Guest Blogging as an Important Tool to Drive Organic Traffic
Being one of the most effective & powerful SEO & content marketing techniques, guest blogging enables site-owners/bloggers to write and publish a blog post on a third-party site. Guest blogging sites expose brands to a relevant audience and can be an effective method to generate awareness — but it must be done carefully to avoid the Google penalty.
Guest blogging is great for site-owners and bloggers to promote their brand/product/service and ensure different benefits such as :-
- Pulling in traffic back to their website
- Optimizing their DA via external links to high-authority domains
- Boosting their brand credibility and awareness
- Making relationships with peers in a relevant industry
A host of blogs and websites today are content-hungry. An informative, well-researched, and quality piece of information from a guest writer on the host website is a marketing technique that is currently booming. The idea of guest-blogging has twin-party benefits.
Providing content in the form of a guest-post to credible websites in your niche shall add a lot of value to your page rank through backlinks.
It helps attract organic traffic. In the marketing package, guest blogging has proved to be the most popular and effective technique in building quality connections with the brands in your niche and your audience.
What is Guest Blogging?
Guest blogging is one of the tried and tested techniques of content marketing. It involves the creation of quality guest blogs that are informative. These are published on a third-party website in a similar niche. This strategy gives an impression of being an industry expert to the audience of the guest blogger and his website, adding to its existing credibility.
The search engines recognize the guest blogger's ability to provide meaningful insights in that niche, and thus the page rank of the guest website adds up. There are specific third-party blogs and websites in every industry that have space carved out for guest posts to build quality connections.
Today, there are a host of professional content writing websites that offer content solutions to drive readers from guest blog to the company's website. There are different guidelines that various editorials have laid out. Guest bloggers have to follow these guidelines to get featured on the host website.
Some of these allow the guest blogger to provide content details and their homepage URL, increasing the chances of drawing in more traffic.
High-Quality Guest Blogging
There is an important question to be addressed here. What is the difference between a mainstream guest blogging exercise and a high-quality guest posting?
While the former might not bring in the desired levels of organic traffic to your website, the latter shall serve as a sure shot marketing technique.
Guest posting should not be perceived as a way to promote or advertise your brand. It should remain an exercise that aims to create informative content for your audience and adds value to existing knowledge about your niche's services.
There is always a space for certain featuring of a product if it finds relevance in the post. Beyond that, the purpose of the piece should be educating the readers who land onto it.
Guest posting allows the writer to carve a position in the industry as an expert and connect qualitatively with other intelligent heads in a similar industry.
Ways to ensure quality in your guest post:
- The author’s bio should be precise and short.
- There should be high-quality links to the guest blogger’s previous work.
- Interactive blog posts asking for the reader’s comments or suggestions serve the purpose better.
- Take the help of social media platforms to promote your guest post.
- Following up on the post after writing to see how much traffic is generated is also important.
Importance of Guest-Blogging in Bringing Organic Traffic
The importance of guest blogging as a marketing strategy in the early phase of a website is unmatched. The following are the pointers that reinforce the idea of why this strategy is full proof to drive in organic traffic to your website:
Establish authority in your niche
Guest posting is the best way to have an edge in the industry. It serves the purpose of helping your website establish an intelligible authority in your niche. The trust of the audience in your brand’s products or websites increases if they witness quality content from your end on the websites they regularly visit.
Having people to place their trust in you does not come easy. The content that is published in your name has to be backed up with researched facts and figures. The information has to be relevant and up-to-date.
Way to creating backlinks
Guest posting has proved to bring in the highest number of quality backlinks to your website from the guest website. This exercise is fruitful only when your website pops up when the audience runs a search in a particular niche. SERPs determine website rank based on the number of pages or links pointing back to the website.
The higher the number of quality backlinks, the better are the chances of more people landing at your website. This can be achieved through high-quality guest posts.
Increase high-quality and relevant traffic to your website
Higher traffic to your website makes sense only when it is organic. If the quality of your guest post is high, traffic to your website is a sure shot. This shall help you perform better on the SERPs and thus bring in relevant users or customers to your website.
Add value to the visibility of your brand
Another advantage of guest blogging is that it shall increase the visibility of your brand in your niche. The guest posts publish your brand's name on some of the top websites in your niche.
If these sources are credible, your brand shall attain success in building quality social connections with other industry websites. Thus, ensuring the quality of information that goes into your guest blog is very important.
Guest blogging: a Marketing Best-Practice
While devising an ideal content marketing strategy, paying special attention to guest blogging is very important. There needs to be customization of content for your specific website and products, as every niche demands differential content marketing.
Guest blogging can serve as the most viable option to test the marketing techniques that work best for you.
Guest posts work similarly to other indirect marketing strategies. Just like stamping a logo on the sports player’s jersey is a test of the brand’s popularity and credibility among the audience, your appearance on other websites is a testimony of your expertise.
Author Bio:
Akash Kumar works as a Digital Marketing Head at Digital Vidya. Digital Vidya is a global leader in digital marketing and data analytics training.