Guest Blogging for Off-page SEO
What is Guest Blogging?
Put simply, Guest Blogging is a content marketing and SEO technique where someone writes and publishes a blog post on a third-party website or blog to promote their personal/corporate brand (BigCommerce, n.d.). Guest blogging sites expose brands to a relevant audience and can be an effective method to generate awareness — but it is not without risk and must be done carefully and strategically to avoid Google penalty.
Why Guest Blog?
The first question that comes to many people’s minds when considering whether or not to author a guest blog is, “why would I share my knowledge and expertise to drive awareness on someone else’s site?” As with many considerations that people face in the digital marketing realm, I try to liken the question to a physical metaphor to help people see the value in an initiative. For example, my response to the above question (regardless of industry) would be along the lines of, “well, if you’re a professional fisherman trying to improve your brand visibility, and Bill Dance asked you to join him onstage at a fishing conference for a panel discussion, would you join him on that stage?” Of course, you would! For those not familiar, Bill Dance is a man of firsts in bass fishing history. He won the first Toyota Tundra Bassmaster Angler of the Year award (1970), established the first television program based on his competitive fishing prowess and was the sport's first bona fide superstar (Duke, 2011). So you’d have the golden opportunity to sit on stage with the legend (so that means you’re a “somebody”), and discuss a current advanced fishing technique via the panel discussion (so that means you have “relevant skills”), have an engaging dialogue with the audience through Q&A (so that shows you’re “smarter than the audience”), and finally you get to have people come up to you after the session to get your business card (so now you have “new connections”). In a nutshell, that is the physical manifestation of guest blogging.
As digital marketing guru Neil Patel writes, there are three main goals for guest blogging (Patel, n.d.):
- Positioning yourself as an authority and well-known name in the industry.
- Getting exposure (traffic) back to your website.
- Building backlinks to your website (though this should never be the main focus, as Google frowns on this).
Being Successful at Guest Blogging
The hard, cold truth about being successful at guest blogging really comes down to two simple, irrefutable facts: you have to be an expert about your blogging topic, and you have to write well. While it also helps to have a track record of writing experience (since most people you’ll be prospecting will probably check you out) those are the two most important. Everything that happens downstream is utterly dependent on these two factors. Specifically, if your writing abilities are marginal, and your topic of expertise is neither thought-provoking nor particularly insightful, your ability to gain access to the best blogs for guest contributions will suffer. Put yourself in the other blogger’s shoes; if you were to receive a pitch on a well-understood months’ old topic, and the pitch itself was rife with grammatical errors, are you going to even respond? You’ll probably waste a lot of time and energy trying find someone willing to listen. If you’re a decent writer, and have an interesting (but not earth-shattering) topic, then you might be getting some call-backs from lower-tier publications or local papers and you manage to place a guest blog. Now you’re a “published guest blogger” but you’re not seeing any significant lift in your website traffic through Google Analytics. Why might that be?
As it turns out, any backlinks that you might get from your new guest post on the local paper blog, aren’t going to be as valuable as backlinks from a major publication or the blog of an industry influencer. Simply by using a browser extension like UberSuggest you can see the domain authority of various online channels (Patel, n.d.). Let’s assume I wanted to write a guest post about the enjoyment of agritourism adventures in Western Loudoun County, Virginia, which has been branded as “DC’s Wine Country” by our local tourism bureau. As both a winemaker and a brewmaster, I have some interesting perspectives on many aspects of our regional agritourism ecosystem. By conducting searches on “dcs wine country tourism” then looking at Domain Authority (DA) and Visits it becomes clear that larger properties such as Washingtonian Magazine are going to provide far more beneficial backlink value than smaller blogs such as the dozens and dozens of wine and food and travel businesses. Highlights from this search can be seen in Figure 1.
Information like this can be really helpful when trying to prioritize your pitch strategy. If you’re a first-time blogger with no established audience, it is unlikely that the Washingtonian will give you your guest blogger opportunity. So even though that amazing DA score is attractive, you’re probably better off finding a mid-tier publication to target to begin building your credibility. Then create your prioritized list and start working your way down from top to bottom. What you’ll probably find is that the properties at the top of your list are not responding at all or are declining for one reason or another. Then as you move lower down the list you might see some interest, but maybe those properties are looking for “exclusives” and won’t allow you to share your idea with anyone else. Then down near the bottom of your list you’ll probably get some call-backs, and they could care less if you’re writing basically the same guest blog for others as long as it’s not a very close competitor, because they’re looking for the same thing you are; fresh interesting content and some co-promotion opportunities.
The beauty about pursuing guest blogging opportunities from this approach is that it will typically give you options to consider. Do you want to go “all in” with a larger publication because they have a great DA score and you believe you’ll get a lot of good traffic from their site, at the expense of exclusivity or at a minimum some kind of content embargo for a few weeks or months? Or do you want to make friends with some smaller businesses, create some back-and-forth link sharing opportunities as well as social media backlinks and go that route? Either approach may work, it then becomes critical to measure the aftereffects of your choice by carefully monitoring inbound traffic through Google Analytics, and even more importantly the impact at the cash register whenever possible. While it would be ill-advised to be too “salesy” in your guest blog content, it is certainly possible to train staff at a brick-and-mortar location to inquire, “how did you hear about us?” during checkout.
By taking a methodological approach to pitching guest blog outlets, and continuing to hone your expertise and writing skills while building up your content library, over time you should see certain trends emerge:
- The average DA of the outlets that will respond to you is increasing, in other words larger publications are taking notice of your authority on your subject matter
- The amount and quality of inbound traffic is increasing
- People begin pitching YOU to contribute to THEIR publication (you know you’ve made it when…)
The Dangers of Guest Blogging
There are a few dangers inherent in guest blogging. The first is that you are choosing to align your personal and/or professional brand with another property. Are you aligned philosophically? What happens to your image if the week after you appear on a publication blog, they have a major PR crisis in the news? Will that affect you in some negative manner? What if the backlinks that you worked so hard to achieve are all broken and their webmaster just resigned, leaving your guest blog point to nowhere? On and on but putting your face and name out their does leave you exposed to any negative ramifications incurred by your partner, though it may be argued that is true for all partnerships.
Another (very often misunderstood) aspect of guest posting is the recent surge in penalizations by Google for what they deem “spammy” backlink tactics. In particular, Google seems to have taken a serious dislike to paid links that are embedded in posts. Publishing guest posts without a “nofollow” link attribute may be risky at this time, at least until Google issues a formal announcement (Montti, 2020). While it may be tempting to include several backlinks within your article, this is now considered a high-risk practice. Don't link back more than once: An author bio or a link to content on your website are simple ways to link back to your website — but you can err on the side of caution by avoiding both. To be truly cautious, insist that links back to your website have the “nofollow” attribute applied. If you choose that strategy, you do forego the potential benefits of the backlink, however that means you reap the promotional benefits and sacrifice SEO for the sake of ensuring a penalty-free interaction (BigCommerce, n.d.). Since the exact factors that go into a penalty are still unclear, and knowing how difficult it would be to engage Google in an attempt to reverse a penalization, this is certainly something to consider.
Another tool that can be brought to bear on the viability of your guest blogging initiatives and ultimately backlink health, is the SEMrush Backlink Audit tool. By setting up your website as an SEMrush project, then running a backlink audit weekly or bi-weekly, you can keep close watch on the health of your backlink ecosystem, as seen in Figure 2. Backlink Audit looks at your domain’s backlink profile in order to help you avoid Google penalties related to toxic backlinks. The tool provides a workflow to audit all of your links, analyze the toxic signals associated with any suspicious links, send emails to website owners, and ultimately create a disavow file to send to Google (SEMrush, n.d.).
References
What is Guest Blogging? (n.d.) BigCommerce. Retrieved from: https://www.bigcommerce.com/ecommerce-answers/what-is-guest-blogging/
Duke, Ken. (28 July 2011). Legend Profile: Bill Dance. Bassmaster. Retrieved from: https://www.bassmaster.com/news/legend-profile-bill-dance
Patel, Neil. (n.d.) The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging. Neil Patel Blog. Retrieved from: https://neilpatel.com/blog/guide-to-guest-blogging/
Montti, Roger. (26 February 2020). Google Penalties on Guest Post Articles. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/guest-post-manual-actions/351692/#close
Backlink Audit. (n.d.) SEMrush. Retrieved from: https://www.semrush.com/kb/295-backlink-audit-tool
Comments
Post a Comment