Guest blogging is something that has taken the SEO industry by storm. There are some upsides and there are some downsides to it, which is why we’ll look at both sides in this article. We’ll also take a look at how you can take advantage of guest blogging while avoiding being penalized by Google.
Guest blogging is one of the best ways to gain traffic and backlinks for your website. You don’t always need to write on a website before you can contribute content. You just need to make sure enough people read that content or blog post you wrote.
Guest blogging is a superb method to create links to your website or establish link building campaigns that are natural and powerful. It is an effective strategy for sharing content and getting traffic by writing outstanding articles for other popular sites. If you’re new to blogging, doing guest blogging for SEO can be difficult.
Benefits Of Guests Blogging For Seo
Increases Credibility And Establishes Authority Online
On the other hand, if you are a blogger who is looking for a chance to boost your online authority, guest blogging is what you need to start. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if an audience doesn’t trust your brand, it is challenging to keep your viewers as loyal users or buyers.
Guest blogging adds to your image as a reliable leader in the industry. Some of the elements that define brand value are personalized content. The audience will naturally continue to see you as a creditable brand if you know the name added to the guest blog entry on a highly reputable page.
Authority not only benefits your company SEO but also helps you in future projects. To increase your customer base and boost your company income, being a well-known brand is essential.
You will show your reputation as an information source by posting high-quality and valuable content to other high-ranking blogs. Sharing your expertise and providing examples to support your point helps strengthen how people view your content. It will help your target audience realize your trustworthiness recognized by brands. Thus, they will be more responsive to any value you may offer on your site.
According to statistics from Bazaarvoice’s report:
- 84% of millennials say that user-generated content influences their purchase decisions a lot (25%) / somewhat (59%)
People who published on websites such as Hubspot and Marketing Land might be regarded in their field as more credible than anyone who does not have any guest posts. If it is too difficult for you to write for top websites, beginning with smaller ones is not a bad idea to start creating your online credibility.
Freshens Your Content Strategy
Continually creating and distributing content may sometimes make you run out of ideas. But you don’t need to worry about that anymore since now you can easily have someone who is an expert in the field that writes for you.
Guest posting opens the chance for a host blog to outsource content writers without any additional fees. It contributes to freshening the content strategy of businesses.
As well-known and knowledgeable individuals write the content, you will no longer worry about the quality of guest posts on your sites. Your readers might also enjoy this as they get to read fantastic content, which provided a different viewpoint that they didn’t expect.
For example, Salesforce (one of the largest cloud computing services as a software (SaaS) company) takes guest blogging seriously.
The guest blogging activity is popular among all the company members, from the CEO Marc Benioff to coders. CEO guest posts at TechCrunch about cloud computing and the coders guest post on Google Code’s official blog about how to build a Google Earth app for Salesforce.com Foundation grantees and how to visualize user cloud’s data.
Instead of having separate departments produce content and do the marketing job, Salesforce integrates the whole team into guest blogging. Through the incorporation within the company, they want to include as many voices as possible around the company, which emphasizes guest posting is a team effort, and Salesforce is open to hearing anything its employees want to say.
The impressive results show Salesforce’s winning of numerous contacts with bloggers and many first-hand tutorials on using its software.
Guest Blogging Increases Your Site’s Ranking In Search Engines
A backlink is a link from a website to another. Search engines, for example, Google, use backlinks as an indicator for rating. When a site links to another, it means the content is worth noting. High-quality backlinks will help websites gain a high ranking position in search engine result pages (SERP).
As backlinks are attached every time your brand appears on blog posts and vice versa, you can prove your brand value and relevance to search engines, and it will be easier for people to find your content via Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others.
However, there are still people who are writing low-quality guest posts merely to get backlinks in return. These poorly written and pay-to-win articles might be penalized by search engines as unhelpful for readers and only meant to build links. You should avoid this by establishing criteria for delivering high-quality and targeted posts whenever anyone asks to submit guest posts.
For instance, Intel, one of the world’s largest PC microprocessors, let a blogging celebrity named Ekaterina Walter, build her brand, freely write guest posts to other sites, and links back to her blog. As her guest posting career goes further, she loves working at Intel as well.
Therefore, without putting any limit or action, Intel can support its influencer employee as well as earn credibility and reputation for the company itself at the same time.
Guest Blogging Boosts Your Traffic And SEO
Although there still exists abuses of poorly written guest posts to get links, guest blogging remains robust digital marketing tactic. Nowadays, guest blogging is one of the best ways to build high-quality backlinks, which is why it also helps generate more quality traffic to your sites, boost your SEO and even enhance your return on investments (ROI).
Backlinks play the most crucial role in search engine algorithm, SEO, and your overall strategy for developing your website.
When you post on other blogs and websites, your brand is linked back to those articles. Search engines, for example, Google, will evaluate your site as relevant and useful based on how many times others cite your brand.
The more backlinks you achieve, the more traffic you gain. The higher traffic you get, the higher-ranking position your website has in SERP. Therein, a relatively high rank means more people will see and possibly access your site when searching for relevant keywords.
Besides, a single backlink from a leading blog might benefit your SEO greatly, making it simple for search engines (like Google, Bing, and other alternatives) to identify and index your content.
Your link can be placed anywhere within the article. However, the position in the body would be ideal. It will look more natural to the readers, and they will be more likely to click through to find out more about you and your brand. Attaching links in the biographical part where you talk about your background and your company is also acceptable.
Drives More Qualified Leads
Well-created and easy-to-share guest content can get backlinks to itself organically over time. Links to company pages enable the generation of referral traffic, which generates leads and high-paying clients on your website.
Guest blogging might bring you not only visitors but also other people in your industry. As you mention them as informative and qualified external links in your articles, they will notice your posts as well as be more likely to learn about your brand.
If your blog is about what they are interested in, they may contact you to guest posts or link to your site as a reliable source. Being a source will help extend your network as well as lead to collaborations and partnerships that improve your sales funnel.
Relevance is the most important criteria to consider guest posting. If you post articles on an irrelevant but popular website, you won’t get a target or qualified leads, and it’s a waste of time.
On the B2B perspectives, guest posting is one of the most powerful marketing tactics for your B2B business.
B2C sales cycles are shorter than B2B sales cycles due to the provided goods and services. For example, it takes less time for a customer to evaluate and process a mobile app purchase than a business does when it comes to a business software payment.
This difference indicates that the priority of B2C and B2B brands might also be different. It is crucial, especially with guest blogging, since it may influence the kind of publishers you target.
As B2B businesses aim to find authorized and relevant blogs to guest post, they can get in front of target customers as often as possible, which will maximize the benefits of guest blogging and drive more quality leads to the company site.
Meanwhile, a B2C brand may sometimes sacrifice the relevance factor to aim to a higher authority site since its goals are improving organic keyword rankings through backlinks.