Did you know that 76% of pages plan to publish between 1-10 guest posts each week? If you’re looking to keep up with the competition, you’ll need to ensure that you have a cutting-edge guest posting strategy in addition to your other search engine optimization efforts.
You also will need to make sure that your guest posts are of the highest possible quality. Read on to learn some of the biggest do’s and don’ts of guest blog posts when boosting your business visibility.
Do… Carefully Consider Publisher Sites
Guest posts are a type of blog post that require collaboration between your business and a third-party publisher site. A guest blog is written to feature your product or service and links back to you. This post is put up on the publisher site so that people reading that page can click the link and drive inbound traffic to your page.
Because the publisher/guest link relationship is so strong, you will need to carefully consider who you want to publish your guest content.
You’ll need a page that has the same target audience as you do (or at least a very similar one). If you choose someone in with completely different clientele, no one is going to be interested in the guest blog or click on your anchor text. Indexing bots may also view your site as irrelevant or poorly-established within your market, leading to you being placed lower in Google.
You also don’t want to choose a direct competitor. If you do, your link will be abandoned and thought frivolous and unnecessary. This can damage your reputation greatly.
Don’t… Mess Up Your Anchor Text
Anchor text is the word or phrase that your link attaches to within the body of the guest post. These clickable words take the reader to your webpage.
It’s important that you choose the correct anchor text to redirect to your website. The main types of anchor text include:
- Exact match, which links from the precise keyword that you want to optimize for (can backfire since crawlers may realize that you’re using paid link building)
- Partial match, where the anchor text uses all words in a query but not the exact keyword/phrase (usually the best choice for blog posts)
- Branded text, which is the name of your business/brand (often good for guest posts since it works to rank the post for those searching up your business
- Random text or CTA anchors, which inspire action (“click here,” “read more,” etc)
If you select a bad anchor text, you will get fewer clicks from the pub site. You also may not appear relevant to your own services in the eyes of Google crawlers.
Do… Research Your Target Market
Before writing a guest post or purchasing a package, you’ll need to research your target market a bit. Consider who is interested in your goods and services based on the pain points that you solve. Come up with demographics for your target audience including their age, gender, occupation, and income.
You can find this information with tools like Google Analytics. These trend-tracking technologies help you look into who clicks on your page and who stays on it. You can see the queries used to find the site and which parts of the website people tend to linger on.
Note all of these trends and take a look at the pages people seem most interested in. Write them down and create a buyer persona that works for your business. Make sure that you’re thorough in noting the objectives, pain points, long-term goals, ideologies, and needs of your ideal consumer.
You can curate your content based on your findings. Make sure that you tell the professional SEO agency that you hire exactly who you’re looking to target so that they can produce content that makes sense for the audience.
Don’t… Settle for Low-Quality Content
Guest posting services can work wonders for your SEO, but only if you use content that readers are interested in. This means that posts need to be relevant to your target market’s interests. It also needs to be well-written so that it consumers don’t immediately bounce.
Well-written blog posts share some features:
- No fluff and filler content
- Value-delivering sections
- High readability (short paragraphs and bulleted lists)
- Good spelling and grammar
- Relevent headers (both H2 and H3)
- Keyword incorporation without keyword stuffing
Don’t settle for anything less.
Don’t… DIY Your Guest Posts
While writing your own guest post might sound like an easy way to get inbound traffic, it’s a bad idea. Like all parts of your SEO strategy, guest blogging requires professional knowledge and tools to be effective.
Trying to get free guest posting by DIYing your campaign will cause a lot of problems. For one thing, you’re unlikely to optimize for the right keywords. This is a great way to ensure that your SEO is ineffective because you won’t have any guidance when it comes to choosing anchor text.
You also would be left with the formidable task of choosing (and contacting) your own publisher site. This would take a long time and you would need to negotiate what you want. Since you wouldn’t be associated with a reputable agency, it would also be challenging to get a publisher interested on incorporating your content onto their page.
Choosing the right professionals means that you can rest easy. We’ll help you identify your audience, select the right anchor text, and create high-quality keyword-rich content. We then will pair you with a willing and reputable publisher site to ensure that your content gets the most visibility possible.
Upgrade Your SEO Strategy Today
Now that you know some of the do’s and don’ts of SEO guest posting, it’s time to get started. We’re committed to helping you find the best strategy for your SEO campaign so that you can boost your visibility and get a wider clientele.
That’s why our experts look forward to discussing your individual digital marketing needs and the ways that you can buy guest posts that actually convert. Contact us for a half-hour SEO consultation so that we can discuss your specific needs ASAP.
