Guest posting, more frequently referred to as ‘guest blogging’ now, can be one of the strongest online marketing approaches your business can invest in. The effectiveness of guest posting often opens up a debate amongst marketers, however, we believe guest posting can bring great results to your business if executed in the right way.
The concept of guest posting is a simple one, it supports your business in spreading your brand’s message and gaining trust from audiences who may have not discovered you on their own. We all know that blogging is a crucial tool that supports your business in attracting new visitors to your website. Guest blogging helps attract unique visitors by exposing your content and brand to a completely new pool of readers, all of which should be in some way related to your industry or sector.
Whilst the debate of whether guest posting is a worthy investment continues, we’ll help you measure up by noting some of the key benefits of the tactic down below.
What is Guest Posting?
So first things first, guest posting is essentially creating written content that is published across one or more websites other than your own. Depending on the publisher or website that hosts your article, they will normally highlight the author of the content as a contributor or guest author. Quite prominent in freelance markets, the guest author will be offered payment for their contribution. More so now, the reward for providing the content is reimbursed with a link back to the author’s website.
Arguably this marketing technique can fall into either the SEO or the Content Marketing bracket, but we feel it falls into both. The content marketing side relates to the production of high-quality written content, whereas the SEO side relates to the reimbursement of a link back to your website. Depending on the publisher, this link could carry a lot of authority to your website. In addition to this, guest posting helps demonstrate to readers that your brand is a trustworthy and authoritative body in the industry.
Why is Guest Posting Important?
Now that we’ve covered the bare basics, you may still be unsure as to whether it’s an investment that’s right for you. Your initial thoughts might be that it seems a little counterproductive, but we’re here to assure you that there are mutual benefits to be had from creating content for other websites.
Whilst you could be using these resources to create content for your own website (which we still recommend!), the opportunities for guest posting can exceed the results of sharing the content just with your own audience. We’ve curated a list of our three top benefits of guest posting in 2022:
The Top 3 Benefits of Guest Posting
- Boosting your domain authority
- Attracting traffic to your website
- Building relationships and marketing network
Boosting Your Domain Authority
Your domain authority is the most accurate representation of where your website stands in the search landscape. At the time of writing this, higher domain authority scores translate into your content ranking better in search. Enhancing your online visibility and in turn, generating more traffic to your website. There are other techniques to building up your authority score, but we’re here to discuss guest posting, and for this one, we’re referring to the value of link building.
Within SEO, building links directed towards your website is a major part of moving up the organic rankings in search engine results pages. Traditionally, in old school SEO, the more backlinks a website had the higher their website would rank. Over time, Google discovered that this system was being manipulated and abused by thousands of websites. With every algorithm update, Google continues to trim the fat on spammy websites and bad SEO practices.
Link building in 2022 is still a viable and standard practice in SEO. Guest posting provides the perfect opportunity for you to earn legitimate and reputable links to your website. Gaining one powerful link can do more for your website than securing ten weaker and less authoritative links. The link power that is passed on from one powerful link can drastically improve the way in which Google views your website as an authority and will rank it accordingly.
How to Secure High Authority Links
Guest posting provides a great vessel for you to propose an arrangement with a publisher, providing your high-quality content in exchange for a link back to your website. Whilst there are many ways in which you can approach this proposition it would be wise to expect that many publishers may deny your request.
It becomes more of a challenge the more authoritative the website is, they will often have much stricter criteria for publishing guest content. To mitigate this, you must ensure that the content you provide is written well, relevant and probably the biggest thing, unique. It’s likely these publishers will be approached by many content creators, consider how you can get your content piece to the forefront.
Attracting Traffic To Your Website
Linked to the previous benefit, guest posting can help you attract traffic to your website. Irrespective of whether you manage to earn a link to your website or not, publishing your high-quality content to another blog can help spark some interest from your audience.
Traffic to your website is the bread and butter of your online activities. Ultimately to achieve marketing and wider business objectives your business will be reliant on the traffic to your website. Guest posting helps you share your authoritative content with similar audiences to your own, building your credibility within a new pool of highly-engaged users. Over time, your brand will become recognised as a source of trustworthy and reliable information.
Guest posting is often referred to as organic advertising due to the great results it can bring to your business. Consumers nowadays are more conscious about clicking on ads, so guest blogging enables you to ‘advertise’ your content in a genuine and authentic way. The influencer culture has only enhanced this theory, consumers are much warier of traditional advertising tactics, guest blogging enables you to bypass this with more natural interaction.
The more content your business can create and share with your network or affiliated networks the more exposure you will gain. This exposure will attract more traffic, which ultimately increases the likelihood of service enquiries or purchases.
Top tip, ahead of your guest post going live, it might be worth doing a quick optimisation check across your website. Ensuring everything works as you would expect it to, consider adding in additional CTAs to enhance your opportunity for conversions.
Building Relationships and Marketing Network
The content you share and publish on your own website provides value and encourages action amongst your visitors. With guest posting you can enhance the reach of your content, connecting with audiences that are outside of your immediate target market. We would always recommend sharing content via publishers that are related to your industry, this helps ensure the traffic you attract is highly engaged and more importantly, interested in what your business has to offer.
So we’ve established that guest posting is a great tool to start building relationships and nurturing trust with new visitors, but how can this help expand your own professional network? Years ago, connecting with the top publishers was a fundamental challenge, but now there is more opportunity as more publishers continue to recognise the benefit of providing high-quality content to their readers. Particularly in niche markets, publishers are always on the lookout for unique and fresh articles they can share with their following.
Writing content for other websites also provides an avenue to build new business relationships. Sharing your knowledge and expertise with other businesses and individuals can help scale your digital footprint alongside your reputation in your industry. It enhances the opportunity for them to want to continue working with you, which could evolve into an ongoing partnership with greater benefits. Ultimately though, guest posting helps your business develop a stronger and more comprehensive network of professionals, and what you do with that is down to you.
Loop Digital SEO Solutions
At Loop Digital, we offer bespoke SEO strategies to a variety of UK businesses. Our team has years of experience developing SEO strategies for startups, SMEs, and large corporations. Unlock your company’s potential with our exceptional SEO and Content Marketing solutions. Call us on 01604 806020 or speak to one of our experts today.
