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Is guest blogging for SEO a good online marketing strategy?
It sure is.
By creating content for other authoritative websites, you actually boost your own recognition and rankings. We are in the middle of 2019 and guest blogging is definitely riding high. The online marketing sphere is buzzing with the prospects and benefits of guest blogging.
Guest blogging is one of the most effective, powerful, and popular strategies for building high-quality relationships with your audience. You develop professional connections and find new business opportunities. It sets your brand value and gives you authoritative links that are important for your brand.
Search Engine Optimization and getting your site to rank for relevant keywords isn’t easy, but the right guest blogging service makes it a little bit easier.
In this post, you will learn everything about the benefits of guest blogging and why it’s important for SEO.
However, before we go on and explore the benefits of guest posting, let’s first discuss the basics of guest blogging and how to get started with it.
What Is Guest Blogging?
Guest blogging, as the name suggests, is creating guest posts to be published on a third-party website. Guest blog posts are generally written for websites that belong to the same industry that the guest blogger serves. What this does is that it allows the guest blogger to build credibility as an industry expert.
Think of it this way. The only reason someone not connected to you will be willing to publish blog posts written by you is if you have advice, insights or information to share as an industry expert. Search engines recognize this too.
Every industry has specific third-party websites that allow guest posting, and you can try and establish connections with them to publish your posts.
The best guest blogging sites have a huge audience base and you can tap into these readers by ensuring you offer value in your pieces.
On top of that, you need to be able to drive readers from the guest blogging site to your company site, for which professional content writing services are the order of the day.
Different guest blogging websites have different editorial guidelines for their guest posts which you can find on their website. Getting your content published isn’t as easy as hiring a blog writer. Your guest posts will only be accepted if you follow these guidelines.
Some guest blogging websites allow you to post your contact info, which is a great benefit of guest posting and further improves your chances of getting traffic to your website.
Why Is Guest Blogging Important for SEO?
A really good SEO service will use a variety of techniques to improve a website’s position on search engines. From using long-tail keywords to link building, they are always chipping away to improve search engine rankings.
One thing that a lot of novice SEOers often neglect is guest blogging. The reason for this is;
- Guest blogging is difficult
- Guest blogging takes time
- The best sites will only accept really high quality content and most content creators can’t deliver that quality of content
Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website. When you guest blog, you write content for other authority websites but ultimately reap the benefits for your own website.
Backlinks from guest blog posts increases your website visibility. It makes guest blogging one of the most vital content marketing tools for your business. More people will know about your brand through guest blogging as compared to writing blogs for your website.
Guest blogging has become a vital part of the content marketing strategy of many businesses. The success of guest blogging for SEO ultimately depends on how relevant, genuine, and helpful the content you provide to the readers is.
As long as you are producing high-quality guest posts, the chances of your website ranking high will soar. If other blogs link back to your guest blog, then Google sees your guest post as interesting and relevant. Similarly, if people like, share, or comment on your post, this also helps you improve your search engine ranking.
What Is High-Quality Guest Blogging?
This brings us to the question of the hours. How do you differentiate between high-quality guest blogging and guest blogging?
First things first, you should not consider your guest post as an advertisement. Think of it as a value-adding opportunity for your audience.
Guest posts should be intended to educate and inform your audience. They are not meant to promote your products or services. Of course, there is no harm in featuring your brand in the blog if it seems relevant and appropriate. However, there is a difference between educating your readers and selling. You must keep a balance between the two.
When writing a guest blog, your aim should be to establish yourself as an authority figure in your industry. Take it as an opportunity to introduce yourself to a new audience and build genuine relationships with other industry experts.
Quick Tips to Enhance Results from Guest Blogging
- Write a concise and clear author bio
- Include at least one high-quality relevant link to one of your previous blogs
- Add a call-to-action in each post asking your readers to leave comments
- Promote your guest blog on your social media channels
- Follow up on how much traffic your guest blog generates
How to Get Started with Guest Blogging
It is important to be clear about the goals you want to achieve through guest blogging before you start with it. When choosing a guest blogging website, look for non-competitor websites that post high-quality content.
You can also guest blog for your partners. This not only helps you achieve your digital marketing goals but also develops a positive relationship between the two parties.
The benefits of guest posting are multifold – and building a network with other experts in your industry is one of the better ones.
Things to look for when choosing a guest blogging website:
- Does the guest blogging website have lots of followers who actively post comments, share the blog in their network, and engage with content?
- Does the guest blogging platform have active social media accounts where they post the guest blogs regularly?
- Does the guest blogging website have a high domain authority that can help amplify your SEO ranking?
- Does the guest blogging website complement your website?
Focus on finding guest blogging sites within your niche. Look for reputable sites that have a credible background. The message they put across on their website must also align with yours. Conflicts of interest lead to problems later on. Your guest posts won’t do well where there is a conflict of personal opinions and ideas.
Simply search for your “industry + guest blog” on Google and you will find a list of blogs that accept guest blog posts.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Here’s our list of 10 incredible benefits of guest blogging for SEO. (Watch a short video)
1. It Helps Establish Authority
Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways of building your business authority. People trust your brand if you have published quality content on websites that they know and follow.
For example, suppose you’re a realtor. Prospects will take you more seriously if you’ve published content on websites like:
- HousingWire.com
- Realtor.com
- Houzz.com
- WiseBread.com
- TheBalance.com
Just keep in mind that the content you post must be relevant, high-quality, and valuable.
Building authority for your business is not easy because creating trust on the internet is difficult. Your audience will trust you more if you share what you know and support your claims with facts and stats.
Writing guest blogs tells your audience about your expertise in the field. They will be more confident in approaching you when they know that you are an expert and authority in your field.
2. Great for Getting Links
What’s the use of a website that doesn’t earn you a single dime?
Running a website takes a lot of time, effort, and resources. You will only be able to reap the fruit of your labor if you appear in the search results of your audience.
One of the many criteria search engines use to determine the ranking of any website is the quality and number of links pointing back to the website. The number of these page links is one of the factors that determine your ranking on search engines.
Guest posting helps you get high-quality backlinks. These links improve your search engine ranking and you will get more audience to your website, which brings us to our next point.
3. Increases Organic Traffic
What’s the point of SEO? To bring you organic traffic. Why is guest blogging important for SEO? Same reason!
If you write a great guest blog post, you can expect traffic to start flowing to your website as soon as the blog goes live. With each relevant backlink, your webpages will perform better on SERPs. This will help you grow organic traffic.
Organic traffic comprises of those visitors who find your content and hence your website via a search engine. When there are enough backlinks to your guest posts, Google and other search engines will consider your content to be of substance and value.
This will bring it to the top search results and will bring more organic traffic to your website.
4. Improves Brand Visibility
Another great benefit of guest blogging for SEO is that it increases brand awareness. With guest blogs, you get your brand name out on the best websites. People that didn’t know your brand before will learn about it from a credible source.
Guest blogs posts are a great way to increase your brand visibility so it’s important to put in the effort in your guest posts. Write premium-quality content to make a great impact.
5. Diverts High-Quality Traffic to Your Website
By high-quality traffic, we mean visitors who not only find your content valuable but also make a purchase. You can sugar coat it all you want, but all we really want at the end of the day is website traffic that converts.
When you write guest blogs for other websites, you don’t have to start from the beginning. There is already an audience on the guest post site. Amassing traffic is not that difficult if you use the right keywords, social media strategies, and phrases. What matters is reaching the audience that will make a difference to your bottom line.
Guest blog posts can help you achieve that.
6. Expands Your Network
Networking is as important today as it was decades ago. It’s just that the way people network today has changed. Consider guest blogging as a way to expand your network. It makes you recognizable in your industry.
Not only your audience, but other people in your industry will also know about you and your brand if you consider guest blogging. This will help expand your network. It often leads to collaborations and partnerships, which further improves your profits.
7. Enhances Your Reputation
Guest blogging helps build your reputation as a credible industry player. Custom content is one of the factors that establishes brand trustworthiness. Your audience will automatically start considering you as a credible brand when they see your name attached to a guest blog post on a highly authoritative blogging website.
This not only brings in SEO benefits to your business but also helps you in future projects. Being a well-reputed brand is essential to increase your customer base and improve your business profits.
With guest blogging, this can be done easily as long as you are creating valuable and high-quality content.
8. Boosts Social Media Shares
The best guest blogs aren’t just shared by the website, but followers start sharing, tweeting, liking, and commenting if the post is really good. This exposure is great because it will include many people who don’t follow you yet.
It is important to promote your brand at as many places as possible to increase brand awareness. Your website traffic will increase every time someone mentions your name on social media.
The more shares you get on social media, the higher the amount traffic you’ll get on your website.
9. Expands Your Subscriber List
With an increase in website traffic, you also increase your chances of expanding your subscriber base. Expanding your subscriber base enables you to reach visitors who are interested in your content. It increases click-through rates and gives sales a boost.
Give your audience a reason to subscribe. The first step to this is creating high-quality content. Your guest posts will do the first step but you must regularly create and post relevant and valuable content to keep them interested in your business.
10. Improves Your Online Influence
These days, people trust online influencers more than advertisements. You can also become an online influencer when you’ve created several highly informative, engaging, and top quality guest blogs.
With guest blogging, you can connect with readers that are on another website. Once you have established yourself as an industry expert and online influencer, other businesses may come to you with their products and services to be featured on your posts. This opens up new avenues of income.
Getting Started with Guest Blogging
Want someone to write a guest blog post for you?
You can get help from a guest blogging service to pull the right chords and make a difference on your bottom line.
Our guest blogging service can help you reap all the benefits of guest blogging mentioned above. Get in touch with us to know more.
