Nowadays, link building is more about quality, not quantity if your goal is to get ranked in TOP 5 by Google. For that reason, you should make sure that the links you’re acquiring are of the highest quality. Consequently, it’ll provide you with many benefits.
Above all, creating a link building strategy is a step-by-step process; you can’t immediately establish incoming links: firstly, you need to establish link-building methods that will enhance your website position in the search console. The methods for getting inbound links to a website may vary from crowd marketing and publishing press releases to advanced link building aimed at getting high-quality guest post links.
❗But in any case, you should admit the fact that Depending on the ‘’quality’’* of websites that you build links on, it is inferred how well you will rank in the search engine, and how long you will be ranked at the leading positions.
*mainly it implies website authority, trust rate, and content quality
This is where blogging helps: according to Neil Patel, you will get 434% more indexed pages and an increase in inbound links by 97%.
Since blogging helps to reach 55% more site visitors, the majority of companies now are trying to adopt regular blogging by implementing various useful strategies. And one of the most effective strategies is guest posting.
Guest posting has been one of the most popular link building strategies in recent years, and most probably its importance and value for establishing organic traffic will become higher and higher every upcoming year. That’s why we decided to break down this activity for you and explain how to perform Guest Posting for building inbound links properly, effectively, and with the highest impact on the SEO of your website. Let’s get down to business!
What is guest posting?
In order to avoid unnecessary terminology, let’s explore what a guest posting is. And the easiest way to do so is to compare it with a sponsored posts:
- You have a promotional article, you pay a site owner to host that article – it is an advertisement or a sponsored post.
- You create quality content, don’t pay anyone or pay a fixed/negotiable price, and the site publishes your article with do-follow backlinks you claim – that’s a guest post.
So, the main difference between guest posts and sponsored posts is that your article is more educational but still leads to your website while a promotional article most probably doesn’t bring real value to the readers. Therefore, inbound links acquired through Guest Posting tends to be of higher quality compared to sponsored posts.
For instance, when we were working on link building for one of our clients – crypto trading terminal and portfolio tracker, Good Crypto – we had pre-written articles, all related to cryptocurrency trading and blockchain topics, which we used as guest posts for our promotion and link building. We framed up the topics and offered them to owners of various websites based on what they were interested in and on the requirements they demanded. But, all the articles were high-quality as the production process was managed by RGray’s co-founder, Gleb Myrko, who has outstanding experience in both crypto trading and marketing.
Why do you need guest posts?
The answer is quite obvious:
1. You get a mention of the brand/site on the web => increase of brand awareness.
2. You get a do-follow link from an authoritative resource. ‘’The signal’’ is sent to Google or any other search engine telling that the content on your website is valuable. As a result, your web page will rank higher on the search console.
3. You get referral traffic. Guest posting is believed to help you increase your referral traffic by 77% in almost no time. Consequently, you will get more conversions and earn higher revenue.
*Whether the website you’d like to publish a guest post on, is authoritative or not, actually, depends on you. You need to choose platforms properly because it will influence the performance of your site in the first place. We will tell more about sorting the websites out in this article below.
All of the points mentioned above are one of the main ranking factors that are taken into account by search engines when determining the position of a website in the search results.
Why do other websites need your guest posts on their blogs?
It depends! But for sure, they benefit somehow from your guest posts. Each webmaster has its own motivation; it may be either engaging industry experts for getting insights and unique data or creation of content on the blog for promotional purposes with no expenses or, maybe, due to a lack of a wide editorial staff, and the need for constant update of the blog. Just getting free and high-quality content is advantageous for any website.
Thus, guest posting is a mutually beneficial strategy for both those who write guest posts and those who post them on their website.
How to find websites for guest posts?
We have smoothly approached the most bothering topic for our readers. There are several ways to do this:
1. Contact the editor
The vast majority of website editors may consider publishing high-quality content for free or for a symbolic fee.
– Get their contact details via the website: the easiest way will be to find contacts on the website. It may be “About us”, “Contact Us” pages, or author bio on their blogs. Authors and editors usually leave their contact information.
– If you are unsure about how to contact the editor or other person who is in charge of blogging, the best option would be to write a letter directly to the site editor.
Just look for an authoritative website that provides editorial contacts -> email them with a brief summary and questions that interest you.
2. Search for potential sites from competitors
One of the easiest and the most effective ways to find opportunities for guest posts is a thorough study of your competitors’ backlinks. You can monitor the competitors’ performance by using any analytical tools, for instance, Ahrefs. Thoroughly learn what websites refer to your rivals; if you see the qualitative ones, follow the link, and study the website.
We will explain how to determine whether a website you found is authoritative and quality enough for getting a link from it or not later in this article.
After you assess the website and define it as a quality one, find the contact details of its owner, and introduce your offer.
3. Use different programs like Link Assistant
This is a great platform that allows you to automate the tasks you were supposed to do for finding websites for guest posting on your own before. This incredibly useful app will help you to find thousands of websites that are eager to publish related guest posts. Just enter the main keywords and let the magic work!
Link Assistant will show you the large list of websites (you may delete the odd ones). After, highlight the ones you’d like to know more about and press ‘’Send’’.
The automated emails offering the guest post opportunity for your websites will be delivered in one click.
Congrats! Now, just wait for the replies → check whether the website is authoritative → if yes, negotiate the terms and prices.
For more guides on how to connect the program to your corporate email account look here.
How to check whether a website is authoritative?
After you sent all the automated emails and received the proper replies, check out whether the website is worthy. You need to take into account such factors as:
- The domain rating (DR) helps to increase the search rankings. By constantly enhancing a website, filling it with quality content, and building more backlinks, the site’s domain name will become more recognizable in the search engine and attract new clients.
Try to look for the websites with higher or the same DR as yours!
- Organic traffic as a great and free source of potential conversions and sales is a result of enduring SEO activities that provide more long-term results. If the website has a high organic traffic reach, Google will consider it valuable and authoritative. What is more, your guest post will start ranking and will bring you traffic (as you link to yourself) due to site authority.
For instance, let’s compare benefits from the paid Ads in Google search with benefits from implementing SEO activities (that bring organic traffic). Pay for a click and then, expecting the customer to make a purchase, bring almost no long-term value as well as no guarantee that the visitor will make a purchase.
- SS (Spam Score) – needs to be not more than 1%. The higher SS signals that you should do some more research into the quality and value of the content on your site.
- TF (Trust Flow) – states for the quality of links that lead to your website. Site pages are supposed to have a bigger TF than CF to prove that they have qualitative links.
- CF (Citation Flow) – is the total amount of links that lead to your website. The quality of your links is not important for CF.
What ratio should be between Citation Flow and Trust Flow? For example, for a Citation Flow of 20 and a Trust Flow of 40, the ratio will be – 1:2. Even though Google has 98:99, the highest ratio is 0:9.
So, if the website has a Citation Flow far greater than a Trust Flow, it means that the website is definitely hosting a lot of low-quality links.
To conclude
A properly organized guest posting strategy will allow you to get backlinks via the articles on trustworthy websites, which is very important for successful SEO performance.
The biggest benefit from guest posting is of course additional free content that if written very competently in terms of SEO optimization will help to attract more traffic to your blog.
For achieving the primary goal of guest posting, it is also important to be able to provide the correct outline for a copywriter.