Do Guest Post Links Still Drive Rankings In 2020?

Table of Contents

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) And Email Marketing

One of the ways to get get subscribers onto your email list is to put an optin form on your blog posts.

But you still need to get traffic to your web pages so you can move people from there onto your list.

If you’re relying on organic traffic rather than paid traffic, then for this to happen, you have to get your web pages to rank highly in the search engines.

And that involves a process called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

There are two sides to SEO – internal (tweaking your site and pages so that they’ll rank highly) and external (getting backlinks from other websites to your own).

One of the best ways to do internal SEO is to add internal links to your site.

Another is to use an SEO plugin like All In One SEO, Yoast or RankMath on your WordPress site.

External SEO requires time and commitment as you have to manually create backlinks to your sites and pages by…

leaving comments on other blogs
writing guest posts for other blogs (also known as guest blogging)
posting in forums and having a link to your site in your signature
posting your links on social media
sending out press releases

If you can afford it, you will get better and faster results if you outsource this task to someone else.

Where Guest Posts Fit In

One of the ways of getting backlinks has been to write guest posts for other websites and link back to your own site from within the content.

Some webmasters will allow you to write for their sites for free, others will charge a fee to publish your content.

But before you write a guest post, you should research the site you intend to publish content on.

Find out how it ranks in the search engines and figure out if publishing on the site is worth your time or not.

How Effective Is Guest Posting?

Hoth is an SEO service and they’ve been tracking the effectiveness of link building and have some interesting results to share.

With Google’s constant algorithm changes, there have been some recent theories about guest post links and if they still work.

So instead of theorizing, Hoth have some concrete results that they’ve been getting recently:

Check this out:

They have a client who is in the insurance industry.

That client bought a DA40+ guest post from them and within days of the post going live, their rankings for the keyword exploded.

DA, in case you don’t know, stands for Domain Authority. It’s a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and the number of total links, into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time. Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs.

Now site movements don’t always happen right away, (sometimes links can take up to 3+ weeks to take effect), but the result was pretty cool.

Even with a medium keyword difficulty, the power of the DA40+ link was able to impact their rankings big time:

Now, there’s another client who used a DA30+ guest post to tackle the lottery space.

Their page went from ranking in the 100’s to position 4 within a few months.

It goes to show that DA30+ links can be effective in pushing rankings:

Here’s another client in the medical industry who purchased several DA40+ links.

This was a very competitive keyword that they were able to rank for by using multiple DA40+ guest posts:

Hoth track metrics like this every day and guest posts are still killing it in 2020.

One link alone isn’t going to move your entire site to page one and keep it there, but if you want to get your rankings going in the right direction, then this is your secret weapon.

If you’re reading this post in March 2020, then Hoth have a 3-for-2 sale on guest posts (buy 2, get 1 free). The sale closes at Midnight PDT, March 31st.

Think about it, that’s a 33% discount on powerful links, that are going to move the needle.

Get in on this deal and get your SEO going…

You can order guest posts on sites from DA10 up to DA50 and guest posts can be from 500 words up to 2,000 words long.

Conclusion

As with a lot of aspects of online business, building backlinks and writing guest posts comes down to putting in the time or hiring someone to do the job for you.

You have to weigh the cost of paying to have a guest post written against how long it would take you to research and write the post and find a site with a suitably high Domain Authority to publish on.

And you may be charged a fee to have your post published.

If writing isn’t your strong point or all the prep work makes you feel like a gigantic task is ahead of you, then outsource the work to an expert.

They know the SEO business better than most of us, so why not put that expertise to use and devote your time to other aspects of your business that your time would be better spent on.