Member Article

Guest Posting: The Most Effective Way To Grow Your UK Business Online

As digital transformation continues to make the internet a competitive place for businesses around the world, it can be difficult for ambitious UK business owners to market themselves to global audiences.

Guest posting, however, offers businesses an opportunity to enter the world stage through a flow of organic traffic and reliable lead-generation tactics.

Of course, guest posting is far from a secret strategy to supercharge conversions and win international website traffic. In fact, 93% of marketers believe that content marketing, including guest posting, is effective for their business.

While some SEO agencies are working on making the guest posting landscape more efficient and automated, it’s still an art form that best rewards the efforts of businesses that indulge in the best industry practices.

But what actually is guest posting? And how can it help UK businesses to grow into international markets online? Let’s take a deeper look at a marketing niche that’s continually helping brands to grow their reputation online:

What is Guest Posting?

Before we begin, it’s worth taking a moment to explore what guest posting actually is. In a nutshell, guest posting and guest blogging are content marketing and SEO strategies where content is generated and published on other websites in a bid to promote brands online.

While it may seem counterintuitive to produce work for other websites, the art of guest posting is that your content will address your business in a positive light and contain key backlinks that can help drive traffic back to your website.

These links are essential for increasing your website’s organic rankings and for generating organic traffic. With your website more discoverable with reputable backlinks from referring domains, it’s easier for search engine crawlers to build confidence in the quality of your pages–paving the way for stronger SERPs.

This means that guest posting to high-quality, high-traffic websites can help to generate steady flows of browsing traffic back to your pages where you can convert your interested visitors into sales or mailing list sign-ups and so on.

How Does Guest Posting Benefit My Business?

Like with many approaches to marketing, the upside of your guest posting strategy will depend on the level of work that’s put in. However, the benefits of effective guest posting can’t be underestimated by any ambitious business. Let’s explore some of the key advantages of embracing guest posting:

Leveraging Quality Backlinks

Because search engines like Google assess the quality of backlinks leading to your website when they’re working out where to rank your pages, guest posting can help to improve your search engine ranking and to generate organic traffic to your site.

By adding a backlink to your brand, it’s possible for you to guide traffic directly to a specific landing page, special offer, or sign-up form to help leverage conversions more effectively.

Unlocking the Potential of Referral Traffic

Crucially, referral traffic can help to drive greater volumes of leads back to your pages from a more reputable website.

Referral traffic is a term that describes users who land on your pages without necessarily searching specifically for your business. Because of this, much of the referral traffic you receive is likely to be through users clicking backlinks on other websites or social media.

When guest posting is conducted effectively, it offers the opportunity to grow your referral traffic for certain target audiences. When you position your backlink within an article on a high-reputation and relevant website with significant traffic volumes, you can generate far greater referral traffic back to your site.

For UK businesses seeking to build a name for themselves on a global scale, this referral traffic can be leveraged from anywhere in the world depending on the guest posting domain used–so it can be a great opportunity to build your reputation in international markets.

Position Yourself as an Industry Leader

Another major advantage of guest posting is that it builds brand value by positioning your business and staff as industry thought leaders.

By creating informative and engaging content and publishing it as a guest author, you’re able to demonstrate value as a voice of authority that can help to resonate with your target audience.

While you may be continually sharing your industry expertise on your website’s own blog, it doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the high volumes of traffic needed to establish yourself as an authoritative figure within your industry.

For UK businesses seeking to grow into new markets, this added expertise in tackling important topics can help your brand to resonate strongly with audiences both domestically and overseas.

Using Guest Posting to Outpace and Outrank Your Competitors

So, we’ve looked at what guest posting is and its advantages, but how can your business use guest posting to grow your business online? Let’s take a deeper look at a few essential industry practices:

Get to Work Early on Your Guest Post Sites

It’s important to gain an early idea of who you’re going to be writing for when it comes to actually creating and distributing your guest posts. Don’t simply write for anyone and everyone that takes this form of content, because you’re looking to resonate with the right audience at a suitable website that can generate referral traffic.

Simple Google searches for relevant industry topics will show what the biggest relevant websites are within your sector, and it’s worth looking for platforms that accept guest posts as suitable targets.

Let’s imagine that you’re a UK ski business that sells ski equipment. Running searches for ‘ski equipment’ is likely to return more retail-related results, but looking for topics surrounding ski technology can bring results that are more focused on quality relevant talking points.

Here, we can see examples of websites publishing relevant topics surrounding the industry. These search strings can not only help you to identify which websites publish ski-related content but can also show you which topics hold potential for discussion points.

If you’re an Ahrefs user, one great way of identifying quality websites to target for your guest posts is to look at a major industry player that offers products or services closely related to your niche.

Let’s say your UK ski business has identified Decathlon as a market leader domestically. Using Ahrefs, it’s possible to search for www.decathlon.co.uk and discover the website’s external backlinks from industry-relevant websites.

Here, we can see that running a search for Decathlon’s URL and selecting ‘Backlinks’ can show you a list of the domains that feature active backlinks to the website.

Now, by ordering the results by Domain Rating (DR), we can see a list of linking sites in descending order, from the most reputable to the least within our results page.

It’s worth searching for dofollow links as this can help search engine crawlers to categorise your website better, and selecting ‘One link per domain’ it can help to whittle down your results by referring page.

While it’s certainly worth targeting larger domains if you have the time, you may find it more rewarding to look to slightly lower DR websites that could be more receptive to guest posting. Ahrefs provides plenty of information regarding domain traffic and linked domains to help you to better understand what you could get out of publishing your content on certain pages.

Identifying your target sites early sets a benchmark for your content, and can better influence your writing style.

Identify Key Industry Talking Points

It’s important to avoid getting too distracted by publications and allowing them to undermine the quality of your content.

Be sure to investigate key industry talking points and tap into the conversations that are being had surrounding your industry. Again, if you’re a ski equipment firm, it’s possible to conduct social listening on social media platforms and to look at Google’s news feeds.

It’s also possible to use platforms like Google Trends to identify when certain topics are being talked about online to plan content in advance. Here, we can see that ski holidays become a popular topic during the winter months, and this can be a useful time to utilise the subject for your own content.

Master Your Outreach

Your outreach process can be one of the hardest parts of guest posting, and should you struggle to receive replies from your chosen editors, the feeling of rejection could put you off from continuing.

If you’re receiving some setbacks when outreaching your content, don’t worry. Editors are often busy and simply unable to accommodate extra work.

When it comes to outreaching your target, it’s usually worth offering them a number of suggested titles that are relevant to their website covering talking points that haven’t yet been addressed on-site.

By introducing yourself and offering your content, you may be able to strike a rapport that enables you to continually send content to strengthen the quality of the backlinks going back to your pages.

Automate Your Guest Posting

While the guest posting process can be arduous, marketing agencies that can professionally create and pitch content on your behalf have often been bogged down by manual processes such as lengthy ‘get to know you’ calls and lengthy in-person meetings.

Solvid is a great example of a guest posting service provider that offers scalable, premium blogger outreach services to businesses, agencies and personal brands.

Solvid is the only guest posting provider to offer placements on DA20 to DA80+, DR30 to DR90+ and Traffic 10K to 1M+ publishers.

Embrace Evergreen Traffic Sources

The great thing about guest posting is that your traffic sources can continue to win your business leads long into the future. Because of the level of traffic high-ranking websites receive and the quality of content you’re capable of publishing on their pages, good examples of guest posting can continue to bring benefits to websites in a sustainable manner.

Content in the Age of Digital Transformation

For UK businesses, digital transformation has posed unprecedented challenges and opportunities.

While the competitive landscape is more fierce than ever before, quality guest posting campaigns have the power to draw in greater volumes of traffic and leads, helping to actively improve the reputation and visibility of your brand online.

By utilising guest posting, you have the power to grow your UK business in an organic way that can help you to compete on the world stage in a more sustainable way–opening the doors to a truly international audience.

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This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dmytro Spilka .