By knowing how to write a guest post, you will improve your website’s SEO as you will be getting high quality backlinks to your website. When our content is featured in other websites’ blogs, your brand is exposed to a wider target market. Guest posting helps you emerge as an authority in your niche and can help you establish trust. You can also expect an increase in referral traffic, which will further boost your website’s rankings.
How to Write A Guest Post – Understanding the Basics
Do you find yourself stuck with the question of how to write a guest post for hours – even days – only to realize that once you publish the guest posts, it is driving absolutely no traffic? Of course, you can just buy paid ads, but there is something incredibly rewarding about creating and publishing evergreen content that generates a steady flow of organic traffic.
The traffic generated by an epic guest post can far outweigh the short-term benefits of publishing and promoting infrequent trendy content.
What Are the Benefits of Guest Blogging?
When it comes to the benefits of guest blogging, you should know that there are too many. At its core, guest posting is an amazing link building strategy that helps boost the reputation as well as organic rankings of your website. Here are some of the top benefits of guest blogging:
Connect with A Wider Audience
Guest blogging enables you to form a connection with a wider audience by tapping into an audience that might not know your website or brand. Essentially, it is about getting exposure, which further boosts brand visibility and establishes brand awareness among new potential customers. The key is to select niche-relevant websites for guest posting.
This way, you will ensure that your guest posts reach a highly targeted audience that is already interested in your industry.
Build Valuable Links
Guest posting is a valuable tactic to build valuable links. When you write a guest post for another site, you can include contextual links within the content of the article. These contextual links naturally indicate the relevant content back to your website, which then adds value to your reader’s user experience.
Usually, contextual links comprise natural anchors within well-written, unique, and informative guest posts, which is incredibly effective for SEO. By establishing a diverse backlink profile, you can protect your website from Google penalties.
The key is to write high quality guest posts as a way to attract high-quality backlinks.
Resultantly, your posts will rank higher in SERPs.
Increase DA – Domain Authority
When you write guest blogs within your niche, you establish the relevance of your website within your niche. Google and other search engines realize the topical connections, and after some time, Google starts to perceive your website as an authoritative resource and contributes to higher DA. If your guest post has do-follow links, it passes on link equity from the publishing site to the linked site, which directly contributes to the authority of your website.
Boost Website’s Credibility
When it comes to effective guest posing, you must ensure you publish high-quality guest posts on high quality websites. What this will do for you is boost the credibility and trustworthiness of your website. By publishing guest posts on high-quality websites, your content will get linked with trustworthy sources, and search engines, such as Google, will recognize your website as a credible source, too. Subsequently, guest posting will lead to a boost in DA.
The Best Guest Posting Guidelines You Need to Know
Here are some of the best guest post guidelines that will give you a kickstart if you want to write epic guest posts:
Start with The Right Topic
Why would you want to invest your time and energy in writing a guest post when you are not going to get any traffic from it? The best thing to do is to find topics that are related to your niche. Choose topics that have a nice search volume so that your guest posts have an actual chance to rank.
You can start with using any keyword research tool and type in your keyword. Proceed to download all the keywords and select low-volume keywords.
Get the Search Intent Right
The next step is to grasp the search intent. Before writing a single word, understand the search intent for the keywords. Usually, all search terms for keywords fall under the following categories:
- Informational
- Navigational
- Transactional
- Commercial
You can essentially figure out the search intent yourself by assessing the keywords.
Get the Outline Right
In the next step of writing a guest post tutorial, you want to get the outline right. Based on your keywords, you can assess the structure or outline of the top articles related to the keywords and see what they did to succeed and rank high. Of course, you won’t be able to beat your competitors if you were to simply copy their outline.
You can get your ideas from the various top-ranking articles for the keyword and create a super outline. Don’t forget to add FAQs, as these work brilliantly to enrich your content. You can get the FAQs from Google in the “People Also Ask” section.
Start With A Great Title
Every blog post starts with a great title. Now, the title of the blog post has two main jobs. The first job is to help you include the main keyword in your title so that Google, as well as other search engines, know what searches to give your traffic for. To do this, you must ensure that your keyword is in the title, preferably at the beginning of the title.
Apart from the keyword, the second job of the title of your guest post is to entice people to read your blog posts. It might be a good idea to add dates to your title to establish relevancy. People also love to read listicles, which is why you might want to add numbers to the title, as it can make people excited.
Ace the Introduction
Now that you have the title right, you can actually start the writing process. Make sure you have an amazing hook so that you can actually hook your readers. If your intro won’t do the magic, no one will read the rest of your guest post. What this will do is give bad signals to Google. Another tip is to avoid fluff.
Engage Emotions
People will engage in your guest post when their emotions are engaged. So, you should leverage your introductory paragraph to entertain your readers. Based on the search intent, you might as well want to use the introductory paragraph to educate or even scare your readers into reading further and finding out more.
Link to Authoritative Websites
In your content, make sure to link to other authoritative websites as a resource for your readers. Linking to authoritative sites is especially important if you are referencing data, as you want to be able to tell where you got the data from. This is also a great way to get high-quality backlinks to your content.
Be Mindful of NLP
In case you are wondering, NLP stands for natural language processing, which is Google algorithm. You must ensure that this algorithm loves your content. However, writing great content isn’t just about making Google happy; the main goal is to satisfy your readers’ queries and make them happy, which is why it is in your best interest to learn about readability hacks.
Understandably, no one wants to read a huge wall of text, which is why you want to pay attention to the structure of your guest post so that your readers would actually want to read your content. For instance, you might want to structure the guest post in short paragraphs so that it is easy for the eyes to read.
Quick Tips to Improve the Readability of Your Guest Post
Apart from paragraphing the content, you can also break the text walls with images and infographics. Make sure that the headlines are of the appropriate size so that your readers can quickly see them as they scroll the page. You can also include custom graphics to illustrate your points. Another quick tip is to embed videos to keep people on your page longer.
When it comes to readability, write your guest post for middle-school kids or teens.
How to Structure A Guest Post
To write a good-quality guest post that will actually rank higher in SERPs, you should follow the below-given structure:
Know Your Audience
At the core of any tutorial for how to write a guest post, you will find the audience. You must know who your target audience is and who you are writing for. Every successful guest post speaks for the readers’ pain points and addresses their needs.
Align Your Content with the Target Site’s Brand
Your guest post should help expand the message of your target website, which is also referred to as the publisher of the guest blog. Make sure that your content aligns with the tone of your brand. For instance, if the blogger’s site has light humor and everyday language, you should avoid publishing a guest post that carries dense academic language.
Make Sure Your Content Fits the Blog Format
Any guest post that you write should fit the format of the blog site. In some cases, you will find writer’s guidelines regarding what the author of the site expects from guest posts. For instance, you might find the instructions include the desired word count, number of headings, subheadings, and the number of sections in which to break the content.
You can also find instructions for the number of internal and external links that the guest post needs to have.
Give Your Readers Actionable Content
When writing an effective guest post, you cannot solely rely on giving your readers one-thousand-word details of the chosen topic. In your guest post, give your readers something that is actionable, something that they can walk away with and do after reading the guest post. Incorporate some idea that is going to stick in their mind, such as an amazing fact or a nugget of wisdom.
It comes down to the practical value that you can impart to your readers, which will make them think of you.
Remember: The Content is Not For You
You must keep in mind that whatever you are writing is not for you – it is for your audience. So, while you are writing the guest post, you might be intrigued to mention the amazing book that you might have written and published last week. However, the purpose of the guest post is to provide content that is meaningful to your readers and prompts them to read more about you.
However, you are going to get an opportunity within the guest blog to tell your readers what you are about through a CTA. So, make sure you get the CTA right.
Guest Post Ideas for Beginners
If you are new to guest posts and researching how to write a guest post, it is time to dig deeper into the best guest post ideas for beginners, which is your ideal space to start with. Here are some great beginner ideas:
- Conduct an interview with a niche expert
- Share your personal story
- Post product reviews
- Post an unpopular opinion
- Post the transcription of your YouTube podcast or video
- Post a comparison of two products in your niche
- Create a how-to blog
- Share important stats related to your niche
- Write a myth-defying blog article
- Provide practical templates
- Write guides
Final Thoughts
Now that you know how to write a guest post and why it matters for your website’s ranking and high-quality link-building, you understand how to leverage the power of getting good-quality and relevant backlinks through guest posts. Finding sites for guest posts and writing guest posts is a time-consuming process. You can avail yourself of the services of a reputable link-building agency like ours and hire experts to write informative, high-quality, and unique content that will actually rank.
FAQs
How do you write guest posts?
To write an effective guest post, you start by researching the user intent of the keywords, as you will essentially be writing for your audience. Include internal and external SEO links to rank your guest higher in SERPs.
How many guest posts should you write every month?
You should post at least one to five guest blogs every month, as the majority of backlinks are obtained through high-quality guest blogs.
How are guest posts part of SEO?
Guest posting, also known as guest blogging, is an efficient way to build high-quality backlinks and improve your website’s rankings.
