Guest Posting in SEO: A Marketer’s Guide

If you’re a blog or website owner or manager, you’re probably aware of the SEO benefits of publishing high-quality content to your site. But what about writing a guest blog for another site? Let’s look at the digital marketing bona fides of being a guest blogger.

Why Guest Posting Still Works in 2025

Guest posting involves someone writing a post for a blog to which they’re not a regular contributor. This arrangement can benefit the blog and its parent company, as well as the writer and any brand or outlet they represent.

You may invite somebody outside your organization to write a post on your blog. This can attract a different audience and speak to an expertise you or others in your organization may not have. Or you may pitch another blog to write a post for them. When you write on another blog, you increase your exposure, possibly to a brand new audience. 

Guest posting has been around since the earliest days of blogging, but there’s a perception among some that guest posts aren’t as relevant or advantageous as they once were. This simply isn’t so.

If a guest post fails to gain traction for the writer or the blog, it’s likely because it just wasn’t a very good article. Or maybe it wasn’t the right guest blogging opportunity, and the collaboration wasn’t a good fit. Because that’s at the heart of guest posting: collaboration. 

Instances of brands collaborating appear to be more popular now than ever (evidenced by how many celebrities have limited-time fast food menu items named for them). So, guest posting still works because the fundamental idea is as strong as ever — collaboration lends one brand’s audience to another and vice versa. But it has to be the right guest post.

Benefits of Guest Posting for SEO

As it applies directly to SEO, how can guest posting help? It can:

• Capture a different search intent: An ideal guest post is on another blog that attracts people who wouldn’t normally visit your site, but who may be interested in your content or benefit from your services or products. Guest blogging can open up your name and brand to a whole new audience. That’s why guest posting can be a key part of a successful digital marketing campaign.
• Increase domain authority: What does the average reader think when they see guest bloggers? They probably think the guest contributor has expertise to lend to the blog. If the blog is well-written, conveys useful insights and includes an author bio, then the reader might be inclined to trust the author and their website, lending authority to the guest contributor’s own blog or website.
• Provides an opportunity for backlinking: Backlinks are a huge benefit to guest blogs. If you write a blog for another website, try to negotiate some backlinks in the copy of your blog, as well as in the anchor text at the end of the article. Link building increases organic traffic and impresses search engine crawlers, which can help your blog move up search engine results page (SERP) rankings.

How To Guest Post Effectively for SEO

Here are some steps you can take to pitch and craft a guest post that boosts website traffic through high-quality backlinks and increased interest from a new audience:

Come Up With a Pitch

It’s good to have a generalized list of topics that touch on your expertise, but ultimately, you should customize every pitch. Build relationships and follow blogs that might be appropriate for augmenting your online presence. When you’ve identified a suitable guest blogging opportunity, pitch the blog owner and highlight how your work can add value to their site and how it might attract their target audience — or a new segment of that audience.

Make Your Pitch

Mention the benefits you can bring right in the subject line (assuming you’re pitching via email). For example, “A Guest Post To Drive Traffic” gets to the point nicely.

Before you begin your spiel about how great your post will be — and it will! — maybe butter them up with a compliment (ideally an honest one). You can mention how something they recently published resonated with you, and maybe even inspired your idea for this guest post. 

Then move on and present your article idea as a solution to something missing in their current content. Be specific about what readers will learn from your article and how it can benefit the blog. For example, your topic might be a keyword their competitors rank for, but they don’t. 

Boost your credibility by sharing some recent blogs you’ve published and any data, awards or acclaim that showcase your effectiveness and expertise. Touch on how you plan to promote the guest post, and then finish by requesting a response.

A brief pitch is a good pitch. Unless your target site has stated guidelines that request full drafts for pitches, restrict yours to an elevator pitch in email form.

Write Your Post

The blog has accepted your idea for a guest post — hooray! 

Now you have to write it — uh oh!

Don’t worry; you got this. Writing a guest post is not all that different from writing for your own blog. Just ensure you meet the same high-quality standards you have for your own site. Be rigorous in your editing to ensure they see the best you can do.

The biggest difference in guest blogging can come from content guidelines. Ensure you meet all the site’s requirements. If they don’t have a style guide, ask about length, formatting, linking expectations, tone of voice and anything else you can think of. It’s always best to ask about these beforehand rather than learning about such rules and preferences only after you’ve transgressed them.

Promote It — a Lot!

Promotion is often just as important as the writing itself — no content creation strategy is complete without it. Promote your guest post on your own site, on social media, call your grandmother and tell her to read it. Do whatever you can to drive traffic to your article. 

Not only can this boost referral traffic back to your blog, but it also makes leadership at the other blog want to welcome you back for another guest post. It can also make other blogs and brands interested in collaborating with you.

How To Find Good Guest Posting Opportunities

The first step is to conduct market research. Following editors and content marketing professionals is a great ongoing best practice to ensure you’re always in the loop regarding new developments and trends. You can also join communities on forums and social media sites, such as Reddit and LinkedIn, to help you make connections.

It’s also valuable to monitor competitors’ backlink profiles. You can do this with tools, such as Semrush’s Backlink Analytics. Look for backlinks that come from guest posts, suggesting sites are open to accepting guest writers.

Guest Posting and Link Building: What You Need To Know

How can you maximize the value of guest posting to your link-building campaign? Let’s look at three things you can do to maximize the value of every guest posting opportunity:

• Guest post in moderation: Writing guest content clearly has value, but you don’t want to go overboard. Remember, “guest blogger” isn’t your job title; don’t exhaust yourself and subtract from the value of your own content. Furthermore, you don’t want to confuse and overwhelm your social media followers with a new guest post link every other day.
• Think beyond the link: Backlinks are a major benefit of writing a guest article, but they can’t be the only reason. You need the right guest post idea for the right host site, or your guest blogging strategy will lean too much on quantity over quality.
• Create a high-quality asset: As a guest writer, you want to create something of value to the audience of the target blog that ties into the content of your site. But crucially, the asset you link to must also be high quality and, ideally, conversion-focused. This way, you can drive traffic and conversions.

Common Mistakes To Avoid

Here are some errors that the successful guest blogger and SEO expert knows to avoid:

• Publishing low-quality guest posts: It cannot be overstated that the key to a successful guest posting strategy is quality. The same is true for all SEO efforts — if the content is suboptimal, it doesn’t matter how many keywords you use or how good your guest post pitch is. The finished asset must be top quality.
• Not tracking or analyzing outcomes: You can’t just write your blog post and hope for the best. That’s not how any successful content or SEO strategy works. You need to measure it. This means tracking branded search terms, referral traffic and conversions from that referral traffic.
• Link farming: Some guest blogging sites engage in link farming, i.e., publishing multiple guest posts daily with a litany of outbound links, often in exchange for money. Selling links violates Google’s guidelines and can result in penalties, such as webpage removal from SERPs.

Get Your Stuff Out There!

Every guest blog post is an opportunity to showcase your brand and your amazing writing skills. And the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it — provided you’re judicious with your efforts and only choose reputable websites.