Guest Post Writing in 2023: Is It Worth It?
Guest posting – if you don’t know by now – is a well-established digital marketing strategy used by companies, agencies, bloggers, and anybody who wants to build their online presence. It can boost your online visibility and get you more exposure. Basically, you’re a guest author on another blog or website where you’ll write and publish a blog post. With online content consumption ramping up even higher than in pre-pandemic times, you need a strategy that can help you stand out and drive traffic in 2023. Is guest post writing worth it in 2023, you ask? It can seem like blogging’s taken a backseat in the digital marketing world with the rise of other channels like TikTok and YouTube for content creation. But the truth is that the written word is still how most of us like to consume content online. Even after watching a video or a short clip, the next step for many people is to read a how-to guide or get more information from an article on the topic. The short answer is that yes, guest post writing is still relevant in 2023. Let’s delve a bit deeper into why it’s worth doing, and how to get it right. [ez-toc] Backlinks still rule SEO Incoming, inbound, backlinks – whatever you like to call them, they’re links to your site from another – and we should never underestimate how important they are as a search engine ranking factor. The more high-quality, relevant backlinks you’ve got to your website or blog, the more Google will notice. They are, and probably always will be, vital for search engine optimisation (SEO). However, relevancy is key. Back in the day, before Google caught wind of some of the tactics people used to get seen in search, you could write a guest post on a high fashion site about how to keep a chicken. It might have got you somewhere if you put a link to your chicken site in there. But in 2023, Google’s long wised up. Who links to your site is more important than how many inbound links you’ve got. What’s more, blog and website owners know this, so if you’re pitching a topic that’s completely unrelated to their site, you’ll probably get ignored. They don’t want to confuse their readers, and neither should you. One or two inbound links from reputable, relevant blogs and websites will get you better results than hundreds of links from sites that have little to nothing to do with what you do. Not to mention, have you ever tried to write content that combines high fashion and chickens? Exactly. How guest posting (when it’s done right) builds backlinks Guest posting is excellent as a method of generating backlinks for your website. When you post on somebody else’s site, you’ll usually be allowed to link your site somewhere in the post or your author bio. These links indicate to Google that other sites think you’re legit, so you deserve to rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Google’s been making many updates to its algorithm lately (namely, the Helpful Content Update, which we’ll get into later). But we assure you that high-quality backlinks will continue to be a key factor used by search engines when determining just how relevant and authoritative a site is. Build relationships in your industry Guest posting isn’t just about backlinks (maybe in 2011, but not anymore!). You can use it as a strategy to build a name for yourself in your niche and cultivate relationships with other website owners and bloggers. You reach out to the owner before guest posting on their site. They’ll usually want to get to know you a little bit before they let you loose with guest post writing. Ultimately, if they like what you offer, you can post on their site and connect with a broader audience, and they get extra content – it’s a win-win. Through guest posting, you can put yourself out there for future opportunities, such as partnerships and collaborations. If you publish content that does well and drives loads of high-quality traffic, the owner will be a huge fan of you – and they might ask to collaborate again in the future. As the competition for visibility and attention on the internet continues to reach even bigger heights in 2023 and beyond, building relationships through guest posting will become even more essential for website and blog owners. The more industry connections you make, the more opportunities you’ll get to reach new audiences. Impressive guest posts can bring recommendations and a better reputation in your industry. Diversify your online presence Guest posting on other blogs and websites can be particularly valuable for small businesses and websites with limited resources. That’s because it’s a cheap and effective way to expand your reach. You don’t have to shell out as much on expensive marketing campaigns when you have a good guest posting strategy. Moreover, writing guest posts for a few different blogs or websites will diversify your online presence. Why’s that important? Well, if you put all your eggs in one basket and only guest post on one site, everything could come crashing down if that site is negatively affected by an algorithm change or penalty. After all, you can’t control how other people run their websites, but you can control where you choose to post. With search engines placing more emphasis on displaying tailored content, diversifying your guest posts allows you to write and publish content that different segments of your audience will like. You don’t have to rely on just one website for web traffic and visibility when you’re busy guest post writing for multiple sites and blogs. Plus, depending on your industry, you might be able to find relevant sites with slightly different audiences – allowing you to cast your net out even further. Guest posting best practices: Quality over quantity, always Guest post writing is undeniably a powerful tool for building backlinks and putting yourself in front of a larger audience.
Unhelpful Content: Exploring Google’s Questions to Ask Yourself
Do you write helpful or unhelpful content? It’s an important question, especially considering all the changes Google has made to how they use content to rank sites and pages. It’s only a short time before the Helpful Content Update completely rolls out and content written solely for SEO purposes becomes obsolete. And honestly, good riddance! The web’s been full of sub-par, unhelpful, uninteresting content designed to hit the right keywords for far too long. That’s not to say keywords won’t continue to be necessary. They will, and keyword research will always be crucial to any good content marketing or blogging plan. After all, it’s the best way to find out what people are searching for when looking for a site like yours. Keyword research isn’t just for ranking; it helps you figure out what to write about to answer your audience’s questions. But when they land on your site, what do they find? Is your content ticking the boxes? It’s all good and well to be ranking for a keyword, but readers will never stick around if they don’t find any value in your content. That will cause problems for your SEO. And once the Helpful Content Update’s been finalised, that fact will hold even more weight than it did already. Unhelpful content won’t just damage your site’s ranking. It’ll also squash your reputation. Have you ever searched for an answer to your question, or a solution to your problem, only to find that the content you end up looking at doesn’t provide either? Is it just a load of keywordy waffling? It could be a more fulfilling experience. You won’t want to return to that site. Google has kindly published a list of questions you should ask yourself to determine if your content isn’t helping anybody. Let’s have some fun and unpick them! [ez-toc] Are you writing content to attract people from search engines without considering if they’ll find it helpful? Well, they’ve gone in for the kill here, haven’t they? But it’s a big one that all too many sites and blogs on the internet are guilty of. Are you focused too heavily on keywords and making your content rank? It’s OK to research keywords and place them naturally in the content but going overboard, not so much. Let’s say you’re setting up an affiliate site about cats. You conduct keyword research and place the top twenty keywords you’re ranking for in all the content you write. Your content’s helpfulness has just considerably dropped because you’ve made it a pain to read. It’s not going to read well, even if you’re the world’s most significant cat expert. A quick keyword search for ‘cats’ brings up the above. Now you can use those to generate many content ideas for a site about cats. The problem: The biggest mistake writers see people making all the time is wanting to place all those top keywords in the same blog post. Not just in one, but in several posts – probably several times and on different topics. It makes for an awkward, unhelpful read, even if your content contains decent information. Realistically, how are you going to write content about a Ragdoll, a Maine Coon, a Siamese cat, catnip, a black cat, and a kitten? It’ll have to be super-general if you want those keywords to slot in nicely and flow with the content. Sure, you could write ‘How to Choose the Best Kitten Breed’, but how often do you think that’s been done before? A quick Google search shows that you’re up against fierce competition. And you’re likely not providing the reader with anything they can’t already find in a thousand other places. Unless you happen to know something about kittens that nobody else does, it’s not helpful content. The solution: Writing helpful content ultimately means narrowing your keyword options and picking something more niche. It means using fewer keywords from your research per post and choosing them strategically. So, narrow it down. Have a look for a topic that needs to be covered. Think about what your readers might be looking for. A simple way to do this is to quickly look at the related searches in Google. For example, when I searched for ‘training a Siamese cat’, it told me that people also ask: ‘Do Siamese cats scratch when bored?‘ Now, that’s a niche idea that could work for your cat site. It’s specific. Imagine you’re the reader – your Siamese kitten is tearing up your new sofa, and you have no idea how to stop them. You search online, and boom – there’s some content entitled ‘How to Stop My Siamese Cat Scratching My Furniture’. It’s got a catchy introduction and it gets into the nitty-gritty of why the kitten is being such a little pain in the ass and how to stop it: it’s helpful content. You might not have put all the keywords you want to rank for in there, but nevertheless, it’s made an impact. It works. Are you producing content on many different topics just in case some ranks? Ooh, another biggie. Yeah, don’t do this. If you’re starting a blog, it’s really tempting to write about literally anything you can. It’s common knowledge in the blogging sphere that you should choose a niche and stick to it. And there’s an excellent reason for this. Imagine you’re reading this post and like it, so you head back to our blog to find more content. Suddenly, you find a piece on a totally random topic, like ‘How to apply smoky eye eyeshadow’. (There isn’t, by the way). It might be helpful and help you perfect a fantastic smoky eye, but still, ‘what the heck?’ you wonder. This is a content marketing blog, and that should not be there! Do you see the problem? Your blog or website visitors have come to expect information on a particular topic from you. So, if you’re writing about healthy eating, and then you veer completely off-topic and start publishing
Forget SEO and Write for People: A Public Service Announcement
It’s not an exaggeration to say that digital content makes the world go round. Imagine not being able to Google something and get an answer the next second. Or ask Alexa, and have her tell you what you need to know immediately. If you’re in the business of creating content, you’re up against much competition. Whether you are running a website, blog, or social media account, the words you put out there can literally make or break your success. By now, it’s no secret that Google and other search engines use the content you publish to indicate how high up your website or blog should be ranking in the SERPs (search engine result pages). So, writing with search engine optimisation (SEO) at the forefront is a tactic marketers have developed over the years. They’ve been diligently writing content designed solely to please Google’s almighty algorithm, hoping they’ll get in the good books and see ranking growth. With just the right number of strategically placed keywords, they hope that Google will deem their content good enough. And for a while, it worked. But will it always work? Does it even work anymore? No. It’s time to stop, and here’s why. Enter: The Helpful Content Update Google’s latest algorithm update is all about ranking helpful, informative content written by somebody who clearly doesn’t care about whether it ranks; they want to put good information out there. If Google hadn’t made it clear in the past that they don’t like it when marketers and business owners write content only for SEO purposes, they have now. The Helpful Content Update will do precisely what it says on the tin. The algorithm is deprioritising the use of keywords and other SEO strategies in online content (although they will still have a role to play) and focusing on ranking content that scratches all the right itches for the reader. Google’s algorithm looks for indicators that the readers are enjoying the content. It’ll hunt for content that solves problems, soothes pain-points, and gives readers that ‘aha’ moment when they finally find the solution they’ve been looking for. Google makes no secret that they want the user experience to be excellent, and part of that involves promoting high-quality, informative content that addresses the reader’s needs. What’s Google looking for? The basics are: Informative Well-researched Relevant Engaging Easy to understand SEO-focused content isn’t usually helpful According to SEO Chatter, the Helpful Content Update will reward content that provides a satisfying user experience. And unfortunately for those who write for algorithms, not people, most content written for search engines first will not cut the mustard. We’re not talking about the content you’ve written to inform readers but have done your keyword research and sprinkled some naturally-fitting ones in. If that’s what you do, keep on doing it. You’ll be fine. Keywords aren’t going to be useless – it’s still important to research them, but for the sake of your readers’ sanity, don’t make your content all about them. We’re focusing on SEO content that’s purely written for SEO and SEO only here. It’s the kind of content you read, and you can see the writer thought keywords were the be-end and all-end of everything and forgot readers exist. It’s probably on a topic that’s been written about a thousand times before, boring, and nobody’s going to read it let alone find it helpful. If Chat-GPT could cook it up and do a better job, then you can bet Google isn’t going to like it. Even worse, it might be good, with some great information. Still, it’s so ridiculously splattered with awkward keywords that it’ll drive the reader bonkers until they furiously hit the back button and hope they can find something a little bit more easy to read elsewhere, lamenting the fact that it might have been a good read. If only ‘insert several keyword variations with a few locations tagged on’ hadn’t appeared 71 times. Until 2022, content like that might have gotten you somewhere. We say it might have worked because Google’s never been the biggest fan of boring and unhelpful content. And they definitely don’t like keyword stuffing. Once the Helpful Content Update finishes rolling out, though, content written for search engines first will have no chance. How will it affect search results? The Helpful Content Update has been in the works since August 2022, and Google will fully roll it out soon. Site and blog owners are already seeing differences in their rankings and results depending on how helpful or not their content is. Website and blog owners that post valuable, helpful content that people like reading will likely see improvement in search rankings. And it’ll have the potential to bring even more traffic with it. On the flip side, websites and blogs filled with useless, boring, unhelpful content complete with a zillion keywords a piece including the misspelt ones, will find that they did all that work in vain. If your site has published content like this, then now is the time to get rid of it. Delete it, shred it, flush it down the toilet, burn it. Get it gone. The bright side: Writing for readers is considerably easier You’re a human. You’re writing for other humans, possibly on something you know a lot about. So, there’s really nothing to stress about with this update. Unless you only know how to write for robots – that might be something you should work on. But no, really, all you need to do is focus your efforts on writing something interesting, informative, and engaging. For us writers, it’ll be great not to worry as much about making sure a particular keyword appears in the text a specific number of times. Sure, put a target keyword or three in there if it’s natural and flows well, but the fact is, keywords will do very little for unhelpful content. And it’s welcome news for some content writers and copywriters. ‘Whatever service near me’ has been the bane of