For many ambitious UK businesses, the challenge of growing your brand in a highly competitive, internationally-focused, online marketplace can be tough–particularly in an online environment that’s seen a significant push towards digital transformation throughout many industries.
When businesses are seeking to secure growth, it can be tricky to juggle scaling strategies while maintaining revenue streams from sales on a consistent basis.
Strong SEO credentials and content marketing strategies are crucial to growing your presence online, and few approaches to search engine optimisation can be more effective than guest blogging.
Guest blogging is already a highly popular practice among businesses. Optinmonster estimates that around 60% of blogs create between one and five guest posts per month while leveraging significant website traffic growth.
In fact, experts at Outreach Monks note that the majority of 65% of backlinks to websites are obtained through guest posts.
But how can your UK business grow into international markets through guest blogging? And what are the most effective ways to find success through this optimisation strategy? Let’s take a deeper look at guest blogging, and why it’s such a strong component of SEO:
What is Guest Blogging?
Firstly, let’s cover what guest blogging actually is. Much like copywriting, guest blogging is a great means of using quality content, keyword usage, and strategic backlinks to build a website’s traffic, search engine results page (SERP) ranking, and conversion rate in a sustainable manner.
The key difference between copywriting for your website and creating guest posts is that your guest blogging won’t be published on your website, but instead on a reputable and relevant external site that’s capable of driving referral traffic back to your homepage, landing pages, blog posts, or product pages.
Guest posts could either help to grow the reputation of your brand by positioning you as a resourceful and trustworthy author and industry expert, or they could utilise keyworded backlinks that refer back to your website.
When applied correctly, guest blogging has the power to boost your domain rating (DR) in a way that makes your website more appealing to search engines–which helps your brand to climb Google’s SERPs to become more visible to your target audience.
But how is this possible? Let’s take a look at some of the key perks of effective guest blogging:
Harnessing the Power of Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is termed as any kind of traffic that your website receives from visitors who weren’t necessarily directly looking for your brand. The most common form of referral traffic stems from users clicking on a backlink from an external article, on video content, or via social media.
The great thing about guest blogging is that you can significantly grow your referral traffic, and control the target audience that your brand is showcased to in the process by choosing the host website for your content.
What this means is that you can send guest posts to websites with a high domain rating and high traffic volumes that specialise in a relevant niche to your USP or a specific product you’re seeking to promote.
Positioning Your Brand as an Industry Voice of Authority
Crucially, guest blogging is also great for building brand value away from digital SEO strategies. By adding yourself as a guest author on reputable websites, you can ensure that your leads trust your reputation and the quality of your content and will feel emboldened to make purchases on your website.
By establishing yourself as an authority in your industry, you can build your credibility and reputation. Although positioning yourself as a voice of authority isn’t directly linked to search engine optimisation, it can help to show search engines that you’re a trustworthy industry figure and thus a reliable source of information.
The Importance of Quality
While you may be conscious of the time it can take to create guest blogging content, it’s imperative that you only publish quality posts on external websites if you’re serious about building your SEO credentials in growing your business.
Guest blogging has come under plenty of scrutiny in recent years due to underhanded link-building tactics and weak link-for-link website copy.
You may have a keyword in mind that you want to ensure search engine crawlers recognise, but avoid spamming the term throughout the copy.
It’s important to give your host publication the respect it deserves and to avoid falling into the trap of just treating your guest blogging opportunity as a sole promotional activity.
When guest posting is at its best, the practice serves as a tool for sharing your industry knowledge and building valuable links throughout relevant sectors.
The best guest blogging practices nurture industry relationships and have the power to inspire and engage the host website’s audience. This helps to develop a positive ecosystem whereby you can continue to build your presence and become a valuable resource for industry-facing communities online.
Identifying Host Websites
We’ve covered the advantages of guest blogging, but how can your business benefit best from the SEO approach? Let’s take a look at the mechanics of guest blogging and how to identify the best opportunities to grow your business through referral traffic and those all-important backlinks.
Firstly, it’s important to identify the best prospective host websites within your industry. These should typically receive traffic consisting of an audience that shares the same aims and interests as your ideal customer profile.
The best way to identify host websites is to explore your niche closely using available SEO tools. Let’s imagine that you’re a UK bookstore seeking to grow your online presence. By using platforms like Ahrefs, it’s possible to identify a market leader, let’s say Waterstones, and explore their existing backlinks for target ideas and inspiration.
Using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we can see that Waterstones.com is a major website with an extremely high domain rating and around 10 million backlinks online. To explore these more, we’ll click on the ‘Backlinks’ option on the sidebar to explore Waterstones’ referring domains in greater detail.
The great thing about Ahrefs’ backlinks explorer is that it has the ability to sort results by both DR and domain traffic. We can also fine-tune the results we see by selecting ‘one link per domain’ and filtering English language-online websites. The language feature can come in handy if you’re a business seeking to appeal to more overseas audiences.
While you’re certainly capable of pitching to have your guest posts published in 90+ domain rating websites, there could be more barriers in the way when it comes to link building. One good tactic is to look for achievable options that are known to publish articles and guest posts regularly.
There are many great blogs and industry-specific news sites that command high levels of traffic with domain ratings between 50-80, and these publications may be more willing to accept quality content from relevant guest bloggers.
Through exploring existing referring domains, it’s possible to not only identify some great prospective host sites, but also topic ideas and talking points that have led to Waterstones becoming featured in existing content. Above, we can see plenty of examples of showbiz news, topical content, the highlighting of relevant books, and quotes from authoritative voices associated with the company.
Pitching to Editors
Once you’ve identified your prospective host sites, it’s time to pitch your guest posts to its editors. Editorial contacts can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and it’s important to know where to pitch your content in order to build strong relationships and get responses.
Expanding on our list from Ahrefs, we can see that one website option, Music Business Worldwide has a list of contacts that encourages users to send news to a specified email address.
When emailing a specific editor, it’s essential that you create a custom email for each prospect that addresses the recipient by their name (if a name is given), and their associated publication.
It’s also vital that you introduce yourself and why you’ll add value to their website as a guest author. If you have prior experience in having content published online, share it, and also be sure to highlight your position within the industry.
Be sure to pitch your ideas in a clear manner and adding links to examples of prior work can be a great tool to offer your recipient a sense of quality control. Don’t worry if your guest blogging CV is too small to share examples, you can add links to your best posts as you build your reputation and begin generating backlinks.
Automating Guest Blogging
Naturally, for many UK businesses intent on growing their online presence, it can be extremely difficult to generate high volumes of reputable backlinks through quality content. Hence, it could be worthwhile enlisting a specialist guest posting agency that can write and secure placements at scale.
Solvid is a great option for agencies and businesses looking to generate quality links through guest posting, yet haven’t got the resources to do it in-house. Having worked with some of the most reputable brands in the world, Solvid secures and publishes 100s of guest posts every single month.
The Road to Evergreen Organic Traffic
One of the greatest perks of guest posting is that quality content and a broadened range of backlinks have the power to create a lasting positive impact on your SEO credentials.
By building a strong network of quality referring domains back to your pages, you can grow your website’s SERPs presence so that it can be positioned on the first page of the internet for your respective industry. This helps to boost your domain rating and improve your overall search engine performance.
With this enhanced level of digital visibility, guest blogging can help your brand to secure evergreen levels of increased traffic, helping to pave the way for higher conversion rates that can secure those all-important growth rates.
