Assuming you have deeply looked into how to use guest posts to boost your SEO, you may have come across articles claiming that guest posting doesn’t help with SEO. Some have been preaching the same thing since 2014.
But that is simply not true, and the irony is that several of those articles are guest posts. Granted, it might not work, but only if you use it as your sole SEO strategy and went into it haphazardly without properly understanding how it can help with SEO.
This article sets out to show you how guest posting can fix your SEO woes. We will discuss how it can help your content rank better in search results, different ways to do it successfully, and highlight a few tips on how to write a successful guest post.
What Is Guest Posting?
Guest posting, also referred to as guest blogging, is creating content that is published on another company’s website. It helps boost brand awareness and attract traffic back to your website.
How Guest Posting Can Help Your Website SEO Results
By sharing your content and expertise on other websites, you will improve your website SEO results through:
1. Backlinks
Google considers several factors to determine a page’s rank, and among them is the quality and number of backlinks. Think of backlinks as a recommendation; the more the recommendations, the better your content must be. Guest posting is one of the many effective ways of acquiring quality backlinks.
Your guest post should contain at least one backlink to your website, either in the post or in the biography section of the author.
If you create a high-quality post and published it on a high domain authority website, the rank of your content will rise.
2. Brand Exposure
You can have the best content that offers the best value; but as long as your target audience doesn’t know about you, you won’t be able to raise your website’s domain authority.
Publishing content on leading online publications whose audience already trusts and engages with the editor will expose your brand, raise your website’s domain authority, and increase your traffic.
Additionally, the more your content appears in highly regarded publications, the more people see you as a trustworthy expert in your industry and the higher your rank in search engine results.
3. Increased User Engagement
Publishing on a website with active users that trust and always engage with its content will have them sharing, commenting, liking, or linking it. This increased engagement “shows” search engines that your content is of high quality, so it could pop up among the first results if someone searches for a similar keyword.
How Can You Find Opportunities To Guest Post?
The first thing you should have in mind when looking for guest posting opportunities is that not all sites allow guest posting, and you shouldn’t offer your post to any site you come across. You have to look for beneficial guest blogging opportunities on websites that are relevant to your industry or niche.
Here are some tips on how to find the best opportunities to guest post.
- Google search for keyword + “guest post”, or keyword + “write for us”, or something similar to find relevant sites that accept guest blogging.
- Look up the most prolific guest bloggers in your industry. Search for something like, “guest posts by Neil Patel”, and you will find all the sites they have published on, which you can use as well.
- Check competitor backlinks on any posts they have guest-written using a tool like Open Site Explorer.
- Search for the phrase “guest post” on social platforms to find any guest posts shared by other guest posters.
- Sign up for My Blog Guest, a community of guest bloggers.
How To Pitch A Guest Post
After finding guest blogging opportunities, the next step is to convince the editor to let you guest post on their website by pitching. But because blog editors receive tens or hundreds of pitches a day, you have to pitch correctly to increase the chances of them accepting your offer.
Here are a few pitching tips to get the editor to accept your offer.
- First, learn the details of the blog’s content such as the target audience and their content.
- Read the guest posting guidelines of the site.
- Don’t try to guest blog if you haven’t been blogging on your site.
- Go straight to the point and don’t waste their time.
- Suggest a few topics for them to pick the best one for their audience.
- Let them know if you have an article ready.
- Address them by their name if you know it.
If they take too long to get back to you, you should follow up either through a phone call or an email. You can even try another pitch.
Tips For Writing A Great Guest Post
A guest post is slightly different from a regular post. So, even if you are great at creating posts, you may have a hard time creating a great guest post.
Here are some helpful tips on how to write a great guest post:
- Write it with the website’s target audience in mind, if they are different from yours.
- Keyword optimize your content.
- Guest-post often on different websites.
- Only guest-post on websites with the same or higher domain authority as your site. Check domain authority through a search engine ranking score by Moz.
- Ensure your post is in line with the guest post guidelines of the website.
If you need help boosting your SEO, you can always seek professional help.
Grow Your Exposure Through Wordseed
SEO is one of several ways of growing your brand, audience, and sales. Guest blogging boosts your SEO efforts and helps your content rank higher in search engines, in the ways we have discussed.
But it isn’t the only way. You can target your competitors’ traffic and grow your exposure and audience through WordSeed. We can help get your brand and content in front of the right audience, time, and place through contextual advertising and sponsored content.
You no longer have to rely on cookie-based ads. Let us help you reach highly-engaged audiences and drive performance across brand-relevant content.
Contact us today to so we can discuss how we can expand your audience and grow your sales.
