Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial aspect of digital marketing, which is required for expanding the reach of your website and boosting traffic and revenue. One of the most effective ways of SEO is link building, where you attract traffic to your website by placing links in other content that direct back to you.
Guest blogging or guest posting is a great way to get backlinks to your content. It is an efficient tool to attract targeted traffic to your website and increase brand visibility on the internet. For businesses that run blogs on their site, guest blogging is a natural step to take the marketing efforts further.
Quality content not only draws more audience but also signals to Google that you are a reliable source. This helps to improve search rankings and feature in prominent positions on search engine result pages (SERPs).
But before we get into the details of how to identify the right guest post sites for your blogging efforts, let us delve into the basics of guest posting.
What is guest posting?
Guest posting is the practice of writing blogs or other content for another company’s website. Guest blogs work best when written for a website belonging to the same industry and with a higher domain authority than yours. Guest posts are beneficial for both the guest writer and the host.
There are several advantages to writing guest posts.
● You can attract traffic back to your website.
● Your domain authority gets a boost if linked to high-authority domains.
● The credibility of your brand increases.
● You can build connections with people from your industry.
● It uplifts your link building efforts.
Why Focus on Quality over Quantity?
Some people choose to write a large number of guest blogs for any and every website they can contact, with the impression that it would bring more backlinks and thus boost rankings. However, focusing blindly on the quantity of guest blogs may end up harming your website in the long run.
Here’s why you should identify quality guest post sites first.
● It helps you build a brand profile as a thought leader or industry expert.
● You can boost followers and subscribers on other platforms as well.
● Authoritative backlinks boost search ranks quickly.
● You also get lots of referral traffic, leads, and potential customers.
● A website with high traffic is more likely to fetch clicks for you.
● Relevant websites attract targeted audience and reduce bounce rates.
Finding quality guest post sites require market research, email pitches, and other outreach methods to find the right fit.
How to Identify Quality Guest Post Sites?
Now that you know the importance of quality guest posts, you must figure out a strategy to identify the right sites for your business to write guest blogs for.
Check the website’s traffic, backlinks, and rank
A website can be considered high-quality if its traffic inflow is high and it features regularly near the top of SERPs. Only then can it provide a boost to your traffic, as many of its readers would choose to click your link and visit your site.
You should also check the kind of backlinks that the website already features on their blogs. If there are many spammy, broken, or irrelevant links, it cannot be considered reliable. Checking these three factors would help you weed out many websites that would not have made a difference to your marketing efforts.
Focus on relevance and target audience
Quality cannot only be determined by traffic volume and search ranks. For instance, if you find a high-ranking website with lots of visitors but completely unrelated to your field of business, it will not fetch positive results for you.
You should focus on writing for websites that are relevant to your content and thus have authority over your target audience. After all, you will only get customers if the people with those specific needs come to know about you. Advertising your content to the wrong audience will do no good in such a scenario.
Choose high authority websites
The domain authority of a website is a great testament to its quality. Domain authority is a rank allotted from 0 to 100, as a measurement of the website’s ability to rank on Google. Ideally, you should opt for high authority websites as they send stronger signals to Google to rank you higher.
Try to target websites that have a domain authority higher than 70. However, if they are rare to find or do not accept your guest post requests easily, you can choose websites with a DA above 40 at the least.
Read posting guidelines carefully
Websites generally have specific guidelines for writing guest posts. These can be related to the word count, language, tone, voice, graphical elements, topics, and other such aspects.
Writers may not be comfortable with websites that have too many instructions for writing guest posts, but they are beneficial to some extent. Higher standards imply that your blogs will be valuable and not many websites get the opportunity to write guest blogs for them. A lack of guidelines indicates that the website accepts any content, which is a red flag for your business. Thus, unless the guidelines are too illogical, choose that website to write for.
Study other guest posts on the website
Reading other guest posts will give you an idea of the website’s standards, type of blogs preferred, and additional factors to include in your post. It also gives an idea of what kind of websites are featured here, and whether the covered topics make sense for your business.
You will also be able to gauge how the other blogs have performed and determine whether writing for this website will be worth your while.
Analyze website visitors and social media presence
Top websites ideally include built-in analytics to help you track number of clicks and reader engagement. You can view factors such as:
● Number of people visiting the page
● Their geographical location
● Source of their traffic for referral verification
● The length of their session
● Further clicks on the website
Even if you cannot access all this data directly, choose websites that provide monthly stats and figures. Transparency in such matters imply that the website is well-performing and can fetch traffic for you.
Also, analyse their social media presence to get an idea of their followers and engagement rates. If you find a large number of followers from your preferred demographic, that is always a good sign.
Conclusion: Does the website deserve your content?
Quality guest posts require time and effort to create. You must produce unique content with original thought and expert opinions on the subject. In the absence of subject matter experts, you might also choose to get the blog outsourced. Hence, you must determine whether the website you choose is worthy of your content.
Judge by all the factors mentioned above and make an informed decision of how much your SEO and backlinking efforts can be boosted by the guest post. Also remember that you cannot hit the jackpot at one go. Consistent outreach efforts and effective pitches will go a long way in securing quality guest post opportunities.
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