Many businesses get spammed with endless amounts of guest post emails per day with the sales pitch that guest posts will boost their SEO rankings and boom their business.
In this post, Red Search takes a deep dive into what you need to know about guest posts and how they help you rank on Google.
But first, let’s break down the basics of guest posting.
What are Guest Posts?
In simple terms, guest posting is publishing an article from your page to another (authoritative) website. It is crucial for businesses since guest posts reinforce brand awareness, drive quality traffic and earn you a do-follow backlink.
Many SEO agencies practice guest posting for clients as a primary technique for boosting keyword rankings on Google. While this is a common practice, it’s typical that not all SEO agencies perform quality guest posting. In fact, most business owners are left with spammy guest posts that do more harm than good.
It’s important that if your SEO agency is performing guest posting as a form of link building, they do it right.
Benefits of Nailing Guest Posting
For businesses that have ambitious SEO growth targets, executing a successful guest posting strategy will have many short-term and long-term advantages. Some include:
1. Earn Natural and High-Quality Backlinks
Google looks into the quality and quantity of backlinks when ranking your website. By earning a stream of high-quality backlinks consistently over a few months to a few years, your website can benefit greatly from top SEO rankings which typically lead to increased inquiries for your product or services.
2. Strengthen Brand Awareness and Exposure
Guest posting on another website lets you tap into their existing audience and spread the word about your business. Doing so reinforces your first impression since first-time visitors will know about your site from a highly credible source.
In that case, make sure that you are only guest posting to authoritative sites and publishing high-quality and well-written content. If you nail your customers’ first impression, then you already have a head start on their buyer journey.
3. Increase Referral Traffic
Referral traffic refers to users visiting your webpage from a host site without searching for your content on Google.
Google will also perceive your content as valuable if you get high-quality backlinks from several guest posts on authoritative websites. In other words, as Red Search has mentioned already, you’re most likely to rank on top of Google’s search engine result pages.
4. Boost Your Brand Authority
You can boost your brand authority by guest posting to other websites. When potential customers read about your business on reliable websites, it lets them know that you are a qualified expert in your field.
But always keep your content factual and honest. Posting fake claims on another website harms your credibility and may prevent you from guest posting to more sites in the future.
5. Get Qualified Leads and Shorten Buyers’ Journey
Guest posting lets you build connections with customers interested in your products or services. Reaching out to websites relevant to your niche also lets you get more qualified leads which you can convert from readers to buyers.
Additionally, leaving a call-to-action on a well-written guest post should help put your brand in front of more customers and convert them from visitors to buyers.
Are Guest Posts Bad In The Eyes of Google?
Google has warned against performing guest posting purely for the goal of acquiring new backlinks as they deem it to be unnatural. While your website won’t be directly penalized, the efforts that you invest into guest posting can potentially be for naught as Google will simply either devalue these posts or ignore them altogether.
Backlinks from guest posts should also have appropriate tags such as rel=” sponsored” or rel=“nofollow”. Untagged links may potentially be flagged and may be seen as low-quality links which can harm your page in the long run.
Guest posting has become an industry-wide practice. However, choosing to work with an agency that will capitalize on doing it properly is uncommon.
Should You Engage With An Agency For Guest Post Link Building?
Guest posts for SEO purposes can be highly fruitful if done right through proper planning and execution. There are many top authority sites in all niches that are in need and readily accept highly credible information from their respective industry experts.