Why enterpreneurs should not use guest posting for seo

I am often asked to do guest posting for SEO purposes. I have always said that this is far from ideal, but earlier I could not thoroughly explain why it is better not to do it.

After more than two years of working for myself, I can say it as it is

I do not think that entrepreneurs should use guest posting for SEO purposes.

Before we begin, let me draw a distinction between the concepts of “expansion”, i.e., disseminating information to other platforms, for example, when we are producing or launching something new. Often this is a guest contribution and “guest posting”, when you write an article specifically for a website, post a link to your website on it, so we hope to increase the link weight.

That is why I think guest posting for entrepreneurs is a waste of time and resources.

Entrepreneurs already have an audience

An entrepreneur will not be an entrepreneur without his audience and income. He will just stop. It all depends on the business model and the required audience is commensurate with your profits and expectations, for example, from investors or markets, but the fact is that the audience already exists.

The entrepreneur rarely cares about following the recommendations of marketing experts, because the entrepreneur is busy scaling, their goal is to increase the scale of their activities faster. If you really solve a problem, many of your clients will become brand advocates anyway. As soon as you get to a certain level, marketing through guest posting will be ineffective in any case.

Entrepreneurs have resources, others do not.

Companies usually have many different departments and opportunities - marketing, products, sales, analytics, etc. Each of these areas in itself plays a very important role, but together they can do much more than individually.

Since companies have access to resources that others do not have, the potential to have more than the sum of individual parts is huge if you can make individual parts work together effectively.

The best marketing is a great product.

This is what one of the general directors once told me. He meant that you should have two things. First, if you do not release a product or create a service that resonates with people, who will then talk about you with friends, your product will not advance.

Secondly, without a quality product, your marketing team will become blind. PR exists to strengthen what is already in the company. You cannot get a larger reach or audience without doing interesting things on the side of the product you produce.

You will not build an audience through guest posting

If you are a small company in your niche, you can create a small audience through guest posts on hyperrelevant blogs. If you are an individual who is just developing its presence on the Internet, there is no better way to start creating your audience than:

• do cool things.
• write about them on your own site.
• find sites that your audience reads and look for ways to add value to this site.

Sometimes the game is delayed for a long time. I know sites that have filled up over the years and have become popular just now and they feel just fine.

However, for companies this approach works. If you are a large media company with a audience of 100 thousand and a turnover of several hundred million rubles a year, what do you get from guest posting? At best, he will give you some links and maybe access to larger sites, which will eventually become large. But if you write content specifically to get the link, while the whole movement is happening around you, are you really working on the strategy of the company as a whole? You may be working on an audience goal, because links can mean higher ratings and more traffic, but you contribute to a broader brand and business vision that the outside world cannot ignore. And do you do all this in front of a relevant audience? Perhaps, but hardly.

If you say: “But my public relations team will not allow content to be distributed to smaller sites!”. Then you have a lot more problems in your hands and you need to ask yourself, can your company really succeed in marketing? Sometimes it is better to move forward slowly and prove value. And sometimes they have to reach out to sites that are not intended for PR. Someday you will realize that nothing changes and it is time to make some adjustments to your work.

Google discourages guest post links

Since I am a professional in marketing, I felt in practice that Google tightened the rules around links. It’s harder to create links that help your traffic. And to be honest, I don’t think that Google really will somehow take into account guest posts in SEO.

What Google likes is good marketing. And this is not 500 words of unique content, write sled for a random site. Good marketing is already work done in a company (whose work you hopefully influence and manage) and its presentation to a new audience. This is not "fictional leadership." This is actual leadership because you are doing a great job and this is what people care about.

Good marketing enhances what is already being done, and it is much more valuable than just earning points before search engines.

Gain, not guest posting

Companies must switch from guest posting to enhancing the content created by a larger team.

Remember the differences between guest posting and boosts?

Guest posting is writing content for external sites in the hope of getting a link for SEO promotion. This content has minimal brand quality control and does not contribute to a much larger company strategy.

Gaining is like providing additional fire support, often with the help of unique articles for the further promotion of a large amount of content created by a larger marketing or product team. The goals here are referral traffic, new users (who, I hope, will become customers).

This is how I structured it all in the past:

• Ideas brainstorming the whole team (including grocery).
• It included SEO, PR, content, email and data science.
• Focus on a few ideas, start working on confirming or disproving this idea.

After you find the clue, the content team starts working on the creation, and the team of gain starts looking for and linking to sites that may be interested in what you are doing.

Highlight the placements and how you get your coverage there. This may include creating internal content in order to receive guest status on these sites.

???

Profit.

This is an enhancement, not a guest posting. This is a strategy, not a tactic.

Want to build your company? Invest in strategies, not tactics. Tactics come and go. Strategies are preserved even when tactics change.

Why am I writing about this strategy and the differences? Because it is very difficult to do everything well. We, of course, have not yet found a weak spot in search engines, but in two years we have achieved tremendous success.