What would you say if we told you that you could generate more traffic and increase conversion without doing anything more to your website? Without even placing advertisements or running campaigns?
Imagine building a larger web presence with more click-throughs and becoming a true authority. And not just in the short-term—we’re talking long-term increases. This is what guest blogging services can do for you.
You’ve probably heard a lot about guest posting but did you know that it improves your SEO too? In this article, we’re going to look at how a simple guest post can do wonders for your business and bring in long-term, sustainable results.
By the end, you’ll be able to add this powerful strong to your content marketing bow. Let’s get started.
What Is Guest Blogging?
We all know that having a blog on your website is a powerful tool to get more traffic and keep readers on the site for longer. But how is guest blogging different and is it better?
Guest blogging is creating a post and publishing it on a different website. The guest post will be helpful and relevant to the publisher’s audience as well as being a topic that ties into your website.
For instance, let’s say you run a plant nursery and have a website selling all sorts of plants. You could create a guest post and have it published on a gardening blog or a lifestyle website. If you write a guest post titled, ’10 Vegetables to Plant this Spring’, it will be relevant to their audience as well as your business.
How to Use Guest Blogging Services to Boost Traffic
That’s all well and good, but isn’t that just giving the publisher’s site extra traffic? Here lies the magic of guest blogging.
Choose a website to guest post on that doesn’t sell what you sell. Information and news sites are great examples. A gardening blogger might post lots about gardening tips, but they don’t sell plants.
When their audience read your guest post and decide to take your advice, they’ll click through to your website and see that you sell the plants you’ve been talking about. The publisher’s traffic becomes your traffic.
Creating content is a time-consuming task that gains huge results. When you use guest blogging services, you hand over that job to guest post experts. They’ll take your niche and create relevant, engaging guest posts.
The best guest blogging services even find suitable websites and deal with the publishing side too. So you can sit back and watch that traffic roll in.
Let’s look at all the ways guest blogging can boost your SEO.
1. Increase Backlinks
If you’ve read anything about SEO, you’ll have heard you need ‘backlinks’. It’s a big deal.
Backlinks are links to your website from other sites. When search engines see that lots of websites are linking to yours, they take it as a clear sign that your website is valuable. This makes them boost their ranking and helps readers find you.
2. Links From High-Quality Sites
But it’s not just any old link. A useful backlink must be relevant and come from a website that is valuable. Search engines have their own ways to work out whether a website is high-quality or not and one of these is its domain authority.
You can check a site’s domain authority and the higher the score, the more authority the site is deemed to have. If you copy and paste Wikipedia’s URL into a domain checker, you’ll find it has a score in the 90s out of 100. So if Wikipedia linked to your website, you’d benefit from its high quality.
Many websites that accept guest posts won’t have a score as good as that, but mid-range scores still help to boost your authority. As you can place a link to your website within each guest post, you’ll soon have good quality backlinks all over the web.
3. Appear More in Search Engines
It’s reported that between 71% and 92% of people don’t look beyond the first page of search results. What does that mean for you? It means that you need to appear on the first page to see your traffic increase.
Having an SEO-driven blog on your website helps you appear more often in searches but guest blogging helps here too. If your guest posts appear on sites with a higher domain authority than you, they stand a chance of appearing higher up the rankings.
4. Build Authority
When you use guest posting services to build your web presence, you’ll find that your domain authority increases thanks to your high-quality backlinks. But what about your website’s reputation amongst readers?
As you start guest posting and reaching a wider audience, your name will become a familiar sight in your niche. The more valuable content you put out across the web, the more readers will see that you’re a go-to resource.
This helps generate trust and loyalty with your new-found traffic.
5. Post Guest Blogs to Social Media
Running social media channels takes a lot of effort for small businesses. You know you need a social media presence but you might be struggling for post ideas.
While posting your website’s content is a good move, social channels don’t look compelling when they’re flooded with your own website links.
With guest blogging, you can repost guest posts across your social media channels giving you no shortage of SEO content. The best part? They all eventually link back to your website.
6. Anchor Text Helps Search Engines
The more you help search engines know what the content is about, the more accurately they’ll be able to boost your rankings. By using guest blogging services, you can choose what your SEO anchor text in your guest post says.
Your anchor text should be a short, relevant piece of text that tells the reader (and search engines) what the link is about. So going back to our plant nursery example, your anchor text to zucchini seeds could be, ‘buy zucchini seeds’.
7. Increases Brand Awareness
Much like building authority, guest posting regularly helps increase brand awareness. This is where readers start recognizing your brand name. How does this help your SEO?
It’s not just readers who will start to recognize your brand, but other businesses and bloggers too. When you guest post a lot, others will begin to see your brand as a useful resource and start linking back to your website or your guest post. Quality content stands out.
8. Increases Conversion Rate
Ever read a post and opened up its amazing looking links in new tabs to read after? High-quality guest posts drive the reader into action.
When someone reads your guest post and clicks through to your website, you already have their attention. You might even already have persuaded them to buy.
With guest posting, you can try out different links and anchor text. Watch in your web analytics how many readers clicked through from each guest post. This helps you optimize your links and give the audience exactly what they’re looking for to boost conversion rates.
9. SEO Boost for Local Searches
If you have a business that serves your local area, guest blogging can have a big effect on your SEO. Submitting guest posts to local news outlets and bloggers gives you an opportunity to rank higher for your location.
Let’s get back to our plants. If your physical plant nursery is open to shoppers, you’ll want to reach people in the local area. A local news outlet guest post could be titled, ‘Easy Indoor Plants to Grow in Washington, DC’. Now searches engines will be able to see that your business is linked to Washington, DC and plants.
10. Boost Your Guest Post’s SEO
When you guest post, you can create a section on your website that lists the outlets you’ve written for with links to each one. Not only does this give your readers new content to read and builds authority, but you’ll be providing a backlink yourself to your own guest post.
Just like getting backlinks to boost your own website’s ranking, by giving your guest post a backlink, you could increase the post’s visibility.
Watch Your Authority and Traffic Hit the Roof
Guest blogging services allow you to use a long-term strategy to improve SEO and increase traffic consistently. As guest posts tend to remain on websites unlike short-term adverts, your backlinks will grow the more you guest post.
Over time, readers will begin to recognize and trust your business and begin sharing your high-quality content. Your domain authority will improve and your web presence will be far broader than your website and social media channels.
Follow us for more tips on SEO strategy or get in touch to find out how we can help boost your rankings and get you the traffic you want.
