What Is a Guest Post?
A guest post is an article or blog post written by a guest author and published on someone else’s website or blog.
Pretty simple right?
It allows businesses and marketers to expand their reach by targeting a wider audience.
It is a phenomenal way to list build and a powerful blog growth strategy that works effectively.
Posting a guest blog drives the traffic back to your site( referral traffic) and enhances brand visibility.
The guest post includes the “author name” and “contributor” highlighted and specially dedicated by the website owner.
Benefits of Guest Posting:
People usually do guest blogging to drive massive organic traffic. But let’s discuss some other major benefits of guest blogging.
- Build authoritative and quality backlinks
- Establish yourself as an industry expert or thought leader
- Grow your personal brand
- Establish relationships and turn them into long-term partnerships
- Improve SEO performance
- Increase brand exposure
- Grow your social media following
- Generate potential leads
Determining the Goal of Guest Posting:
Knowing the goal of doing guest blogging is the fundamental key to processing further and getting potentially desired results.
Generally, it is the most important step to decide why you should do this. There could be any of the reasons below.
- Generating backlinks to your website (very common and the main focus of mostly bloggers)
- Getting organic traffic back to your website (this is also known as referral traffic).
- Positioning yourself as an authority and thought leader in your niche.
- Increase Website Ranking
Why Should Marketers Do Guest Blogging?
The concept of guest blogging sounds pretty simple and easy to go right?
You just have to write an article for authority websites and get potential benefits in return.
People who have just started their businesses and websites usually have a lot of marketing problems. One of the major problems is SEO ranking.
Guest posting could be the biggest source of search engine optimization because it helps to build credibility and authority.
As we talk about the backlinks generation by guest blogging above. Google counts backlinks as a sign of authority and is used to rank a website.
The more backlinks you have the more likely your website will rank higher on search engine page results (SERP).
Another important point and challenge faced by new startups is the number of visitors.
New websites usually get a low number of visitors. However, guest blogging helps to drive massive organic traffic back to your site.
For instance, let’s say you have a toddler toys business and you want to promote it. Guest blogging could help you with this.
You have to target those websites with relevant interests and audiences so when people read they will click and easily jump on your site.
The Impact of Guest Blogging:
In the context of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), guest posting can have both positive and negative impacts.
Positive impacts on SEO:
1. Backlinks:
Marketers and business owners often do guest posting to build strong backlink profiles. When you generate high-quality content for a respected site and solve the problem of their audience they will ultimately link you back happily.
Backlinks are considered a vote of confidence by Google. Every time you get backlinks it will increase your brand authority and build credibility.
Besides improving your domain authority it also helps to rank high in the search engine and establish your brand successfully.
It is clear that it is a helpful technique to get links, but sometimes spammy websites also link to you.
This type of linking will not help you with any of your goals and ranking to go up as much.
That is why it is necessary to check regularly which links impact negatively on your site or not helping you in any way. Remove those links and contribute your content to authority websites.
It’ll help you to maintain your website’s overall health which can improve your website’s credibility and ranking.
2. Increased brand awareness:
Guest blogging enables you to expand your reach by tapping into the world of authorities. The time when you get quality links back to your site it will ultimately send positive signals to search engines.
Simply put, when you publish guest posts on an authority website in your niche, you tap into their established audiences.
This introduces your brand to people who may have yet to encounter it before and enhances your brand visibility and authority.
It also allows you to convey consistently your brand message, values, and unique selling point to readers. It helps to reinforce your brand identity and boost your online presence as well.
Similarly, by sharing valuable insights and expertise on relevant websites, you’ll position yourself as a thought leader in your respected industry.
This can significantly enhance your brand’s credibility and make you a more trusted source of information.
3. Author Bio and Links:
Most of the time guest post includes a section devoted to the author’s bio. This includes links to your website or social media profile so people who love your content can easily find you.
You can say it is an unpaid mini-advertisement of your brand which primarily showcases your expertise and value proposition.
This not only drives traffic to your site but is also able to convert them into potential customers.
4. Networking and Relationship Building:
Guest posting is a great way of building relationships and expanding your online network.
When you publish a post on a relevant popular website you are essentially getting your name and expertise in front of a new audience.
It’ll help to introduce and connect with website owners and other businesses. This leads to long-term partnerships that can benefit you in various ways.
Although, collaborating with authorities facilitates networking opportunities and relationship-building with your niche it is also beneficial for a backlink profile.
5. Referral traffic:
Typically guest posting aims to reach a wider audience and expand the brand exposure. When your goal of posting is getting greater organic traffic, you have to ensure that you are targeting relevant as well as high audience-rate websites.
Whenever a person clicks on the link or content, it will jump on your website with ease. In this way, it’ll direct your target website traffic to your site and improve your site ranking.
Besides driving referral traffic to your website it also leads to increased engagement and conversions.
The other way is by guest posting you can provide fresh perspectives and diverse content, which can attract return visits from search engines. This will also boost your ranking and brand credibility.
Negative impacts on SEO:
1. Over-optimization:
Guest posting is an outstanding strategy with significant benefits but it also leads to over-optimization, if not done properly.
- Keyword Stuffing: The goal is to include relevant keywords naturally throughout your content, but cramming them in unnaturally makes it look spammy and hurts readability. Search engines can also penalize sites for excessive keyword stuffing.
- Link Overload: Including too many links in your guest post, especially to your site, can come across as promotional and inauthentic. Focus on providing valuable content and linking strategically to relevant sources, including your high-quality content when appropriate.
It means avoiding the excessive use of keywords and links to maintain your website’s SEO.
2. Low-quality links:
One of the greatest risks of guest posting is getting spammy and low-quality links. Google penalizes those websites that use guest posting just for generating links.
Google clearly said that guest posting solely for links is a violation of their guidelines.
As I mentioned above when you post on site it includes your website links and author bio that direct traffic and other significant benefits.
But if your target website is of low quality and low-domain then the link you got may not hold any value in Google’s eyes. This can hurt your SEO badly and negatively impact on overall website.
The best way to avoid this is to check and verify the website domain authority, ranking, relevancy, and content before targeting.
3. Duplicate content:
One of the disadvantages of guest posting is it leads to duplicate content issues. If the same articles are published on different websites it will become hard for the original website to rank.
Additionally, it badly affects your website ranking and may get penalized by Google. The thing is Google doesn’t directly penalize the website instead it will lower your website ranking and authority.
To avoid this make sure you check for duplicate content before publishing it on your website or ask the guest blogger whether it is original content or already shared with other websites.
4. Manipulative tactics:
Google considers large-scale guest posting a manipulative tactic for building backlinks etc.
Guest postings that contain manipulative linking and unethical practices are penalized by search engines and negatively impact your website performance.
Also when a guest post is primarily created to promote a product or service without any clear disclosure it misleads readers and seems an unethical practice.
However, guest posting is a strategic approach to building a brand, but these manipulative tactics undermine the trust and harm both guest writer and host.
To avoid negative impacts and maximize the positive impacts on SEO, focus on:
1. Quality over quantity:
Usually, people do guest posting just for the sake of generating the number of backlinks and in that process, they don’t keep checking on the quality of links.
This will damage your website’s credibility and lower the domain authority.
It also hurts your search engine ranking very badly and signals Google that this site is involved in some spammy and unethical practices.
To avoid this you have to prioritize guest posting on high-quality, relevant, and authoritative websites.
Rather than low-quality websites that give you no benefit at all, they negatively affect your website.
2. Diverse anchor text:
Anchor text diversity plays a very crucial role in search engine optimization.
Using diverse and natural anchor text when linking back to your website makes your website trustworthy.
Search engines use anchor text to determine the quality of the link and to understand the content. It is also very useful to evaluate the relevance and trustworthiness of your site.
If you use the same anchor text for all your links it indicates that you are doing spammy and manipulative link-building practices.
Cooperate natural and relevant phrases in your anchor text to make sure that it doesn’t look manipulative.
Also mix branded, generic, and ISL keywords to avoid over-optimization with exact-match keywords which is not good for SEO health.
3. Unique content:
The content is the fundamental aspect of the link-building strategy. You must ensure that each guest post is unique and provides value to the audience.
Create well-written, informative, and link-worthy content that other websites are inclined to link it.
If you are sure that your current content provides value and information to your audience then it’s good to go.
But, if you have any doubts and your website doesn’t get the potential number of visitors, it lacks the capacity to attract and hold visitors.
It took a little more effort, you just have to do research and generate long-form, problem-solving, and valuable insight-rich content.
4. Follow Google’s guidelines:
Generally, when are going to generate high-quality content you have to follow the Google guidelines for effective results.
Same as when you have to create a post for another website make sure it’s on the right track otherwise it fails to give you results.
Adhere to Google’s guidelines on guest posting and link schemes. Google’s primary concern is the quality of content and user experience.
The content you curate should be well-researched, deep insights, and relevant. Try to avoid keyword stuffing, adding irrelevant data, and incorporating too many links.
Remember, the goal of guest posting should be to build relationships, provide value, and attract relevant audiences, not just to build links
The primary goal of guest posting should be to provide valuable content to the host’s audience, with backlinks as a secondary benefit.