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Warmest regards,

S&M

Site contains adult content (NSFW)

[MeanGiant]

First improve UX, if the site is supposed to be about the user, then improve that.  While improving that you can also improve any on-page SEO factors that will also improve your rankings.  Better descriptions and optimized tags will improve your rankings.  That will make your efforts down the road easier.  From what I've seen, it takes 3-6 months for a new site to settle in so you have some time.  If you were in a different industry I might say spend more time on building links and stuff, but I think you'll probably have to rely more on trying to get return customers or industry specific forums, etc.   Maybe it's just me, but social media will probably be pretty difficult to get solid traction from(outside of industry specifics).

[Sexandmetal]

Thank you MCarle, I appreciate it.

[Mcarle]

You need to find out WHERE the ROI comes from in your site.

Example:

10 hits a day from people searching purple anodized  floggers & sell 3 of them.

VS

100 hits a day from people searching Extreme Restraints & sell nothing.

Once you can narrow that down, that will help drill down where to improve.

I have heard with many commerce sites the more narrow the search string, teh more your buyer knows about that product and is ready to buy.