Guest blogging is an incredibly powerful tool for your business. In fact, it’s one of the best tools available for building backlinks and sending relevant traffic back to your website. Recently, Google issued a statement that effectively said guest blogging is dead. However, this couldn’t be further form the truth, and instead seemed to be used to to scare off spam business from abusing this powerful method.
Below we’re going to go into how you can properly implement a guest blogging strategy to increase your rankings in a safe and effective manner.
Guest blogging is the process of creating content for other blogs in your niche. Usually, these blogs have some leave of overlap with the market you’re trying to serve. These opportunities usually aren’t paid, but can result in traffic, exposure and leads, which makes it a very effective marketing strategy.
Below you’ll find an easily repeatable process that enables you to create a guest blogging strategy that increases both your traffic and local search engine rankings.
Selecting the right blogs is one of the most important parts of the guest blogging process. In one of Google’s recent algorithm updates they increased the importance of having relevant backlinks to your website.
If your website had a ton of links that were coming from non-relevant websites, then it wouldn’t be very beneficial for your rankings. This means that when you’re looking for blogs to post on it’s important that you choose blogs and websites that have some level of overlap with your market.
One good method for finding potential guest post spots is to use Google and search for “guest post + [your market]”. By using phrases like this you’ll uncover guest posting opportunities within your current niche.
You can also look at blogs that you currently read and get your information from, as surely some of these will also accept guest posts.
Keywords are very important during the post creation phase. However, it’s important that they don’t become your central focus. The main reason you’ll be using keywords is to include a backlink to your website with that specific keyword, either in the blog post, or in the author bio section.
When choosing blogs for SEO purposes it’s important that they allow a “do-follow” backlink. This will send SEO juice from that site to your website.
Spammy and low-quality guest posting is long gone. If you’re creating a blog post for a new audience it’s important that you try to provide the most value possible.
Make sure your post is actionable and very useful. This will ensure that your blog post not only provides great SEO value, but also provides value to the readers, and may even send some new valuable leads your way.
Guest blogging is important, but only if you do it on a regular basis. You can’t expect a single blog post to cure all of your traffic woes. Try to stick to a regular guest posting schedule, just as you do for your business blog.
The more often you pitch and write guest blogs the better your results are going to be.
If you’re interested in a content marketing strategy that actually works, then get in touch with our creative team today.
