Effectiveness of a Guest Blog if it is not getting you any traffic

[EricMoore]

Hi,

I have been paying adequate attention to Guest Blogging for the past 4-5 months. I have posted good quality articles on  some decently ranked websites. Of late I managed to get a guest post on a website with a page rank of 4. But I didn't get any referral traffic from it.

My concern was will the Guest Blog also contribute to my Organic Search ? Will google give me any points if my links on the Guest Blog are not generating any traffic ? I was under the impression that Guest Blogs will work in your favour and will help in improving your search traffic only if you have visitors from that particular page. Any comments on this ?

Eric

[ChrisDyson]

Hi Eric,

Are the links to your own website within the blog post followed?

Is your guest blog post indexed by Google?

Is the Blog that you posted your article on ranking for it's own brand terms (i.e. not penalised)?

If you can answer yes to these three questions then there is a very high chance that PageRank (or link juice if you prefer) will be passed from the guest post to your site, how much that moves the needle is subjective.

As Tom advises it is much better to try to aim your guest post efforts at sites that has an audience:

When I am qualifying sites for guest post opportunities then I will check the following:

1. Their articles receive a large number of social shares

2. They have a large RSS subscriber base or email list

3. The blog posts receive comments

There is a good post by James Agate on this topic over on the Moz blog

Ideally you want to be posting on places that your customers will hang out however they maybe direct competitors and it will be impossible to secure an opportunity.

For my clients I make sure the blog’s topic is relevant to the company’s (brand) readership/customers. I make sure the blog content is in line with the buyer personas outlined and their marketing journey, this does not necessarily mean that they are within the same niche but could be in a complimentary niche.

These guest posting opportunities will probably be a little tougher to secure but the extra effort will be worth it in terms of links, social shares and referral traffic.

[TomRayner]

First of all, it's important to mention that Google (as of yet) does not take into account traffic as a ranking factor.  It might take into account things like bounce rate and excessive 404s, but traffic isn't one of them as yet.

Therefore, just because a guest post isn't contributing traffic does not mean it would have "lost any strength", to put it one way.  Your post, provided that it's relevant, informative, is presented nicely and sits on a authoritative website related to your niche, will be passing on organic search strength.

Where I think the confusion may lie is that it sounds like you have been told not to guest post unless you can build up referral traffic and/or generate leads or connections from it as well.  This is very good advice.  Now, someone could go out there and guest post purely for organic search means, but in doing so, not only are they potentially missing out on relationship building, their sort of skewed perspective might lead them to write for search engines and end up manipulating where and how they blog.  It's when you start getting into the habit of writing for a search engine, rather than an audience, that mistakes creep in which may ultimately cost you.

In addition, if you're writing for guest blogs that you think have a connection to your business and so are writing for your target audience, your post may get more social shares (which can help organic strength) and you may invariably be writing for a better quality of blog if there is an engaged audience.

You've been given some good advice there Eric - generally aim to guest post on places that will drive referral traffic and will be for a targeted audience relevant to your niche, for the hope of further engagement.  Should it not work out, however, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will lose the "strength" of the page/blog for organic search reasons.