How to Develop a Guest Blogging Strategy for SEO

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Guest blogging has different use-cases that can help businesses achieve their goals. The most common ones are increasing your brand awareness and link building.

It’s so effective that Neil Patel considers it to be the heartbeat of his digital business.

However, you can’t submit guest posts on just any bunch of sites and expect results right away. To get the most out of guest blogging as an SEO tactic, first develop your content marketing strategy and follow the process below.

Search for Guest Posting Partners on Google

No matter what your niche is, there are countless guest blogging opportunities out there. You just need to know where to look.

And what better place to look for opportunities than Google?

However, to find the sites related to your industry, you must use the following search operators:

  • [topic] “write for us”
  • [topic] “guest article”
  • [topic] “guest post”
  • [topic] “guest blog’
  • [topic] inurl: contributor

Gather the relevant sites that accept guest posts on a spreadsheet. List as many sites as possible.

Read the Guidelines

Once you have your initial list of prospects, go over them one by one to check their guidelines.

Most websites that accept guest posts will state what they expect from guest contributions. If you want yours to be published on their site, it’s vital that you follow instructions carefully.

When reading their guidelines, you need to know if the sites allow either nofollow and dofollow sites.

But what’s the deal with nofollow and dofollow links? Aren’t they pretty much the same in terms of directing traffic to your website? Well, it depends on your purpose for the link.

The purpose of guest blogging is to pass link juice from their site to yours. The more authoritative the site is, the more potent its link juice.

Once it passes down to your site via backlinks, you can boost your site’s organic search rankings. It’s basically link building 101.

This reason is why dofollow links are important in guest blogging. You must identify sites that let you place relevant dofollow links to your site in the body or byline.

If the site only allows nofollow links, it’s best to skip it for now. Concentrate on websites that permit dofollow links and use that to link back to your site.

Determine the Site Metrics

Let’s face it. Writing a kickass guest post takes a lot of work. If you want your time and effort to pay off, you need to determine the metrics that will improve your site’s ranking.

Tools like URL Profiler or NetPeak Checker can help you check a website’s authority based on page PR, domain PR, Alexa ranking, DMOZ, and social Media mentions.

Although SEO, in general, can be difficult to track, setting KPIs can help you determine whether or not your SEO efforts are working. All you need to understand are these 5 SEO factors.

Research the Site First Before Making a Pitch

You always want maximum effect with minimum effort. So before you send your pitch, you might want to ask this important question: “Is this a blog worth contributing to?”

While you’ve researched the metrics of the sites, they don’t tell the entire story.

Some websites are relatively new, which explains their low DA and DR. However, if you visit their sites, they publish great content regularly and generate lots of engagement.

Therefore, do your own research and check if the blog is actually thriving. If there are tons of valuable comments, and the blog owner takes time to acknowledge every single one of them, then you can be sure that your guest post will have an audience.

Also, try to see if the site owner treats it like a business. You want to be part of a growing business venture and not just an author byline in a promotional tool.

Don’t Skimp on Quality

Whether you’re writing for your own blog or for someone else’s, always remember that quality content matters.

No matter how amazing your ideas are, writing low-quality and spammy content won’t communicate them properly. If your guest post isn’t good enough to put on your website, you have no business asking others to put it on theirs.

So, what types of blog posts should you be writing? Here are a few ideas:

  • Inspirational posts: posts that tug at the heartstrings and give people a sense that anything is possible in the world.
  • Interview posts: posts that are also known as expert roundups.
  • Crowd-sourced infographics: graphics assets that are highly shareable.
  • Pillar posts: in-depth articles that help establish a blogger’s authority and credibility.

Build Relationships With the Site Owners

At the end of the day, guest posting is all about building relationships with other site owners.

Yes, it can help you get some valuable links to your site, but the tactic lets one foot in their door. You can then use this opportunity to strike a collaboration with them.

Try asking the webmasters how you can provide more value to their website. They might just allow a couple of dofollow links in your content.

Also, blogger outreach can help you get more traction to your content. If you build trust with webmasters, they can help you promote your content on their promotional channels.

Conclusion

When developing a guest blogging strategy, the devil is in the detail. Writing the content is the easy part. The challenge comes from finding the most authoritative sites to submit your guest posts.

By following the process above, you can approach guest blogging in a deliberate manner that benefits your SEO.

This is a Contributor Post. Opinions expressed here are opinions of the Contributor. Influencive does not endorse or review brands mentioned; does not and cannot investigate relationships with brands, products, and people mentioned and is up to the Contributor to disclose. Contributors, amongst other accounts and articles may be professional fee-based.

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