To succeed in SEO, it’s about more than just tweaking your website and adding content. Google measures websites on relevance and authority.

Relevance means optimising your website for given terms, such as your service and location, and adding content around it such as blog posts and service pages. This shows Google you’re a good match for the search someone is making.

Authority is more complicated. Google is in many ways a popularity contest. If lots of other sites are linking to yours, Google will see you as more important than a competitor who doesn’t have as many inbound links, and list you above them in search.

There are many ways to build inbound links, and one is guest posting. Having articles on blog sites which link back to your website is a common way of authority building.

So how to go about getting these guest posts? There are a few different methods:

1. Manual Outreach

Find relevant blogs and contact the webmaster directly asking to create a guest post for them. This way you will have complete control over what is published and will typically get it published in your name, increasing authority further. The downside is they will charge you “retail rate” for the post, and there’s a lot of effort involved in finding blogs and cooperative webmasters

2. Use a guest-posting agency

Agencies which specialise in building guest posts will offer posts on their network for a fixed fee depending on the website’s domain authority. Many SEO agencies simply use these services and mark them up (by as much as 500%) to their clients. Although it’s easy and quick, the downsides are: 1. it’s more expensive than the other options, 2. you have no control over the content, so it may contain information which is clinically inaccurate, 3. you have no control what blog it’s published on, and 4. you can’t get it published in your name.

3. Use a freelancer

There are many link-building specialists on freelancer sites who will write a guest post for you and publish it on their network. The upside here is that some of these freelancers have access to very high domain authority blogs and can publish a post on a respected website for a fraction of what an agency would charge. The downside is that the market is rife with scammers and pretenders who will promise you a high DA link and then try to fob you off with nonsense or spammy links from lesser sites (believe me, we’ve tried many of them). Although you can eventually hit gold, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.

4. Use a specialist agency platform

There are also agency platforms which connect you to hundreds or thousands of potential blogs with a fixed fee to publish a post. The upside here is that it’s cheaper than all the other options, and you have complete control over content and what blog it’s published on. The downside is that these are professional platforms. If you are inexperienced in guest posting and don’t write content that vibes with the blog then the webmaster will reject your post, and you will be forced to use their own (expensive) content-writing service. There are also often up-front fees designed for an agency using the platform for multiple clients.

There’s no simple way to build guest posts, which is partly what makes it a great SEO tool as most of your competitors won’t be doing it. We build mainly using agency platforms, then also with a few trusted freelancers and directly with trusted blogs in our own network. This way we build quality links for our clients whilst keeping the cost below what they would pay for a link-building agency.

Building quality guest-posting links is built into all our monthly packages.