Should You Be Using Guest Blogs as Part of Your SEO Strategy?

Content marketing calls for blogging as an essential way to boost your SEO ranking on Google and other online search engines, but should your blogging strategy also include writing and accepting guest blogs? Once considered a controversial topic amongst marketing experts, the results are in and clearly show that yes, you should. Provided that you do it correctly. Guest blogging, both as a writer and a host, is a fantastic way to increase the breadth and depth of your online audiences as well as potentially boost social media reach, engagement, and more. It’s also an ideal way to increase your SEO ranking and here’s why:

Guest Blogging Offers the Opportunity for Backlinks

One of the backbones of Google’s elusive algorithm to rank websites on its results page is the presence of backlinks; that is, links that connect your website to others. Having this network helps demonstrate to Google and other search engines that you have expertise and authority on the subject matter your website provides. Unfortunately, Google’s own digital strategy to provide its users with the best results by rewarding backlinks was manipulated in a way that caused a reckless amount of unnecessary and irrelevant links amongst websites, ultimately providing Google users the opposite of what was intended. This led to several algorithm changes, which today, although top secret in the details, do make it quite clear that backlinks are still an important aspect to Google’s ranking system, provided that they are quality ones.

What does this mean for you as a business looking to build the best online presence and successful SEO strategy?

How to Use Guest Blogging in Your SEO Strategy

Whether you are writing guest blogs for others’ sites, accepting guest blogs to be featured on yours, or (ideally) both, the key to using guest blogging in a successful SEO strategy is relevance. If the content that appears on your website -be it your own or that written by a guest blogger, is helpful to your business’ target audience, it will increase traffic and Google’s algorithms will reward it with a higher ranking. The same is true for blogs that you write and publish as a guest on other sites, too: backlinks are, after all, a two-way street, which means that writing the best material for another is also a great marketing strategy for yourself.

Other advice to follow to create and publish the best guest blogs as part of your SEO strategy is:

• Follow Google’s advice to create and offer only quality content that emphasizes your E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) qualities.
• Don’t write keyword-heavy blogs for the sake of vocabulary. Instead, focus on grammar, organization, and -perhaps most importantly these days, flow. Any quality blog, be in on your site or on another with your name attached as writer, will be easy to read and full of useful, unique information that your readers are looking for.
• Make sure your marketing team understand and use nofollow tags in any guest blog you receive. Proper use of them can play a big part in the way Google “reads” your blogs for content, structure, and backlinks that play a major role in your results page ranking.
• Customize the content in your blog for your specific audiences, including being selective in the guest bloggers that you accept. Generic information can be found anywhere: you need to offer targeted information for targeted audiences.
• Avoid the big influencers, especially if you are just starting out with guest blogging. Micro-influencers are often more approachable to you and your audiences, which means your blogs are more likely to obtain more attention from them and their followers.
• Let the blog do the talking. A blog published on your site that’s full of praise for the guest business will be seen as spam and will be ranked lower on Google’s search page. Similarly, any backlinks within any blog should be exceptionally relevant to avoid being marked as spam by Google’s algorithms, which never boasts well for your SEO.

In short, to get the most out of your SEO strategy this year, it is without a doubt in your best interest to both write guest blogs as well as accept them. The key to success here, though, is to make sure that they, like all the content on your website, are quality and relevant to the needs and desires of your specific online audiences. This often means that, especially at first, a solid SEO strategy that uses guest blogging requires some extra time and consideration to understand and solidify your branding, but it is well worth it.

If you are looking to design or improve upon your SEO strategy this year, Peppermint’s expert digital marketing team can help you every step of the way, from creating a brand and branding strategy, auditing your current efforts to determine what is and isn’t offering the best return on investment, and designing an SEO strategy -including best practice guest blogging, to help you get the best results possible. Our writers can help you choose topics, find relevant websites to approach for guest blogging opportunities, even write your blogs for you, in Spanish or English! Give us a call today to discuss what we can do to get your SEO on the right track this year!