Guest posts are an integral part of link building.
You may wonder why.
It is because you have a great chance to get published on blogs and earn good backlinks for your site.
The biggest challenge is finding worthwhile guest posting opportunities. It can be difficult to find blogs that accept guest posts.
If you are serious about guest blogging, learning a few tricks to find good opportunities can save you some time and allow you to earn high-quality links.
What is guest posting?
Guest posting or guest blogging is the practice of creating content for a third-party blog. The website where you publish your guest post is the host, and you are the guest blogger.
The main goal of guest posting is to write a piece of content that gives value and gains quality backlinks pointing to your website. This will allow visitors to be redirected to your page and learn more about you and your business. In other words, your site gets a vote of confidence, signaling search engines like Google that your site is an authority in your niche.
Guest posting is more or less a win-win situation for you and the website host. The host will receive top-notch quality content for their blog, and you can reach their audience through your content. Plus, you can get backlinks for SEO!
If you’re new to the process of guest posting or building backlinks, don’t forget to check our SEO glossary to get you prepared.
5 powerful benefits of guest posting
It has been said a lot that guest posting is a powerful link-building strategy. However, we have not mentioned the exact reasons why guest posting is worth trying.
Below, we have put together five benefits of guest posting.
Boosts brand awareness
Brand awareness is a pivotal part of any successful marketing strategy. Businesses can boost their visibility and attract new audiences by guest posting on trustworthy websites.
Due to increased brand visibility, businesses can gain brand recognition and association with a specific niche. As a result, customers are more likely to memorize your brand when they need your products or services. The right branding and its elements play a huge role here that involve its name, mission, vision, voice, messaging, and logo crafted with the help of a professional logo maker.
So, companies should consistently create high-quality content to become thought leaders and experts in their field. This way, they can improve their reputation and build trust among potential customers.
Leads to increased website traffic
When you publish guest posts on reputable websites with high traffic, you have an opportunity to increase your own website traffic. If readers find your content engaging, relevant, and informative enough, they will visit your site for more information or explore your products/services.
Improves your site’s rankings
Increased search engine rankings are also among the benefits of guest posting.
As we have already mentioned, when you create valuable content and gain relevant backlinks, search engines count those as votes of authority and confidence for your site.
This leads to improved rankings and helps you land on the first page of Google for your focus keywords.
It’s not fair to state that a few simple guest posts and incoming links alone will bring you organic traffic. But when coupled with quality content on your site that meets users’ search intent and needs, it’s a winning combination.
Helps getting backlinks
Guest posts allow businesses to earn quality backlinks. These backlinks not only improve your website’s SEO by increasing your domain rating but also indicate to Google that your content is reliable.
According to a study by Ahrefs, 56.4% of pages have at least one backlink from a guest post. This proves the point that guest posting is a popular and actionable method for building quality links.
However, not all links are useful for your site. Nowadays, Google easily identifies low-quality links and penalizes sites that have low-quality or over-optimized links.
This is why all backlinks are not created equal. For instance, a link from a reputable website is more valuable than a link from a low-quality website.
Another factor to be cautious about is the relevance of the outbound links. Getting a backlink from a site relevant to your industry amplifies the value of a link.
So, pay attention to the backlinks in your guest posts. Regularly monitor backlinks to make sure there are no incoming links from spammy and low-quality websites.
Helps to attract more customers
A well-crafted content showcasing your business’s expertise and knowledge can help you to attract potential customers and leads. By offering valuable insights and useful advice, guest posting allows businesses to establish themselves as authorities in their industry, convert prospects, and build trust with them.
By addressing customer pain points and needs and providing solutions, guest posts can also position businesses as problem solvers, making potential customers more likely to seek out their products/services and enhancing the customer success process overall. Eventually, the number of leads and conversions will increase for the business.
Can guest posting harm your SEO efforts?
Guest posting is considered to be one of the best ways to earn quality backlinks and boost your overall SEO efforts. This is why you should explore how to find guest posting opportunities, as they can highly contribute to your online visibility and authority if done right.
However, in some cases, guest posting can hurt your hard work. This can lead to a huge drop in rankings and decrease the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.
Publishing poorly-crafted content
Poorly-written content harms anyone involved in guest posting, both the website host and the person who has written it. If you are going to produce something that is useless, it will ruin your reputation, and no one will want to do business with you anymore.
Similarly, if people read something full of grammatical mistakes and typos and they see your name on different blogs, they will refuse to keep reading. So, keep in mind that excessive errors will negatively reflect on your reputation.
To avoid this, make sure to:
- Proofread and edit your content before submitting it for guest posting
- Review your article for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors
- Craft valuable and insightful content that benefits readers.
Writing irrelevant content
Relevancy is a must when it comes to writing any piece of content. You can learn how to find guest posting opportunities, but if your writing isn’t relevant to the target audience, it won’t resonate. Writing something irrelevant to your niche or products/services can only mislead the readers and turn them off.
After all, they have clicked through your article, hoping to find information that meets their needs and expectations. When they don’t receive answers to their questions, they eventually will leave your site. Chances are less that they will ever visit your site to seek some information.
So, make sure that everything you write is relevant to your niche. Otherwise, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Stuffing content with keywords
You should also be careful about keyword over-optimization. Google can easily spot any cases of keyword overuse, and while there’s no strict rule for how often a given keyword should be used, just remember that it should fit the context and sound natural.
If you wonder how to avoid keyword stuffing, follow these easy but actionable tips.
- Make sure content is readable enough
- Add keywords naturally within the context.
- Use synonyms and related keywords for variety.
- Keep your audience in mind
Paying for backlinks
Paying for backlinks is a black-hat SEO practice that should be avoided at all costs. Good marketers and SEO specialists will highly advise you to avoid this tactic. Google doesn’t encourage paid guest posting, either. And the reason is quite simple— It violates Google’s algorithm. Google wants people to link to websites organically.
Paying for a link-building service is a different case, though. If you’re paying a business to be guest posters on your behalf, it is fine unless these services buy links from bloggers. In that case, Google will penalize such attempts. That’s why it’s crucial to do research on any service provider you’re willing to work with.
Linking to malicious pages
Linking to a malicious site can harm your site and even lead to the deindexation of that specific page until you fix the problem.
Therefore, it is recommended to check the destination of any link in a blog post you publish. This way, you can decide whether these links are good enough to leave as do-follow links. Afterwards, you can simply remove such links.
4 ways to find guest posting opportunities
Use Google Search
For those wondering how to find guest posting opportunities, Google Search can be the first method to try.
All you need is to type your “niche + blogs” to find relevant blogs for your industry. Once you find relevant websites, find out if they accept guest posts. This will save you time, as you won’t reach out to sites that are not interested in guest posting.
Once you are done with your Google search, make sure to make a list of the best sites for guest posting. Gathering all suitable and relevant sites in a guest posting sites list is a great way to keep all information in one place.
Look carefully into each website. Learn what kind of guest posts they feature. This will allow you to tailor your pitch and better understand the site’s tone and writing style.
Do competitor backlinks analysis
Wondering how to find guest posting opportunities? Do competitor backlinks analysis.
This is yet another excellent way to identify guest posting opportunities. All you need is to learn what your competitors are up to. To do so, make a list of your competitors and use SEO tools like Ahrefs to gain insight into their backlink profiles. If a particular site has accepted a guest blog from your competitor, it is likely they will accept yours too.
By doing competitor backlinks analysis, you can find relevant websites open for guest post contributions. Check whether their niche is relevant to yours to make sure that your guest post addresses the target audience’s needs and pain points. Additionally, find out whether these blogs have high authority to maintain a strong brand reputation.
Once you find relevant sites to reach out to, start preparing a compelling guest post pitch that emphasizes your expertise and your value proposition.
Use LinkedIn to find guest posting opportunities
If you wonder how to find guest posting opportunities, consider exploring social media channels, more specifically LinkedIn. The platform is great not only for job seekers but also for those looking for guest post opportunities.
You can write a LinkedIn post and tell your network that you are looking for sites where you can get published. This way, you have a great opportunity to be involved in a conversation with your friends who have friends who own blogs/websites. They can suggest sites or help you connect with the editors of sites that accept guest posts.
Network
For those curious about how to find guest posting opportunities, networking can be another actionable method.
Networking is an excellent way to increase your outreach. Look for bloggers, website owners, and writers on social media and exchange knowledge about your respective niches. You can find great writers who do a remote job if you search online well enough. Having conversations with each of them can open up new opportunities.
Avoid being too promotional or salesy. Instead, try to build genuine relationships with them, and then you can pitch them to publish your blog on their website.
How to lookup guest post opps on Ahrefs?
To do so, make a list of your competitors and use SEO tools like Ahrefs to gain insight into their backlink profiles.
If you wonder how to lookup guest post opps on Ahrefs, you should:
- Head to Ahrefs’ “Content Explorer”
- Type a broad keyword or phrase related to your industry
- Select “In Title” from the drop-down menu
- Click “Search”
In the screenshot below, you can see that we have searched .
Then, a lot of potential opportunities will pop up, but you can narrow the list down by applying these filters:
- Domain Rating (DR) from 30 to 60
- Click the One page per domain filter
- Click the Exclude homepages filter
- Click the Exclude subdomains filter
Then tap on the “Websites” to find relevant sites you could guest post for.
If a particular site has accepted a guest blog from your competitor, it is likely they will accept yours too.
By doing competitor backlinks analysis, you can find relevant websites open for guest post contributions. Check whether their niche is relevant to yours to make sure that your guest post addresses the target audience’s needs and pain points. Additionally, find out whether these blogs have high authority to maintain a strong brand reputation.
Once you find relevant sites to reach out to, start preparing a compelling guest post pitch that emphasizes your expertise and your value proposition.
Conclusion
Learning how to find guest posting opportunities is essential if you want to maximize your SEO efforts. Leveraging the power of Google Search, doing detailed competitor backlinks analysis, implementing broken link building, utilizing your LinkedIn network, and expanding your connections through networking are five valuable methods worth trying.
By combining these techniques, businesses can significantly enhance their online presence and boost the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns.
So, if you are serious about boosting your site’s rankings and brand credibility, you should definitely leverage the power of guest posts.
Start small, and soon you will start seeing results.
Good luck!
FAQ about finding guest posting opportunities
What types of content are suitable for guest posting?
Any content type is suitable for guest posting. You can write informative articles, how-to guides, tutorials, case studies, industry insights, opinion pieces, and more. Whatever you write, make sure it aligns with the host website’s niche and audience interests.
Can I repurpose my existing blog posts as guest posts?
You can repurpose existing content for guest posting. However, you need to make sure that your writing matches the host site’s tone, style, and target audience. You also need to make sure that your content is up-to-date and provides fresh insights, updates, or examples.
What should I consider before submitting a guest post?
Get familiar with the blog’s guidelines and style. When writing a blog, you need to make sure it aligns with the host website’s tone and provides value to its readers. Additionally, your blog post should be original, well-researched, and error-free.
How often should I write guest posts?
The frequency of writing guest posts depends on your goals and time. Aim for quality rather than quantity. It’s better to have a few well-crafted posts than to write a lot of blog posts that have poor quality.
Are there any common mistakes to avoid in guest posting outreach?
When doing a guest posting outreach, avoid sending generic pitches, neglecting blog guidelines, not researching the target blog, and being overly salesy. Instead, strive to build a mutually beneficial relationship and provide value to the blog’s audience.
