Guest Blogging: Why Your Content Strategy Needs To Change
Content is the new and exciting strategy to build up your Google ranking and appear to more people in Google searches. So between providing answers to all of our questions, providing us with great marketing opportunities, and the opportunity to have your brand online, It is natural to think Google is a marketer’s best friend.
However, Google is at its core a medium for people to find the best that the web has to offer. When it comes to content strategy this is something we really need to remember.
This seems like an obvious revelation, but if that’s the case why haven’t you changed the way you write your content?
Have you tried to write for the consumer and not for the search engine? Have you written a piece to be loved and shared by everyone who reads it? Or have you been writing content to spam the web and hopefully grow your search rankings?
If you have been doing the latter, it’s time to stop and say goodbye to the strategy we like to call guest blogging.
Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Webspam informed the SEO community that “Guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well.”
What is Guest Blogging?
Essentially guest blogging is automated, low quality, outsourced content written in large batches to be distributed out to websites and published for a fee. This was commonplace and worked well many years ago, but now it’s time to move on or face extinction.
This sadly has generalised the concept of guest blogging, but if you are using guest writers to gain links in 2016 you should probably stop. On the flip side, if you have high quality multi-author blogs that provide awesome content and social influence, by all means continue to change the world one article at a time.
History of Google & What Next
If you go and read through information on many search engine websites, they can tell you that this isn’t the first time Google or Matt Cutts has discussed the risks with this SEO strategy. Look no further than Matt’s own blog post on the subject; he has also included all the videos from 2012 as a reference.
He outlines how this is often the case with cool strategies that work for SEO. A new strategy will start to be used that is legitimate and effective until lots of people pile on and it renders it illegitimate from then on. In short, we’ve seen this happen many times, you have missed the bus, so get creative and find a different route to get your result.
So guest blogging is dead, your content strategy is cancelled, and you’re left plan-less and in a panic. Where do you go from here?
Change can be scary, but don’t fret and fall back into bad habits or try to find another tactic to take its place. Create a content strategy that consumers will love as a priority, and then find ways to make it work for your rankings.
Write, curate and publish content that users will enjoy and share around, because you can put hours into developing a killer strategy, but if it isn’t valuable to the reader, it won’t be valuable to you.
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