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Whether you are trying to build links and establish relationships for your brand/website or simply love writing, guest posting is one of the most popular ways to provide relevant and unique content to a group of audience. Through high-quality content, you will be able to attract visitors and potentially convert them into sales for your business. Today we will look at Guest Post outreach as a way to help your link building strategy.
Undoubtedly this technique of finding relevant targets for your niche is probably one of the fastest and cheapest methods. Many link building strategies incorporate a big number of subscription-based software to help you speed the process but this guide is designed to both help you save as much money as possible and at the same time still be efficient.
In this method, we will be using Ahrefs in order to set some parameters for our targets. What I mean by this is, that we will be looking at DA, Organic Traffic, Keywords Ranked, and Anchor Text. The reason I do this is that when you have an already established site/brand that has a decent link profile, you need to shoot a little higher than you would when a startup is involved. In this case, my main parameter of a potential outreach target is DA. I will be using any sites above 20 DA and below 75 DA. The reason I do this is that websites with 75 DA and above are into the competitive range and these sites receive one of a kind, amazing content that will most likely answer any questions you may have about the subject or query. These types of sites usually have articles from 2000+ (sometimes in the tens of thousands) word count where you go as much in-depth as possible on the subject. If you feel like you have the best content on the subject, then go ahead and reach out to these high authority sites.
How can you tell if the targets are a home run for your guest post outreach?
Here is an example:
This is literally a gold mine. As you can see you have a decent DA of 45 DR (fits right in the middle of our range). The organic keywords are 12,800+ and keep increasing. The same goes for traffic. You can see the organic traffic at 5,100+ with a monthly increase. This means that at least 5k people visit the site every month. Some people might say that this is nothing crazy but here is the secret. This is a niche-specific site (interior design) and the only visitors are people who are interested in purchasing furniture or other products for designing the interior of their house. Now you can imagine out of these 5k visitors if you get 200 people to read your article and out of these you might have potential sales. For example, if your article is about “bedroom furniture trends of 2020” and your products fit into that category, chances are some people actually might be interested in changing their bedroom and the first place they see is a link to your website.
However, let’s not forget, the reason we are doing this is strictly for link building but you can see how this can benefit you if you pay more attention and spend a good amount of time targeting your business niche. Unless your article is keyword-stuffed or you abuse specific anchor text too much, this website will most likely never get you penalized by Google, in fact, it will take quite a lot to boost your rankings.
Keyword (your niche or target keyword) + “write for us”
Example: kitchen cabinets + “write for us”
Keyword + “Guest Article”
Keyword + “Submit Guest Post”
Keyword + “Guest Post”
Keyword + “Contribute to us”
And many others… Find the one that works best for you and you can rotate them with the same keyword to give you different results from which you can discover your targets.
SEO Quake is a really good plugin for Chrome that can give you all kinds of stats regarding a SERP or a specific site. It is a quick plugin that analyzes a site with a simple click.
Here is what it looks like:
I won’t go in-depth as much because this is not the reason I use the software. I know there are more convenient ways out there but I use this software to download the SERP result from Google.
After I have exported the SERP, a file that looks like this:
My next step is to select all of these and go back to Ahrefs. When you have it open you will go to the top right of the navigation bar and select “More”. You will see a drop-down menu with a “Batch Analysis”. This is where you want to go.
All you have left to do is insert your SERP results into the prompt window and leave only the domain.com/ path. This means that anything before the domain and after the .com/ should be deleted (just in case sometimes it does not run the analysis). After that you will get something that looks like this:
You click export and get another excel. Once you open the excel you can weed out any site that does not fit YOUR parameters that you have set (which we talked about earlier). As you can see all you need is these two tools or any similar once that can provide you with the same features. There are many SEO tools out there but always focus on what is useful for you rather than having an excess amount that performs the same things.
Of course, by no means, you are done. Now comes the hardest part: Outreaching to your targets. You should look for a method and customize it to your own likes. No matter the way you take, you will most likely need several pieces of information on your target website to pitch your content.
Some are:
These are only a few things that you need to consider. Obviously you would need to write a good and convincing email pitch. Many people use templates to make the work easier and also customize them as they move along. There is enough information out there on the guest post pitch, that I will not go into it because it is a completely different subject.
I personally love using this method. Once you get everything settled down into a structure from finding your targets to pitching your content, you will find out that you might only need a few hours to pitch your content to as many as 50 targets. My advice is always to do as much outreach as possible because you never know just how many webmasters might take interest in your content. I hope this guide was helpful and I wish you good luck in your guest post endeavors.
Robin Khokhar is an SEO specialist who mostly writes on SEO. Thus sharing tips and tricks related to SEO, WordPress, blogging, and digital marketing, and related topics.
Hi Robin,
Thanks for the great tips. I am going to try for SEOquake for sure. I am using Guest post tracker to find guest post sites and hunter extension to find their mail Id.
Regards
Arumugam