Guest posting may be the fastest way to increase your popularity. It requires you to put in the time, but it's worth it, as it's what can improve your SEO and traffic, and also help you build collaborative relationships with people in your industry.
But let's take a closer look at what guest posting is, how it benefits you and how you can get started with it.
What is Guest Posting?
Guest Posting is writing content for another blog or website. Usually, and especially if you're doing it for SEO purposes, this means writing valuable content for a blog or website in your industry. The main benefits are as follows:
- Attracting traffic to your website
- Strengthening website authority
- Increase the credibility and awareness of your brand
- Build relationships with others in your industry
Guest Posting has mutual benefits for both the guest author and the website hosting the content. In other words, Guest Posting is a two-way street - so when you decide to start it, you should also consider hosting guest authors on your own site.
How Guest Posting benefits SEO?
Authority
The main advantage of Guest Posting over SEO is the increase in website authority. To understand how this benefits your website, we must first clarify the concept of Authority.
A high-authority website is a website that Google considers trustworthy and an authority in its industry. Websites with higher authority are on average more likely to rank higher on Google compared to similar websites.
The biggest factor that determines authority is backlinks, i.e. links from other websites to yours. If another website links to yours, Google sees it as a vote of confidence. For another site to be willing to send its audience to your site, you're probably doing something right. The higher a site's authority, the more "power" you gain from a link from their site to yours. And of course, the more links you have, the higher your site's authority will be.
Ultimately, developing a Guest Posting strategy that boosts SEO requires providing genuine, useful and relevant content to educate readers - not low-quality content that is only used for links to your site.
So, as long as your content is high quality, Guest Posting is a great way to increase your site's ranking in the results. When people comment, share, or link to your blog, it sends positive messages to Google's algorithm, meaning that your content provides value. Thus, you're much more likely to appear first when someone Googles a similar topic.
Audience outreach and visibility
Other great benefits of Guest Posting are reaching new audiences and increasing your brand awareness, which also help your SEO, indirectly. By joining another blog's audience, you are introducing yourself to an already established community that is ready to hear what you have to say. If you add value to their reading experience, then they are likely to head to your blog to check out the rest of your content.
The effect of click throughs to your site from the link to the article should also not be ignored. The more people who are introduced to your site, the more people will search for it online, or share your content, or simply spend time on your site. All of these actions send positive messages to Google that greatly benefit your site's overall SEO.
How do I get started with Guest Posting?
First, you need to find the blog that will host you. Make sure it's clear what you want to gain from the guest posting experience. Look for non-competing blogs where you can provide real information to readers and where those readers are relevant to your business.
There are a few sites that list active blogs suitable for guest posting. However, the links may be unreliable. In addition, you may not have the quality of hosting that you are actually targeting.
A Google search is probably the most obvious thing to try. Just type in "top blogs for [your field]" and see what comes up. Focus on finding people in your field in the market, with a similar background or even from a reputable company.
Here are some things to think about before choosing a blog for guest posting:
- Does this blog have many active followers who post comments, share blogs with their networks, or use other ways to interact?
- Do they have a Facebook or Twitter account where they regularly share their own blog posts?
- Do they have high domain authority that would boost your SEO ranking? (You can check domain authority using tools like https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker)
- Is their industry and expertise complementary to yours?
Also, another tip before choosing a blog to publish is to search for an industry related keyword + "guest posting", "write for us" or similar. For example, if you want to write about inbound marketing, you could google:
- Inbound marketing guest post
- Inbound marketing article hosting
- Inbound marketing guest post instructions
- Inbound marketing write for us
.... and so on. This will help you find relevant industry blogs that are interested in the topic you're writing about and are currently accepting submissions from guest authors. Then all you have to do is contact them and get started!
