When Being a Guest Matters – Top Reasons Why Marketers Should Include Guest Blogging in Their SEO Efforts

Staying Ahead of the Competition Through Guest Blogging

To stay ahead of your competition online, it is important that you market your business in every channel available. You have probably tap into social media and  it is also likely that you have created your own blog and add content into it on a regular basis to improve your website's traffic. However, are you aware that you can also improve your website's rankings on SERPs through guest blogging?

Guest blogging, or guest posting as other would like to call it, is a simple approach that involves writing useful and compelling content not for your own site or blog but for someone else's or vice versa. Whether you invite another blogger to write a post for your website or you write a content for another person to publish on his or her site, the key to guest posting is sharing content that is relevant to  the audience.

Although this is a fairly new practice, many marketers and bloggers alike are seeing the value of guest blogging when it comes to improving their website's traffic and ranking. Of course, you're probably asking “why would I want to give away the content I wrote to someone else?” The reasons below will shed light on why you should include guest posting in your marketing arsenal.

Broaden Online Relationships and Open Up Opportunities for Cross-Promotion

As a business owner, you are probably aware how important networking is for your brand. Guest posting opens up numerous opportunities for you to build your network and for you to establish a strong working relationship with industry bloggers. If you are able to contribute relevant content to different industry blogs, you can be assured that blog owners will be grateful for your valuable contribution on their sites. Along the line, you can be able to leverage on the relationship you have built and it would be easier for you to ask them to write a review or promote your brand and you can do these things to them as well.

Breathe New Life on Topics

If you frequently write content for your own website, it is likely that you have occasionally experienced writer's block. The same thing happens to bloggers as well. Every once in a while, marketers who write their own content have trouble coming up with fresh posts or putting a creative spin on a subject that they have been writing about for a long time. By guest blogging, you will be able to inject new life and perspective into industry blogs. The more relevant your posts are, the higher the likelihood that blog owners will ask you to continue guest posting for them in the future.

Obtain Backlinks

Any online content marketer knows how important backlinks are to get higher search engine rankings. When you do guest posts creatively and intelligently most blog owners are likely to let you to include a few links in your author's bio section, or if you have a good relationship with them they may also let you drop a few more links on the content itself. As a result, if the blog owners  generate more readers to their site, the backlinks will ensure that you get more traffic on your site as well. Basically,  it's a win-win situation for you and the blog owners.

Expand Your audience

Of course, when you write a guest post on another blog, an entirely new audience would be able to read your content. The post you made becomes the channel for you to showcase your knowledge, expertise and industry authority, which in turn will attract more readers. With the right techniques as well as consistency, you can turn most of your new audience to regularly follow or read your posts.

Fuel Your Social Media Campaign

If you have been marketing on social networking platforms for your brand, you should be aware that just like SEO, social media thrives on content. As such, when you are writing creative guest posts, the more likely that people will share, like, comment, tweet and +1 your content. Nonetheless, you would be able to spark conversations, which in turn will make others to become interested on your brand. Whenever your content gets shared on various social networking platforms, search engines would be able to pick the signals, telling them that your content is valuable, which in turn equates to higher ranks in SERPs.

Guest blogging is an excellent trade-off that lets you establish excellent relationships with industry experts, showcase your credibility and authority, garner you a new audience and, in general, help you with your brand's marketing efforts. Now that you know what guest posting can do for you and for your business, it's about time that you take advantage of it  and include it in your marketing arsenal.

The article was written by Robert Kirk who runs a  Search Engine Optimisation company in Scotland, UK. RFK Solutions also carry out website design, ecommerce and printing.