Guest Posting is an old SEO practice in which you write for a website, blog, or publication other than your own. This helps individuals and businesses spread the word about their organisation.
When done right, it opens up new avenues for you by creating brand awareness, attracting new audiences and helping you build a profile as an industry expert or thought leader.
If you are facing problems with attracting traffic to your website, have a low Domain Authority and want to increase your brand credibility and awareness then this is the perfect practice to integrate into your marketing strategy. According to a HubSpot article regarding “The Top Challenges Marketing Leaders Face.”, 11% of marketing leaders express difficulty in generating traffic and leads. They are struggling to create demand for their content and are unsure of the platforms that will be the best for their business, especially in promoting their content effectively.
“Google search features like featured snippets and images have made it increasingly difficult to get traffic to your site at all. In fact, 65% of Google searches now end without a click.”
This means that consumers get to see a snippet or a part of the website’s content without clicking on it, resulting in low website traffic and SEO performance.
How to get started with guest posting:
To get started it is important to not treat guest posting like a transaction. You are more likely to be successful in being welcomed by a publishing site if you build a relationship with the platform and get to know about them in detail, leading with a personalised pitch rather than a standard pitch that is being given to every platform.
Before we send a pitch, we need to decide on our goals and make sure they are SMART, for example, getting more leads and clients or website performance like improving search visibility or referral traffic. When goals are specific it becomes easier to pick a topic which is relevant to our own business goals. While searching for publishing options it’s important to ensure that the site has an audience that we want to access and covers topics relevant to our brand or industry.
They don’t need to be exactly like our brand but there needs to be some similarities to gain a new audience. To find some valuable websites most of us already know some go to sites from our industry.
However, we can also widen our search by doing the following:
- Ask employees and customers about their go-to industry or relevant topic-related sites, magazines, social handles, etc.
- Search for your keywords or industry topics on Google to see which sites rank well for them.
- Visit the sites to identify the categories they cover.
Deborah Sweeney succinctly explains the elements of a good pitch to her site, MyCorporation.com: “(It) usually fills in a gap that we are not currently covering and offers a fresh, informative perspective.”
Enhance and boost your brand visibility with these tips:
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Writing a clear and concise author biography. “Although 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. Your bio, then, is likely the only place in your guest post that will include a permanent link back to your website.” (Burnam, 2022)
- Include one to two relevant internal links to a company’s previous blog posts in the guest post category.
- Finally, conclude each post with a call-to-action that asks the readers to comment and share, this way you’re the popularity of your post will increase in the SEO search.
By following these tips, you can steer clear of creating or accepting spammy content and fully enjoy the real advantages of guest blogging.
