How to Use Guest Blogging for High-Quality Link-Building
Many of us have heard the hoax “Guest Blogging is dead” so many times. While this concept was prophesized back in the year 2014 by Matt Cutt, Former Head of Web Spam at Google, the fact remains far from today’s reality. Guest blogging is amongst the most important go-to tools in digital marketing and has numerous benefits to complement your SEO endeavors. Using Guest blogging for building High Quality Link Building that are from authoritative domains, makes it a powerful tool for improving brand awareness, boosting your SEO endeavors, discovering new and useful contacts, and streamlining the sales cycles.
According to the Business Blogging Secrets Revealed report by Curata, 56% of externally sourced blogs, often written to build links are from guest authors.
There is no reason to be discouraged from guest blogging even as many of the companies spoil link-building efforts with the no-follow tags and remove all the links from the guest posts.
Link removal is one of the greatest problems in link building that guest bloggers face, particularly the ones employing their link-building endeavors for getting some merit links onto their websites. Nonetheless, despite the removal of links or the addition of no-follow links, using guest blogging for link building from authoritative websites is very much a twirling art.
If the guest bloggers start from analyzing and researching the market carefully, discover new and promising opportunities, execute perfect pitching to their desired guest blogging websites and write the guest posts with the intent of helping out the target audience, guest blogging can be used for quite effectively and can really fetch some authoritative links.
Using guest blogging not only helps marketers in building class links but also helps them in reaping several other major benefits:
- It helps the marketers attract the targeted traffic and an improved proportion of the referral and organic traffic in many cases
- Guest blogging can be used as an effective tactic for capturing leads
- Using guest blogging for link building fetches marketers the links from reputable domains
- Leveraging guest blogging for link building fuels your branding endeavors as marketers can get recognition for themselves, as well as their businesses
- Marketers have social proof of flaunting their expertise as subject-matter specialists
How to Prevent Your Guest Blogging Practices to be Classified as Spammy
While employing SEO for link building, content marketers must ensure that their content is nothing less than the best in terms of class. The links from mediocre content leading to spammy SEO-optimized affiliate sites is a highly detrimental SEO practice that should be avoided at all costs unless it will spoil all your link-building endeavors.
Apart from the above practice, Google has highlighted several other detrimental guest-blogging practices that do more harm than good to your overall brand reputation:
- Stuffing your articles with too many irrelevant links that are rich in keywords
- Using amateurish opinions from writers who don’t have enough knowledge about what they are writing
- Using similar content in the guest blog as is the tone of your business blog
Thus, the marketers using guest blogging for creating authoritative links should remember that link-building efforts will automatically come to fruition as a result of the superiority of the content class being created, and they should not be just on blogging for link building. The content needs to abide by the principles of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
The link-building endeavors accomplished as a result of guest blogging should be a repercussion of the value you provide with your pieces of content and not the sole reason for creating the pieces of content.
Therefore, the content marketers planning to use guest-blogging for building authoritative links can deduce the following conclusions:
- Refrain from mass guest blogging for getting backlinks
- Share your personal insights experiences amassed from running marketing campaigns
- Under no circumstances should you outsource the process of your content creation to amateurish writers and should never stuff their guest posts with anchor links rich in keywords
Guest Blogging for Building the Best-In-Class Links: Converted Mysteries Revealed
Guest blogging gives content marketers a chance to write for well-renowned blog posts having a large fan following. Writing guest blogs with links from authoritative domains gives marketers a chance to get noticed by people following the well-known blogs.
Some of them might actually come to your blog as well, giving you an opportunity to be seen by a larger and arguably more educated audience base who have never seen your work before.
Matt Cutts, Web Spam Expert at Google describes the importance of guest blogging in the following words:
“While there’s always a grain of salt involved with Google gospel, it does seem to follow along with what we knew (or suspected) about authorship: eminence and trust signals are increasingly surrounding content and the individuals who write them.”
The core mission of Google search is to provide value to the users’ search queries and as long as your guest-blogging is capable of assessing several pain points of the customers and prospects, there’s no reason that it wouldn’t bring innumerable benefits including the links.
Guest bloggers can follow a systematically orchestrated approach to fine-tune the links from starting till the end and if you are a content marketer looking forward to getting published on the higher domain authority websites, the following steps will help:
1. It All Starts with Researching Where to Pitch
When it comes to pitching for getting published you need to be very selective. There are several high domain authority websites offering guest-blogging opportunities, which doesn’t mean you pitch to all of them.
Select one authoritative website that is most suitable for the type of content, you wish to create.
Usually, choosing a niche-specific and high domain authority website is a good idea to get published.
However, approaching reputable media platforms for publishing sponsored content on which media editors, too can work is equally good an idea to experiment with. Getting published with a media house gives your content impeccable and instant popularity and exposure to highly-educated audience groups to witness your brands’ success stories and provide you with some constructive feedback.
Once you have decided on your target website to pitch for getting published, you need to introspect the performance of the website and align it with your own to deduce whether your guest blogging objectives can be fulfilled through the website.
A high domain authority website (usually a domain authority above 50 is considered to be good); with the enriched social following, a connection with industry experts and influencers, and possessing a well-engaged audience base for a while, can be considered to be ideal for guest blogging and for building influential links in the process.
In addition to authenticating the website’s performance, the authors also need to ensure that they get a featured bio with your byline, a headshot, and a link back to your website for audiences to follow.
2. Prepare a Pitch that Can’t be Overlooked
When thinking about pitching your favorite website marketers should think of creating a pitch that editors cannot ignore.
It’s like you are selling why they should publish the content you write and what is in it you that makes you so different from other people and their work.
Consider putting your best feet forward when trying to pitch to your favorite website’s editor.
Following the following steps may help:
- Start demonstrating work ethics and skillsets and if the publishing guidelines allow sending the links and descriptions of some of the best blogs published on other guest blogging websites or on your own website
- Do extensive research to figure out the style, of their blog, the tone of writing, and the substance provided, and think if there’s some missing value or added information that you can provide through your blogs
- Make the tone of your guest blogging highly personal, sounding generic is not an option and it can get you ignored. Ensure that you address the pitch directly at the editor-in-chief or any other well-known face working for the enterprise
- Put in a bit of extra effort to deduce who else is guest blogging for your favorite websites, what designations they hold, and what niche their parental websites fall under. Acting like a detective keeps you better prepared to bank upon your guest blogging opportunities for link-building
- You should be direct in talking to the editor-in-chief or owner of the website. No fluff talk, just show them the value you got to add to their websites.
- The guidelines for pitching shouldn’t be ignored and should be closely followed. Oftentimes, the best-written pitches are written succinctly, are concise enough, advocating the value they will provide
Violating the guidelines may get your pitch deleted without even getting noticed
- When pitching to the editors or owners of your favorite websites, let them know about the credentials of your website. It’s a great idea to let the blog editors and owners know who they will be working with, pretty well in advance
3. Brainstorm the Blogging Ideas
Coming up with the original guest blogging ideas is an essential step to using guest blogging for building the links that are the best-in-class. Additionally, the idea should also be in synchronization with the ideas already being propagated on your favorite blog that you wish to write for.
The brainstorming sessions must be driven by the concrete belief that at the end of the day the blogs that you wish to write for, also need more audience.
You can use tools such as Buzzsumo to figure out the characteristics of the most shared pieces of content.
The following aspects should be kept in mind while crafting the pieces of content for the guest blogging websites:
- Introspect whether the most shared articles are listicles, how-to guides, step-by-step tutorials, or solitary pieces expressing opinions on a topic
- What are the primary topic/topics that the most shared articles deal with
- What is the tone of language for the most shared pieces of content and what kind of words compose their headlines
- Introspect whether emotional headlines have an upper hand over the logical ones or otherwise
- Align the topic-level complexity in your pieces of content with the knowledge and expertise level of the blog’s target audience. Don’t talk to the target audience groups in a tone that is too simple or too complex for them to relate with.
Check the content on the website to see the tone in which they talk to their audiences, whether there are too many advanced-level pieces of stuff or just a very generic approach to addressing the target audiences.
- While trying to use guest-blogging for building the best-in-class quality links, marketers should be SEO-centric.
The selection of the primary keyword to be included in the title, meta-description, and body of the article is very important. A precise keyword density improves the web discoverability of your guest blogs.
4. Write Guest Blogs to Drift Audience on Your Website
For getting a quality link by publishing a guest blog, marketers must articulate the pieces of content to talk to the pain points of the customers.
People read your blogs mostly for information that will help them resolve their pain points or for some inspiration to draw them out of their mundane lives.
So, while writing a guest blog you should have it clear in your mind as to what are the pain points of your audiences that you wish to address and speak with.
The following factors can keep audiences glued to your guest blogs and can drift them onto your websites once they see the value:
- Captivate readers with your headlines. The headlines should be molded in a way that compels the readers to continue with your post, promises a definite value, and reflects professionalism.
Your headlines should inspire confidence and promise definite value; for example include phrases such as “The Ultimate Guide to…,” “Top 10 Ways to…,” “7 Essentials of…,” etc.
Also, using powerful words in your headlines such as perfection, polish, sheen, etc. draws more audiences.
- Your content is a reflection of who you are and hence while using guest blogging for enhancing your best-in-class quality links, you should dive deeper into the topics that you are writing about. Present well-researched pieces of content to reflect on your subject-matter-expertise and authority.
- As a business expert, your writing should prioritize the knowledge of your readers, their expectations, and their education levels. Your writing language should be firm and inspiring, supported with statistical insights and a data-driven approach to storytelling.
- Employ social listening and other forms of research to deduce the most frequently asked questions that spring around in the minds of your target audiences, related to the topic that you have chosen to write about.
- Always add links to the surface that you’re referencing for readers to dig in
- Adopt an intriguing writing style to keep your audiences interested
- Weave your content strategy towards the core purpose of your blog, whether it is to help your readers understand a new concept, inform them about a new product or inspire them, keep your goals at the forefront
- Tell your people the value they will get out of your blog post and clearly narrate what benefits they will get out of it
- Proofread your blog post extensively and remove all the ideas that don’t make any sense
- Craft your content to be easily snackable and readable
- Divide your blogs into multiple sections and sub-sections to keep the readers engaged and interested
- Use visuals to make your blog lively and explain the concepts in an uncomplicated manner
Read more on Why Visual Storytelling is imperative for B2B Content Marketing
- Remember to break your blog into several paragraphs and provide the users with the much needed white spaces to keep them intrigued to read further
5. Create Quality and Contextual Content
When thinking of using guest blogging for preparing the best-in-class links, the focus should be on creating authoritative and contextual content. A strategic approach to content creation will always pay off and is a strategy that marketers simply can’t miss upon.
The content should abide by the principles of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and should effectively address the specific concerns of audiences at specific stages of buying cycles, whom the content has been written to the target.
The following factors are indicators of authoritative content that would be preferred by the search engines to rank higher on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages):
1. The Content Should be Readable:
This means taking the excess fluff out of your content; furthermore, content texturing is also important.
Keeping the paragraphs limited to 2-3 sentences at most, using plenty of headings and subheadings, and breaking down the information into bullet points and block quotes are highly beneficial in improving the readability of your blogs.
- Use Custom Images & Embed Videos in Your Blog
Images and videos make your post easy to understand. They help in breaking the information into snackable sections.
Having high-quality images and contextual videos embedded in your blog automatically elevates the perceived value of your blog posts.
Also, having contextually high visual appeal means that your content you never be differentiated as anything near to those spammy SEO content pieces.
- Incorporate Contextual Backlinks in your Posts
For the content marketers planning to use guest-blogging for building high-quality content, the process of brainstorming ideas for the same starts with thinking about how to align the guest blog with the content already present on their websites.
Among many other things, this idea helps in incorporating contextual links to your website in your guest blog.
Most guest authors materialize their link-building endeavors by providing a link to the blog in their profile bio. However, for optimizing the SEO component, getting links within the body of the guest blog itself is of high importance.
Having a link within your content acts as an editorial link that gives you a lot of SEO benefits when it comes to getting the maximum out of your link-building endeavors.
Try to employ a keyword-rich anchor text for backlinking and adding contextual links to the page being targeted in your blog. The guest blogger should assure that the backlink incorporated provides value to the readers or else it stands a high chance of getting omitted by the editor.
6. Funneling Your Guest Blogs to Generate Conversions
When it comes to using guest blogging for the link-building exercise, very few people will think of aligning defined conversion goals with their guest blogging endeavors.
Often, getting published is the only priority.
However, having one or two definite conversion goals aligned with your guest blogs isn’t such a bad idea. To start with marketers can use guest blogs to generate ample amount to traffic and elevate the proportions of referral traffic that they get from certain web pages.
Better still guest blogging can be used to re-direct the traffic on the specific pages of your parent website.
Content marketers should think of the outcome they wish to accomplish the most through the link in their author’s bio and accordingly should direct the link on a desired page of choice on their websites. This strategy is an important one when it comes to getting links from authoritative domains in the due course of your link-building endeavors.
Keeping your core marketing purposes in mind, you can redirect your audiences to sign-up for your email newsletters, visit your online inventory, your product/services page, or simply follow your blog.
Think of getting the maximum out of your link-building endeavors? Include a link to that page in your author’s bio.
7. Getting Published
Once you hand over your final content draft to the editor, it might take a while before you can hear from them. The article may require subsequent rounds of editing post submission until it finally gets published.
Some large blogs have a waiting list of 1-3 months.
Post your guest blog goes live, invest time into building relationships with the authorities and editors of your guest blogging websites so that in the future you can harness the benefits of collaboration, to discover new opportunities and boost your link-building endeavors.
8. Engage with the Comments on your Guest Blog
Once your guest blog has been published, you need to engage with your audiences who leave a comment on your post. This is an important SEO tactic that boosts your link-building efforts.
If some questions have been asked in the comments, answer them, and express your gratitude to the readers who comment on your guest blog stating that they find it useful.
By proactively engaging with the audiences who comment on your guest blogs, you will improve their experiences which will keep you noticed. Also, as you are always on the minds of your readers you can optimize the conversion goals associated with your guest blogging endeavors and can effectively use guest blogging for building high-quality links.
Importance of Link Building
Now that you have understood how to get a link back to your website from some of the most reputable and authoritative pages, let’s understand why link-building is of paramount importance in the first place, and why should you even bother about getting a link from a reputable platform. Getting a link from a trustworthy and high-authority website helps search engines discover new web pages. The link establishes how high a page must rank on the search engine result pages (SERPs). For guest bloggers, the entire process of getting a quality link is amongst the most critical ranking factors. A quality link is amongst the best aids to your content optimization endeavors.
Link building marketing is both an art and a science. Simply put, building an authority link is a process of getting other websites to link back to your website. Business owners with link-building mindsets are interested in driving referral traffic to increase the domain authority of the website in question. A contextual and authoritative source link tends to help you earn higher rankings. The white hat link-building approach is the favorite of SEO marketers when it comes to driving traffic to search engines through search engine optimization techniques. These link-building tactics help your pages feature higher on the search results. Popular social media pages can be used to link profiles and direct them to your website to drive additional referral traffic.
Link building is a popular move amongst the SEO whizzes, for optimizing both on-page and off-page techniques. When an SEO strategist executes a link-building campaign and links a piece of content to search engines like Google, this helps that piece of content earn a highly reputable link. Marketers can create great content such as case studies and earn links. Broken link-building strategies are an indispensable part of increasing the total number of links on a webpage. This link-building strategy involves building links by finding broken links and reaching out to the webmasters building for SEO with a resource that has been created to replace the link. Broken link building can be an effective tool in your link-building arsenal and plays an important role in increasing the total number of links to your site. A boost in the total number of internal links pointing to a page boosts the search rankings of a particular website. Pieces of content written after proper keyword research can establish a hierarchy on a website and assigns a higher link value to important pages and pots than the less valuable ones. Link building for SEO experts is thus an important strategy that is just perfect for all forms of page SEO, whether employed on or off the pages. That’s why all the smart SEOs must strategically link to important pages.
Wrapping Things Up
Guest blogging for getting the best-in-class links isn’t easy. This is the prime reason why it can give you some competitive edge over your competitors who just might have insignificant resources and patience to get published on the top-ranking blogs.
Guest blogging when applied as a part of or orchestrated and strategized marketing approach can help you in accomplishing some best-in-class backlinks.
However, guest blogging solely to get backlinks will only result in disappointments.
Focus on getting published with authoritative websites. Employing guest-blogging for building the best-in-class links is all about publishing in small volumes, strategically to websites with good domain authority and mass fan following. Guest blogging when done right and on authoritative websites, gives a significant boost to your traffic and rankings.
Quality over quantity is the rule to go with when it comes to guest blogging. Guest blogging helps you in indirect link-building.
This post serves as a guide to link building and focuses on the importance of link building and how the users can establish an information hierarchy for a given website by boosting the link equities associated with their respective websites. Employing link building for SEO gives Google an idea of the structure of your website which in turn helps in establishing a hierarchy on your site. When you link with another page on your website, you also successfully send link authority to that page.
The brands get a chance to flaunt their subject-matter-expertise and authoritativeness. Catching up the eyes of readers of prestigious blogs helps in building brand awareness and increases the overall traffic influx and the number of leads on your website.
Valasys Media assists B2B marketers with an array of services including lead generation, lead nurturing, account-based marketing, list building services, contact building services, content syndication services, event promotion, appointment setting, business intelligence, and CRM services to help them accomplish their conversion goals. We love to hear from audiences and experts about what they think about blogs.
We provide guest blogging opportunity which gives you a chance to get published with us and flaunt your subject-matter-expertise. So, if you think you have what it takes to guest blog for us, drop us your pitch line in our write for us section and if your idea excites us, we will definitely get back to you.
Contact us for any help to optimize your marketing and conversion goals & develop frameworks for efficient sales pipeline management.