How guest blogs can grow your audience and boost your Google rankings

by Stratton Craig

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The term ‘guest blogging or posting’ means to publish an article on some else’s website or blog. For businesses this generally means featuring a guest blog written by somebody else on your website. It can be a fantastic way of increasing your reach as a brand to new audiences and potential customers.
Build relationships
All blogs need good content. To get this, sometimes it’s necessary to reach out to other bloggers in your sphere or industry. By building strong relationships with other bloggers you’ll be able to get involved in the conversations that take place every day across social media and online forums. You never know when these new blogging friends might come in use and they’ll boost your influence and help you attract more readers.
Search engine optimisation
By filling your site with informative, entertaining and relevant guest content – i.e. everything that effective content marketing is built upon – you’ll really help to boost your SEO. That’s because SEO needs content marketing, and the more you feed it with unique blogs that incorporate all the right keywords in the right way, the more it helps you to rank highly. For the guest blogger, a link from your site to theirs will create valuable backlinks that raise the value of their own blog and make it easier to find on Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
House rules
Guest blogging is all about both sides getting real value and benefits from the experience. With this in mind you need to make sure that your guest sticks to some pretty simple rules. First, get them to promote the blog on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. This will help to drive traffic to your site and gives you the chance to promote your product. You can also get them to link to the blog from their own site; this can boost your SEO by up to five times more than creating new content yourself.
If you have any advice or tips about guest blogging, share them with us below or tweet us @strattoncraig.