SEO and Guest Blogs: Tips for a mutually beneficial collaboration

Introduction to SEO and Guest Blogging

In today’s competitive world, every business is looking for innovative ways to stand out and capture the attention of potential customers. One such tactic that has grown in popularity is the use of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and guest blogging. These two elements, when used correctly, can create a mutually beneficial partnership for businesses and bloggers.

Understanding SEO and Guest Blogging

SEO is a practice that involves optimising your website in order to improve its visibility for relevant searches. The higher the visibility of your pages in search results, the more likely you are to capture attention and attract valuable visitors to your website. On the other hand, a guest post is a blog article published on a website that isn’t your own. It’s an excellent opportunity to obtain high-quality backlinks to your site, increase your visibility, and reach a wider audience.

How Can SEO and Guest Blogging Collaborate?

SEO and guest blogging can work hand in hand to create an effective digital marketing strategy. Guest blogging makes it possible to incorporate return links (backlinks) to your website as part of the content. These backlinks are extremely valuable for SEO, as they signal to search engines that your website contains relevant, high-quality content. In turn, this can improve your ranking in search results, which can lead to an increase in traffic to your site.

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Setting clear objectives before any collaboration

Even before opening a spreadsheet to draw up the list of target publications, the first question to ask is: “What do we hope to get out of this guest-blogging campaign? . Do we primarily want to obtain quality backlinks, increase brand awareness, attract qualified leads, or test a new language market? The answer will determinethe entire set of KPIs, from the content produced through to the distribution method. For example, when the French start-up Swile expanded internationally, its first guest posts on HR Technologist and PeopleMatters had a clear objective: to validate the resonance of their value proposition among English-speaking HR directors and measure the traffic coming from these sources. Backlinks were only a bonus. Conversely, the London agency Seeker Digital sets as its primary goal the consolidation of the DR of its clients, even if that means publishing on blogs with a smaller audience, but high authority.

Identifying the right platform: beyond simple “Domain Authority

The most common mistake is to focus on a single metric indicator, whether it is Domain Authority (Moz), Domain Rating (Ahrefs), or Trust Flow (Majestic). Yet contextual relevance is increasingly taking precedence in Google’s algorithms. A link from an ultra-niche blog but read by the decision-makers in your sector will often be more valuable than a backlink from a generalist outlet overflowing with sponsored sections. The company Zapier, for example, did not hesitate to publish on relatively modest sites such as Process Street, judging their audience to overlap with that of its power users.

To assess this relevance, cross-reference several signals: the share of organic traffic coming from keywords related to your topic, the depth of exchanges in the comments section, the presence of segmented newsletters, or the recurrence of social shares. In the context of a B2B project, data from tools such as SimilarWeb or BuiltWith make it possible to check whether the readership does indeed match the typology of companies targeted (size, technology stack, geographic area). Finally, don’t forget to examine the profile of outbound links on the host site: a blog that links exclusively to online casinos or shady ICO sites remains a very bad signal, whatever its DA metric.

Build an irresistible value proposition for the host

Publishers are inundated with guest content proposals; yours therefore needs to stand out. Creating a UVP – Unique Value Proposition for each pitch is essential. Instead of a simple “can you publish my article?”, propose an exclusive survey, a quantified case study or proprietary data. When Backlinko approached BuzzSumo, Brian Dean came with an analysis of 1,000,000 rich snippets, offering something unprecedented to the editorial team. Result: the article was picked up by Search Engine Journal, Entrepreneur and dozens of influencers, multiplying the benefit for both parties.

Understand overlapping audiences

Carrying out an audience intersection is an exercise similar to what you do in product marketing. Use Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics or SparkToro’s “Audience Overlap” features to map common interests. You can then promise the publisher a concrete increase in reach: “Our newsletter has 25,000 subscribers, 48 % of whom already follow your podcast. We can guarantee multi-channel amplification.” This approach gives the negotiation the feel of a win-win partnership rather than a simple placement request.

Information research methods

To make this added value tangible, using original research methods pays off. Web scraping (while respecting the robots.txt), LinkedIn surveys, public databases such as data.gouv.fr or Kaggle: each newly analysed data point increases the appeal of your proposition.

Negotiate the SEO aspects: anchors, placement and context

A solid collaboration relies on transparency. Discuss in advance the type of links (dofollow, UGC, sponsored), the length of the anchors and their position in the site structure. Patrick Stox’s studies for Ahrefs show that a contextual link inserted in the first third of content of more than 1,500 words generates on average 20 % more organic traffic compared with a backlink placed at the bottom of the page. Nevertheless, imposing your will is counter-productive. Offering the publisher the freedom to rephrase the anchor or place it where it fits best ensures a natural result, a crucial parameter since the SpamBrain update of December 2022.

Do not neglect internal links either. Suggesting a few relevant URLs from the host site that your article could strengthen is a sign of seriousness. The team at Animalz does this systematically and thus achieves acceptance rates above 70 %.

Content quality: how to clear the editorial bar

Producing an SEO-friendly text does not mean stuffing the article with keywords. The goal is to reach the level of, or even exceed, the editorial standards of the host site. Analyse the average density of visuals, the presence of GIFs, original diagrams, expert quotes and adapt accordingly. For example, Shopify Plus requires a ratio of one chart per 400 words and refuses free stock images. With them, a B2B buying guide must contain at least three screenshots taken from e-commerce tools. This rigour is then reflected in SEO performance: according to SimilarWeb, Shopify’s guest-post pages generate 38 % more organic traffic than their native articles, precisely because the invited content often exceeds the industry norm.

Semantic interlinking also plays a role. Use named entities (organisation, person, place) to strengthen Google’s understanding in terms of « topical authority . Tools like InLinks or ThotSEO make it easier to detect these entities and insert schemas to correctly mark up your FAQs, HowTo or Product.

Technical aspects: markup, Core Web Vitals and structured data

A good guest post must be designed like a complete digital product. Check the loading speed of the host blog: if Time to First Byte exceeds 600 ms, offer the teams a mini Lighthouse audit. Optimising LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) or properly compressing images will benefit you twice over: better UX for readers and quality signals for Google.

Adding structured data (Article, Breadcrumb, FAQ, VideoObject) increases the post’s SERP visibility. For example, when Hotjar published a guest post on the blog of Crazy Egg with HowTo markup, the rich snippet obtained captured +6 pts of CTR, according to their Search Console. In the same vein, integrate Author Schema to reinforce the “Experience” attribute of your E-A-T.

Authority and E-A-T: capitalise on social proof

Since the introduction of the extra E for “Experience” in E-A-T, Google values content written by people with direct experience of the subject. Make sure the author’s biography reflects this experience: certifications, projects delivered, citations in the specialist press. The blog The Next Web now mentions the list of conferences where the author has spoken. This simple line strengthens credibility and positively influences E-A-T scoring. Contributors to WordStream add links to their Google Scholar profiles or their patents for a similar effect.

Concrete examples of successful collaborations

Buffer and the GrooveHQ blog: the alliance of storytelling and SEO

In 2013, Buffer published a 2,560-word post on the GrooveHQ blog entitled “How Buffer’s Founders Made It Past $100,000 In Monthly Revenue”. Beyond the inspiring story, the article incorporated cohort data, a revenue projection spreadsheet and several screenshots of internal dashboards. Result: 20,000 views in 48 h, 1,900 shares on Twitter and around a hundred inbound links for Groove. Buffer, for its part, gained a flow of qualified traffic that still represented 2 % of its new users six months later. The ancestor of data-driven guest posting.

Semrush & Search Engine Journal: a long-term partnership

Since 2017, Semrush has been publishing articles on Search Engine Journal almost monthly. This partnership has enabled them to test Google algorithm fluctuations in real time via rapid analysis posts. One of these posts, about the Medic update (August 2018), was cited by more than 340 referring domains. The advantage: in exchange for very technical exclusive content, SEJ allowed Semrush to place a dofollow link to its SERP sensors page. It’s a win-win deal: SEJ captures cutting-edge content, Semrush strengthens its authority and drives high-intent leads.

Spendesk & Lecko: a French case of editorial complementarity

In 2021, fintech Spendesk partnered with Lecko, an analytics firm specialising in collaborative usage, to produce a study on the digitalisation of the finance function. Guest article, webinar, infographic: the multichannel operation generated 1,200 e-book downloads and eight press citations in Les Echos and La Tribune. Backlinks from the lecko.fr domain (DR 71) propelled Spendesk’s “expense control solutions” page from position 19 to position 4 for the keyword “expense claim management” in three months, while consolidating the expert image of both entities among CFOs.

Risks and bad practices to avoid

Guest blogging with an exclusively SEO aim has given rise to a grey market: article farms, PBN networks, triangular link exchanges. These practices can lead to manual penalties. Let us recall the notorious case of MyBlogGuest in 2014: the platform had industrialised the exchange of guest posts, until Google publicly penalised it. Result: thousands of sites lost their traffic almost overnight. To avoid the boomerang effect, check that the host site does not have a large number of external links to “toxic” topics (pharma, gambling, dubious crypto), limit the frequency of your guest posts (no more than one per month on the same domain) and vary your anchors.

Do the same on the legal compliance side. In Europe, the Omnibus Directive requires transparency for sponsored content. Discreetly mentioning « partner article in a discreet CSS banner may be enough to remain compliant while preserving the user experience.

Post-publication tracking: KPIs and tools

The best way to prove the value of a guest post is to report a dashboard combining:

• Number of GA4 sessions coming from the referring link.
• Average time on the target page.
• Micro (newsletter sign-up) and macro (demo, purchase) conversion rate.
• Secondary backlinks (« link echo ) gained following media pick-ups.
• Change in the position of the targeted keyword.

Tools such as Looker Studio make it possible to merge Search Console, GA4 and Ahrefs visually. Also think about Google Alerts: set up a query « intitle :YourBrand to automatically detect any derived mention of the guest post.

Turn a one-off collaboration into a strategic partnership

A guest post shouldn’t be a one-night stand. Send a thank-you email to the editor with a mini report: « Your article generated 374 visits and three secondary backlinks in 10 days . Then propose a follow-up: an update of the content piece in six months, a podcast version, or the creation of a downloadable checklist. That’s how HubSpot built its « guest star series with Neil Patel, Rand Fishkin and then Dharmesh Shah. Each initial collaboration opened the door to cross-channel campaigns (webinars, trade shows, studies).

Conclusion: towards a lasting symbiosis between SEO and guest blogging

In an ecosystem where topical authority and trust are more decisive than ever, quality guest blogging remains a major asset. The players who succeed are those who view each guest article as a piece ofinbound marketing premium content, forming part of a long-term editorial partnership. By combining SEO requirements, journalistic rigour and added value for the audience, the collaboration between host and contributor becomes truly mutually beneficial — beyond a simple link exchange, it paves the way for co-creation of knowledge, a lever for sustainable traffic and shared sector recognition.

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