We started working on a website in personal loan niche in Feb this year. At that time, this website was having a zero DA/DR and contains only 4 pages. I arranged 20 guest posts on the site from websites having DA metrics ranging from 93 to 50. The owner was also arranging some guest posts on high authority websites that allows free posting on subpages (teachable, nairaland etc). Now in August 2020, the site in question has a DA-29 & DR-27. It is ranking for 10 keywords as per Moz and 16 as per Ahrefs.
However, the website still has only 4 pages (including one home page and one Contact page). The owner has done absolutely nothing to grow the inbound traffic of the site. I see it as an opportunity lost.
Guest post, in the instant case, were a means for us to improve the overall standing of the site and I feel we did succeed in that. However, had the owner been more proactive in writing a blog on the website, he must have been receiving lots of inbound traffic. So, in my opinion, guest posts should be the part of a broader strategy to reach our target audience. If you just rely on them, your progress will be slow.