Guest blogging made quite a comeback after its supposed death a few years ago. Of course, its nature changed – just like with the rest of SEO strategies, quality now trumps quantity. You no longer get results from dozens of poor-quality keyword-heavy posts scattered across random irrelevant blogs created for the specific reason of hosting such articles. A single well-written, content-dense, high-quality, high-value blog post strategically published on an influential blog with relevant audience will bring you more traffic and influence your ranking more than a hundred of such low-quality articles.

However, some marketers still do not believe that guest posting offers sufficient return on investment. They cannot be more mistaken.

1.    It helps building new relationships

Relationships with other blogs, their authors, webmasters and audiences, to be precise. A blog post with another industry-related blog can be the beginning of a long-term partnership, and its audience can become your audience. However, you should understand that building relationships takes time. You won’t establish strong ties by submitting a single post. You have to follow it up by following and engaging in the conversation in comments, contacting the blog owner to ask how the post did, accompanying it with other topics and offering/asking for suggestion for further collaboration. This will demonstrate that you see this interaction as something more than link building effort.

2.    More backlinks = better ranking

The ranking of a website on Google these days is largely determined by the quality of links that lead to it, and the most obvious advantage of guest posting is that you get more of these. If your website has many links leading to it from other resources relevant for your industry, it cannot but influence your ranking. It is especially true if you deal with a dedicated guest posting agency (you can find out more on www.luckyposting.com) – they have enough experience to spread your posts in a way that will ensure maximum influx of traffic and increase in ranking.

3.    It gets you targeted traffic

Guest posting is probably the best way to quickly expose your website to concentrated targeted traffic. If you select the target blog carefully, your audiences heavily overlap, and the post you submit offers real value, you will experience a significant influx of visitors who are likely to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

4.    It builds up your authority in the industry

In academia, there is such thing as h-index – it is the number of peer-reviewed articles a scholar has that is referred to at least the same number of times. I.e., an h-index of 7 means that a scholar has at least 7 articles that are referred to from 7 other sources. H-index is a straightforward method of determining both the input and the productivity of a scholar. While website owners have no such easy way of measuring their authority in their industries, references are just as important for them as they are for scholars. The more often you are mentioned and referred to on other websites and the more of your materials are scattered across well-reputed sources, the more authority you have.

5.    It gets you useful feedback

By engaging with an audience wider than that of your own blog, you vastly increase your outreach. In addition to increasing the likelihood of attracting potential customers, you benefit in another way as well – you get more insightful feedback from more people, including other contributors from your industry. Eventually, after sharing a bit of useful content on someone else’s blog you may not just teach but learn as well.

6.    It helps you find new business opportunities

By exposing your business, methods and expertise to a wider audience, you not only increase the general awareness about your business – you potentially also can attract people who will be sufficiently impressed with what you have to say to do business with you. The more guest posts you have scattered across the Internet, the more likely you are to be seen as trustworthy and experienced enough to do business with directly.

7. Unique content on the right platform

It is important to publish only unique content at all times. Spun or scraped content is quickly discovered. This cannot only lead to a ranking problem or a deindexing. But also to lawyers, who then enforce the copyright, if the texts come from foreign sources.
It is also a good idea to regularly check the backlinks and their quality, mentioned by Arne, owner of “Seolotsen.de” in his german article on backlink analyses. It’s a good tutorial to find badlinks and penalty risks.

 

As you can see, guest posting has many advantages beyond simple link building – although if it were its only result, it would be good enough.