5 Ways Guest Blogging Can Boost Your SEO
If you have a website of your own, be it for business or personal use, you’d have heard probably a million times that search engine optimization (SEO), both on-page and off-page, is crucial to the searchability and visibility of your site; in short, to rank well in search engine results.
Despite the fact that SEO is constantly changing, content and backlinks remain two of the most important elements that can impact a site’s rankings. Content is vital because it’s the medium to reach and engage with audiences; backlinks, the links from another website to your site, help in boosting your site’s authority and drawing traffic.
Why Is Guest Blogging Important to SEO?
Of the many SEO tactics, guest blogging is exactly the practice that entails content and backlinks; it is the practice of publishing posts on a third-party website or a blog to build backlinks to your site. Guest bloggers write for sites that are related to their niche so that their posts can:
- Build authority and credibility to their site
- Boost their site’s domain authority using high-authority backlinks
- Draw traffic to their site
- Increase brand exposure to a newer and bigger audience
However, guest blogging on any site may not prove beneficial to your SEO. While low-quality guest blogging—posting poor content on low-quality websites—that is mainly done to obtain backlinks is looked upon as a spammy SEO practice by Google, high-quality guest blogging is seen as an effective SEO strategy. This is because strong content plays an indispensable role in improving your SEO strategy.
5 Ways Guest Blogging Can Boost Your SEO
Now that you know the relationship between guest blogging and SEO, let’s delve into how and what guest blogging strategies can boost your SEO.
Obtain Natural Backlinks
Guest blogging is an effective strategy to obtain natural backlinks by establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry. With Google’s E-A-T update that stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness, Google sees expert content as one of the indicators of a high-quality site. While this is true for the content that is on your site and third-party sites, you might be wondering how to turn the update to your advantage.
If you are an expert in your field, ensure to include your author bio while guest blogging on other websites. This way, your article is likely to rank well and draw more organic traffic. By contributing well-researched content, other blogs will naturally link to your guest post. When you are linking within your content, it is important to remember that your post should support the link and anchor text. Additionally, when you are obtaining links from various guest posts, you can vary the anchor texts so that you have a healthy link portfolio.
Build Brand Exposure
An important aspect of guest blogging is that by contributing high-quality posts, you can build brand exposure. If you post your contribution on sites that your audience values, the post can act as a positioning tool. Remember guest blogging is a two-way street. High authority sites welcome content that is of superior quality; the sites get to post high-value content whereas, your website becomes visible through the backlinks you build through your posts.
Boost Rankings with Backlinks
A significant benefit of guest blogging is to obtain natural backlinks. Since Google considers backlinks to your site as one of the primary ranking factors, your site’s rankings will increase with more relevant backlinks. An effective guest blogging strategy would be to aim at getting links from relevant sites that have high domain authority (DA). DA is an important metric that indicates the trustworthiness of a site, and links from sites with a high DA is superior compared to a link from a site with a low DA score.
Increase Traffic to Your Site
As mentioned in the previous section, the more relevant the backlinks are, the more likely is your visibility; your site will appear on the search engine results pages (SERP). With more visibility, you can expect a growth of organic traffic. Visitors who see your website at the top of the search results will click on it and land on your website.
If you are starting out and do not have enough backlinks or DA to make it to the SERPs, guest blogging opens up another avenue to draw traffic. When you post on a highly authoritative site that already draws a lot of visitors, you are opening your site up to those audiences without ranking in the SERPs.
Grow Your Social Media Following
Guest blogging is an effective strategy to place your site on the Social Media radar. When you post great content on a site that has its fair share of followers, they start sharing it across their social media platforms. If the content is what they are looking for, you will find people tweeting, mentioning, and engaging with the content. It needs no mentioning that your site’s popularity will grow making guest blogging a really smart strategy when you are trying to getting your site off the ground.
Though you are well aware of how effective guest blogging techniques can help your SEO, it cannot be denied that reaching out to bloggers who are willing to publish your article with a backlink and following up with them till it’s published can be a ton of work. If you want a hassle-free guest blogging experience, you can use the services of Directory Maximizer that operates with a dynamic team who manually reaches out to bloggers and gets your guest posts published on popular blogs.
