As any basic inbound marketer knows, blogging is a vital tool for attracting the right visitors to your website. If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you might’ve begun toying with the idea of guest blogging, too.
And in case you’ve been wavering with that idea, we’re here to let you know: You absolutely should.
What is Guest Blogging?
Basically guest blogging is also known as “guest posting,” which is the act of writing content for another company’s website. usually, guest bloggers write for similar blogs within their industry in order to:
- Attract traffic back to their website
- improve their domain authority using external links to high-authority domains
- Increase their brand credibility and awareness, and
- Build relationships with peers in their industry.
Roughly, guest blogging offers mutual benefits for both the guest blogger and the website hosting the guest content. Speaking openly, guest blogging is a two-way street — so when you decide to hop on the guest blogging bandwagon, you should consider featuring posts by guest bloggers on your own website, too.
Why Is Guest Blogging Important For Your Business?
Moreover, guest blogging offers a number of benefits in any business. Through sharing your expertise on other companies’ websites, you can establish yourself as an authority figure within your market, build relationships with other thought leaders in your field and expose your brand to an entirely new audience.
Moreover, featuring guest posts on your own blog will help you deliver new perspectives and fresh content to your audience. Generally, we’re all guilty of falling victim to a routine and growing tired of the same old stuff, so featuring guest posts is a great way to keep readers engaged — no need to mention the promotional boost that occurs when your guest bloggers share their blogs with their personal network.
How Do I Get Started With Guest Blogging?
Before you get started with guest blogging, make sure you’re clear about what you’re looking to get out of the guest blogging experience. Search for industry blogs by non-competitor companies where you can deliver real insight to readers.
Regardless, research is essential for successful guest blogging.
No more secrets there is a lot of spam surfacing the web. It’s your job to make sure you’re not posting to these types of blogs — or publishing any spammy content on your own blog.
Keep efforts on finding writers within your niche, within your market, and from a respected business or background. There is also a need to agree with what they’re saying in their post and ensure that the message aligns with your personas’ interests. In case the content doesn’t align with your business, personas, or brand voice, guest blogging can have a swift and negative impact on your company.
The following are few things to look for before offering to guest blog or vice-versa:
- Do this blog or blogger have a slew of followers who are actively posting comments, sharing blogs with their networks, and otherwise engaging with content?
- Does they have a Facebook or Twitter account where they share their own blog posts regularly?
- Does they have high domain authority that would amplify my own SEO ranking?
- Are their industry and expertise complementary to my own?
How Does Guest Blogging Impact SEO?
Providing you’re careful and considerate about creating high-value guest blogs for legitimate websites, guest blogging can be a great tool for building your domain authority and moving up in SEO rankings.
Ultimately, developing an SEO-boosting guest blogging strategy comes down to providing genuine, helpful, and relevant content to educate readers — not low-quality content used as a mere container for links to your website.
So as long as your content is of high quality, guest blogging is a great way to increase your site rankings. What Google sees is, if other people are linking back to your blog on their own websites, then the content on your blog must be relevant and interesting. When individuals comment, share, like or link to your blog, it moves up in Google’s PageRank — that means, it’s much more likely to pop up first when someone googles a similar topic.
Nevertheless, Google PageRank is only an algorithm, so it can’t tell the difference between dynamic content and spam! Therefore while cramming your guest blog posts with links and keywords will push you farther up in the ranking, it probably won’t generate any new, high-fit traffic, and it certainly won’t establish you as an authority in your field
What Does High-Quality Guest Blogging Look Like?
The most important key element to writing a high-quality guest blog is to think of it as a value-add for your audience — not as an advertisement!
With any type of inbound content, your guest blogs should be intended to educate your reader, not promote your own product or service. In case the topic is relevant to your product or service, then, of course, there’s no harm in featuring it in your blog. However, there’s a big difference between selling yourself and offering helpful, actionable information to your readers.
As an alternative to writing guest blogs with the purpose of establishing yourself as an authority figure in your field, introducing your name to a new audience, and building genuine relationships with other bloggers or businesses.
The following are a few other quick tips to help you enhance your guest blogging strategy:
- Write a clear, concise author bio. Even though some companies allow you to include links back to your website within the main body of your blog, many prohibit it or change the links over time. Biodata of yours, then, is likely the only place in your guest post that will include a permanent link back to your website.
- Try to include at least one relevant internal link back to one of the company’s previous blog posts within your guest post. They’ll appreciate the research you’ve done and this small act helps increase their own authority and traffic.
- Conclude each post with a call-to-action that asks readers to leave comments. Always remember, the more people to comment on and share your blog, the more popular your post will become in an SEO search.
- Promote your guest blog post on your own social media networks. This acts as a nice gesture that will generate more traffic back to your guest blogger and their business. By now, it should be second nature for you to share your content — and it’s a good way to say “thank you” for publishing your guest post.
- Use Google Analytics to track how much traffic your guest post is generating. This will give you a broader idea of what readers want to hear about and see what is working for your business.
Following these tips will help you avoid writing or accepting spammy content and, in turn, gather the true benefits of guest blogging. And also increases your SEO rankings, boost the credibility of your brand and reach new audiences in your industry, follow our recommended steps and only associate your business blog and posts with well-respected marketers.
