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Create A Custom SEO Strategy For Long-term Growth

Establishing an effective, custom SEO strategy for your business is more important now than it ever has been. The global pandemic has created a strong awareness of the options that exist to people in a contactless environment.

Many people will continue to explore those options long after the pandemic is over. As online searches continue to surge, companies are experiencing a large increase in the demand for their products.

The benefits of SEO have never been greater. A top-ranking in the search results for important keywords can contribute to the largest source of leads and new clients your business acquires.

Many companies relying on the in-store experience have felt the impact, while those positioned at the top of the search results have experienced a boost in brand recognition and overall sales.

The bottom line is that your business needs to be prepared for more digital solutions in a contactless environment. A custom SEO strategy is one of your best solutions to ensuring long-term growth.

Why is SEO important in 2020?

Despite the inevitable end of a global pandemic, the behavioural patterns of the typical consumer has been changed forever. Online searches have surged creating massive traffic opportunities for companies to capitalize on to increase revenue.

So many have turned to online shopping for the first time. As people become more accustomed to researching and making purchases online the trend in online sales will continue to skyrocket.

Ecommerce is booming and will continue its rapid expansion of total sales. The numbers this year will break all records and extend past initial projections.

ecommerce predictions suggest increased importance of a custom SEO strategy
image source: https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-ecommerce-2020

How can you position your company to benefit from the inevitable shift in the way we do business?

Position your website to receive increased search traffic to capture more leads and new clients. Execute a custom SEO campaign designed to drive traffic from keywords that are important to your business.

What is an SEO campaign?

An SEO campaign is a process that improves your website’s search visibility through improved rankings in keyword searches. It results in attracting visitors who are a match to what your business offers in products and services.

An SEO campaign provides the blueprint for developing your site in the major keyword topics that surround the inner workings of your business. As you build content that answers questions and educates visitors, your site becomes increasingly relevant to keyword searches.

As a result, your website appears in keyword-related searches from users at different stages of the buyer journey.

The buyer journey details the different types of content that need to be created in an SEO strategy
image source: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/what-is-the-buyers-journey

The goal is to create a website that has the ability to drive traffic, educate prospects and convert visitors to clients.

How to customize your SEO strategy and build an effective SEO campaign

The main focus of an SEO campaign is on the keywords you target and the content you publish. The largest ranking factor is being the best result to a search query. An SEO campaign builds the relevance of your page to the keyword topics and targets.

Understand your audience by researching your target keyword

Establishing search intent is crucial to understanding what it is that Google is using to rank pages highly in a search result. Keyword research is the first area that establishes the foundation of an effective SEO strategy.

What is the user truly expecting to find when they type in a search query?

Whenever you’re considering a keyword to target, the first action is to use that keyword in a search. The SERP (search engine result page) contains a lot of information that will point to what is needed to rank for the search term.

Reverse engineer the way other pages have achieved a top ranking to provide clues on how your site will outperform your competition.

Perform a SERP analysis

For every keyword search you will find the following on the SERP:

  • The level of competition that competes for the first page
  • The type of content that is being used to rank
  • How pages are optimized to perform
  • How many links are pointing to the ranking pages
  • How Google displays the search result
  • The commercial value of the search term

Establish intent

The first assessment is whether this term is a perfect fit for your company. If the pages that rank are all competitors that are offering the same product or service it confirms the relevance of the keyword to your business.

If there is a mix of results, consider a more specific search term to avoid unwanted traffic that wouldn’t be interested in your content.

Assess the competition

Using software and keyword tools becomes necessary in order to establish the authority competing pages have built. By identifying the number of links each page has pointing to it, where those links came from and whether they will benefit your site is the first indication of how realistic your keyword is to rank.

Build a list of alternative keywords

A search result can display many different features that are clues to what users are searching for when they search for your keyword. Establish commonly used phrases and keyword alternatives to build a better understanding of what the bigger picture is to the user’s true intent.

Read more on how to choose the perfect keywords for your site

Prioritize your target keywords

Keyword research will result in a large list of keywords, keyword synonyms and related search phrases. Prioritize your list in order of importance. Group your keywords based on search intent.

The result should be a keyword strategy that addresses the most important aspects of your keyword topic. This is the initial blueprint of a keyword strategy that lays the foundation for your content strategy.

Develop your Content Strategy

The approach you take on building content should be to provide as much information about your business by building a resource of information. The content you publish should answer common questions, provide insight and educate based on satisfying the intent of the keywords you target.

As your site becomes more successful in ranking for these terms, it increases the trust search engines place on your website for keyword related searches.

Map your content to match your keyword strategy

A visual representation of a keyword strategy is known as a topic cluster. Google ranks pages based on topical relevance. Connecting the ideas and concepts of your main keyword topic builds more relevance to your site and to the pages that are interlinked.

topic clusters concept to structure your content in an SEO campaign
Image source: https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/what-are-topic-clusters

The pillar pages of your site will target the most important keywords. The clustered content will target more specific searches that serve connect visitors to your business by addressing the various details surrounding your keyword topic.

Read about how to implement pillar pages

Publish content that performs

The content you publish needs to serve the user’s purpose. If there are massive guides that are published on the first page of results for your keyword, it indicates the level of detail that’s required.

The Skyscraper method is a common approach to making sure your content is 10 times better than anything that ranks.

Using this approach ensures you cover the topics and subtopics necessary to address the intent of a search.

Read about how to write SEO content that ranks highly

As a local business, publishing local SEO content is a strategy that enhances your local search appearance.

Optimize for traffic opportunities

When your page ranks at the top of a result, it ranks for a number of different keywords. People use a number of different terms in a search-even though they are searching for the same content. Part of your content strategy includes optimizing for additional terms as well as traffic opportunities that exist in Google features.

Featured snippets and PAA boxes, for example, are considered and traffic opportunities because they are features that attract a percentage of clicks on the search engine result page.

featured snippet and PAA box are traffic opportunities in your content strategy

Optimize to appear in these features for additional traffic to the same page for multiple related search terms.

Link building strategy

Link building is necessary to get votes of confidence in the quality of your content. Well-placed links to your content build credibility and authority in your niche and industry.

There are a number of different link building methods you can employ, but regardless of what you choose the strategy should appear as natural as possible.

A common tactic employed is to assess your competitor’s links. By identifying where their links come from, you can pick up on a few links for your site.

Not every link on a competing page will be good for your ranking. In fact, there may be links pointing to their site that don’t help them and are hurting their ranking potential.

Choose to pursue links from websites that have traffic and whose visitors will be genuinely interested in your content. This approach helps to identify the sites that have a strong relation to yours and also get more people on your site that has a strong possibility to become clients.

Reach out to similar niche and authority sites

Most SEO campaigns require some level of outreach. In order to get links in the most natural way, it’s common to reach out to website owners who publish similar content.

The success of your link building depends largely on the quality of your content. When you have good content worth sharing people won’t mind linking to it.

Achieve goals and benchmark your success with your SEO strategy

Every SEO campaign should end with the goal of driving traffic to your site from keyword searches that serve a role in your overall keyword strategy.

Creating content that ranks is a primary function of traffic generation. With the right keyword strategy, your website will thrive from the flow of visitors that convert to clients.

Customize your SEO campaign to achieve keyword related goals and drive traffic that converts.

How To Build Local Links To Attract More Clients

Local SEO is a crucial part of any business whose clients are mainly sourced from a specific location. In order to take advantage of high converting local traffic, it’s important to optimize your website for a specific location. Build local links to improve your local search presence and drive more clients to your site from a specific location.

Building citations from directories and encouraging clients to leave a Google review will only get you so far. It’s important to acquire as many local links as possible to fuel your site’s local ranking ability.

The more ties you have to a locality with quality links, the more you’re able to demonstrate authority in your keyword topic and city.

Link building includes a wide variety of links that aren’t necessarily from high domain authority sites. The most important aspect of local link building is that your links come from relevant sites (niche specific) and are related to the area.

Major directory local link building

The best way to pursue link building is to build links in a way that is natural and logical. When a company first opens its doors for business, among the first logical places to get listed is in the city directories that locals are using.

Google Local Finder

One of the major directories that are obvious is Google’s local finder. The local pack (the three listings that Google highlights in a local search) is an excellent source of traffic for generating local leads.

Build local links to rank highly in Google's local finder

You can sign up to be found in Google’s local finder by optimizing a Google My Business profile. Use as much information as possible so that your site will be eligible for as many different types of searches as possible.

Bing local places

Bing has the second-largest share of searches as far search engine market share goes. Listing your business here is not just for that fact, but for the validation that Bing provides to your Google listing. 

In order to optimize locally, your site should be sending as many ranking signals as possible. Confirming your name address and phone number across major directories strengthens your local ranking in Google’s local finder as well as localized search results.

Use the option to synchronize your Google My Business account information with Bing. Any changes made to your Google account will automatically be updated in Bing. Not only is this advantageous to maintaining your ranking signals through identical NAP details but it saves you time from filling out all the information again.

Yellow pages business | Local business marketing solutions

This is another major directory that your business will benefit from being listed. Yellow Pages has a dozen other affiliate sites that collect your information from their database. If you’re listed on Yellow Pages you automatically get listed in other directories that will add to validating your local presence.

City-specific directories

The next tier of directories you should pursue is those unique to the city in which you are ranking your website. Create a listing in directories that receive traffic and which people are actually using to find local places.

You can search for city directories by typing in [your city] + directory. Vary your search by typing [your keyword] + [your city] to see what directories are ranking for that keyword. If a directory shows up in the first few pages of search results, it’s a good indication that there’s value in listing your business in it.

Niche-specific directories

The same concept should be applied to niche-specific directories. Be more selective about the directories in which you create a profile. Low-quality sites may have an adverse effect on your ranking. Search for niche-specific directories by typing in [your keyword] + directories to get a list of options.

Unstructured citations

These types of links are considered to be the most valuable for building a strong local link profile. An unstructured citation is a mention of your company on a site that doesn’t specifically have a place to fill it out.

You receive structured citations on directories, review sites and other sites that provide a specific place for listing your information.

If a company mentions your website on their blog, it’s an unstructured citation. It is much more difficult to acquire backlinks such as these which is why they are so valuable. They represent a true vote of confidence in the credibility of your company.

How to get an unstructured citation

It all boils down to outreach. To get another site in your city to mention your business, you need to ask the site owner to link to your site. This is most likely to happen from clients, vendors or businesses in a close vertical to your own. 

Obviously a direct competitor isn’t going to want to send traffic to your site. Look for companies in the same city that offer related services and products. You can form a coalition of sorts to help promote each other’s business with a link arrangement or content collaboration.

For example, if you own a restaurant the bakery in which you get your dinner rolls would have no problem linking to your site. They have a vested interest in your success so they are an excellent link prospect.

In many cases, you may need to be creative with the ways you acquire your backlinks. One option is to create content for another site’s blog. Infographics typically have more leverage because of their visual appeal.

Related reading: A Crash Course In Broken Link Building

Resource page link building

Discover local sites that have published resource pages that list links they have found useful to their business. Website owners will often link to their vendors, suppliers and other organizations that are related to their products and services.

You can use the search operator “inurl” when searching Google to display sites with a specific keyword in their URL. Most resource pages are titled “Resources”, “Links” or Resources and Useful Links” so the URL will typically reflect those keywords.

To find these pages type into Google searches such as:

[your keyword] inurl:links

or

[your keyword] inurl:resources

Resource page results for Toronto websites with keyword "software"

Choose sites that are relevant to your site and would be a good match for the link prospects list of resources. Having a resource page of your own can help leverage your success rate, however, keep in mind that too many link exchanges may trigger an unnatural link pattern.

Related reading: 9 Effective Backlinking Strategies for 2020

Local charities and organizations

There are many organizations that list the names and websites of sponsors who have contributed to their cause. Making a donation to these sites can earn you a spot on their list.

You can also donate products and services to those that will benefit from your offering. For example, if you’re a web designer you could offer to revamp a local charity website. The likelihood of the organization allowing you a link from their site goes way up with acts of generosity and kindness.

Job postings

Post a listing for a job offering on local sites. It’s an easy way to tie in your business with the city in which you’re trying to rank.

Host an event

Use sites like Meetup to host local events. Not only will you build local links from the event your posting on the site, but also it’s a way to build new connections with businesses in your area.

Local newspapers

If you have some newsworthy content to promote, local newspapers can be an effective source for local links. Whether it’s an event your hosting, or news that the community can benefit from, a link from a local newspaper will get your site in front of a local audience and contribute to your local ranking.

Review sites

Apart from the biggest review sites such as Yelp, every city has websites that are frequently viewed by locals who are researching businesses. Get your site listed here and encourage people to leave reviews about your services. These sites are specific to your city and will anchor your site as a local business in the area.

Build your local presence with local links

Local businesses do not typically have extensive high authority link profiles. It’s just not common for local businesses to invest large budgets into SEO content and link building campaigns. Most local businesses acquire natural links through directories and sites that are native to the city in which they do business.

Plan to build local links from a variety of the above-mentioned sources. Local links are the most powerful sources when it comes to appearing in local searches.

Related reading: 5 Link Building Strategies That Attracts Customers

Don’t overdo any one type of link and maintain a natural acquisition of links throughout your campaign. Building 100 directory links in one day is not a natural link velocity.

As one of the highest converting sources of traffic, the local search results will contribute to the revenue your business generates.

Increase the number of local clients your business acquires with local SEO services in Toronto. Build local links to improve your local ranking for keywords that are vital to your business.

A Crash Course In Broken Link Building

Broken link building is just one of many backlinking strategies used to acquire links to your website. The short summary of how to execute a broken link building campaign is:

  • Find a website that would be ideal to link from to your site,
  • Identify any links on the site which are broken (the target page no longer exists)
  • Create content to replace the link
  • Contact the site owner to have the link replaced with your own

In a recent outreach article, I asked Brian Dean what strategy he thought was the most effective link building strategies for 2020 and broken link building was his immediate response.

Brian Dean names broken link building as the most effective link building strategy in 2020

Brian, who is one of the industry’s most well known SEO’s, boasted a 10% conversion rate on his latest campaign. This is an important point because when you set out to accomplish your link building campaigns you should set some realistic expectations.

Most people do not welcome email that essentially is a request for a link. If you’ve ever run an outreach campaign, it can be frustrating at times with the response you receive. If a 10% conversion rate is an above-average result, you can expect to hear deafening silence from over 90% of the webmasters you contact.

This is what makes broken link building a more attractive method of acquiring backlinks. Your outreach email is based on providing value for all parties involved.

  • The website owner improves the UX and the SEO of their site
  • The users are not taken to an error page
  • You receive a juicy backlink

Automate broken link building with software

The best way to go about broken link building is to automate the process with software. Ahrefs seems to be the best option for identifying broken links because their software will scan an entire website and list every link that is broken.

The poor mans version of this process would involve a manual discovery whereby you would be required to go page by page and use an extension to highlight broken links. You can download an extension such as broken backlink checker (a bit out-dated) or check my links (recommended), both of which you can find in Chrome.

Build a list of prospects

The best option for the most success is to target sites that would have a lot of links pointing to their pages. You want to be able to find a broken link that not only one site owner will be happy to replace, but a number of site owners. If there is a missing page that 100 people have linked to, your chances of acquiring links go way up.

Make a list of the top sites in your industry. Shoot for the stars. Target domains with high authority and decent amount of traffic.

Plug your prospect site into Ahrefs and click on the inbound links. You can then click on the broken link tab to pull up a list of links that need replacing.

Choose topics to compliment your niche

When you’re looking at links to replace you will need to choose content that best suits your specialty.

Find links to pages that you are able to write quality content unless you’re outsourcing a freelancer to do your writing.

Although you are bringing a broken link to the attention of the site owner, you will still need to provide a good piece of content that will earn the link.

Hindsight is 20/20

If you’ve never used the Wayback Machine, get ready for journey back in time. This particular marvel of a site will show you what the page used to look like before it was deleted or moved. This is an important part of the process because you need to set the standard for the content your replacement page will need to cover.

Assemble the troops

Now that you have content that rivals your successor, you will need to get it in front of those who have linked to the page. Type in the URL of the broken link into Ahrefs and get a list of the sites that are linking to that page. You now have your list of sites to approach for link replacement.

Find the right email addresses

This part of the process can be automated with software like Hunter. Hunter offers a free option but if you want to find hundreds of email addresses in one fell swoop you can opt for the paid version and upload the list of websites.

You may want to rifle through your results in order to make sure you are sending your outreach to the right person. List your prospects on a spreadsheet in order to set yourself up for a template email approach.

Automate your outreach

Ninja Outreach can be your best friend for saving time in the outreach process. Your approach to contacting webmasters is already packed with value so make your email as simple as possible. Here is an example of what will get the best response.

Broken link building outreach email

Pay it forward

One twist to this method that many SEO’s overlooks is the potential to appease the fourth party. Everyone in the broken link building method seems to win-except one. The website who lost the link.

You can pay it forward and show appreciation for their loss by linking to their content. By giving the previous link holder a link from your content you really are creating a winning situation for all parties involved.

Conclusion

Consider the number of people who are spamming sites and asking for favours and this method of link building becomes more attractive by showing upfront value.

The truth is you can scale up your link building by using this strategy as opposed to the more time-consuming methods, such as guest posting.

As one of many tools you can use in your link building arsenal, broken link building tends to get a higher response rate than simply asking someone to link to your content.

Don’t be discouraged by dismal response rates. Outreach, in general, is riddled with a lack of response. The average conversion on an outreach link building strategy is somewhere around 8%. If you can get to that number or above, you’ve outperformed the standard, cleaned up the internet and acquired some juicy backlinks for your site.

Related reading: How To Write SEO Optimized Blog Posts

Whitby Local SEO Tactics To Rank On First Page

The growth of your business is not something that should be left to chance. Take control of the future of your company by making sure those that are looking for your products and services can find you. Strong local SEO will get your site ranked highly on Google for local search results. Whitby local SEO is one of the go-to sources for lead generation and new clients for a local business in Whitby.

The value of appearing in the organic local search results is obvious. Why not be found by people who are actively searching for your product? No matter if you’re a new business or have been around for years, you can increase the number of people who find you by improving your SEO.

The fastest way to make this happen is to hire an SEO company in Whitby. However, if you’re feeling brave enough, here are two major tasks to accomplish to make your website rank higher in the local organic search results.

  1. Optimize your website
  2. Build local backlinks

Improve your on-page SEO for searches in Whitby

The process for optimizing your website starts by making sure you have adequate content on your website. One of the biggest hurdles to overcome is making sure you have covered the content topics of your business. The ultimate goal is to answer every possible question a visitor may have who lands on your site by publishing local content about your company and what it offers.

Part of this process requires building a blog with linkable assets. Not only does this serve as a resource for your clients and potential customers, but also it gives other websites a reason to link to your site.

Google bases a large part of its ranking criteria on the trustworthiness of your site. Is your site credible, authoritative and considered a source for expert opinion? Building a blog that generates traffic and backlinks demonstrates these qualities.

If you are knowledgeable about your business and can publish content to teach people about it in an organized manner, you are about halfway to owning a website that ranks highly. The two biggest areas to spend time on will be your content and backlinks.

Use as many optimization tactics as possible to improve your on-page SEO. Once you have built an optimized website, the final task to improve ranking ability is to acquire quality backlinks.

Whitby local link building strategy

Competing on a global level allows you to find websites from anywhere in the world to link to you. The challenge is how to get the websites with the greatest amount of authority to link to your site. This is the same concept for local SEO but within your target city.

A local business can use links from around the world to build authority to a website, however, they don’t have the same power to create a local presence. Acquiring links from websites in your target city are the most powerful backlinks for ranking in that city.

Think of links as referrals

A link from another website is similar to a referral from another business. Collect the most trusted types of referrals for your website to see the greatest gains in your site’s ranking. The more quality referrals your website acquires, the more convincing it is to search engines to rank your site closer to the number one position.

Let’s assume that you are in the market to buy a swimming pool. You ask two people for referrals on who they believe to have the best reputation for quality. One of the people you ask runs a bakery, and the other is another pool manufacturer. Whose opinion do you think would be more knowledgeable?

Obviously the person who is in the same industry should have more insight into the business. Think of the links you acquire from websites in the same way. The more relevance your links have to the keyword you are trying to rank for, the more powerful they are in moving your site to the top of the search results.

How do I find local sites in Whitby to link to my website?

The beauty of local SEO is that you can limit your search to the city you are trying to rank highly in. Resource page link building is an effective strategy to find sites that have pages that link to useful sites, suppliers and vendors. Here’s how you can execute a resource page link building strategy.

Create a list of link prospects

There will obviously be a tiered level of the quality of links you will find, so your first task will be to make a list of prospective links to choose from. You can start your search by typing the following into Google:

[your keyword] + [your city] inurl:links

The search results will list websites that are associated with your keyword and city and have the word “links” in the URL. For example, if your company does landscaping in Whitby, this would be a search you could perform to find relevant links:

landscaping Whitby inurl:links

To produce these results:

Resources page link building example of a Whitby local seo strategy

If you take a look at the first result, it is a site located in Oshawa, which is next to Whitby. This means it isn’t the best type of link if you’re targeting Whitby however, it is extremely relevant because it’s the next town and it’s a gardening site. This is a link prospect you would want to pursue.

You can repeat this search replacing variations of your keyword to generate different results. You can also replace the word you tell Google to look for in the URL with another probable word such as “resource” or “resources”.

[your keyword] + [your city] inurl:resources

The goal is to get links from the sites that are closely related to yours. If there is a slight connection you can still use those types of links to tie in your website to your city for a stronger local presence.

Tier 1 vs. tier 2 links

Separate your list into two tiers based on the relevance of the link prospect. If the website is not in your industry but is in your city, you would consider it a tier two link. Your first tier consists of the websites you will contact first because they are in your city and relevant to your business.

Make contact with relevant sites

This stage of the outreach process is the first of a two-pronged approach. You want to make contact with the website owner first before you go asking them for favours. At the end of the day, you’re asking other sites to give you a link so you don’t want your first impression to repel the owner or for your email to be dismissed as spam.

Here is an example of an email that will get your prospect warmed up to the idea of giving you a link to your site simply because you aren’t asking for anything.

Example of Whitby resource page link building outreach email

The ask

Once you’ve sent this email, follow up with a second email, asking for the link to your site. What is proven to do wonders for your success rate is to offer value to your prospect as a way gaining more favour and encouraging them to give you what you want.

Avoid link exchanges

Try to avoid reciprocal links. A few instances of where you link to another site and they link back may not harm your site, but too many link exchanges may have an adverse effect on your site’s ranking. It’s ok to engage in a few, but if your backlink profile is all link exchanges, you run the risk of being flagged for unnatural link building.

Offer value by finding broken links

One way to offer value is notifying the prospect of any broken links to their site. By using the Chrome extension “broken link checker” you can quickly identify any broken links on the resource page and let the webmaster know about it.

example of finding broken links for whitby landscaping link prospects
Example of using Broken Link Checker to find the broken links on a page

Your next email can go something like this:

The ask email that informs the webmaster of broken link and asks for the link to your site.
“The Ask” email

Follow up

Make it a point to follow up on your link requests to make sure your emails were not in vain. It may turn out that the Webmaster has added your link but hasn’t bothered to respond. Check the resource page before emailing a follow up email.

In some cases, it may even work out better to pick up the phone and call. If you can get to the right person who makes the decisions on the website you can get a straight answer. It helps to add a little personality to your efforts-just make sure you aren’t’ too pushy.

Gauge your results

When you get a link to your site, gauge your results. It should only take a day or two to see the effects of your link. If your niche isn’t that competitive you may be able to see large gains in ranking with just a few links. At any rate, the number of relevant local links you acquire will have the greatest impact on moving your ranking.

Resource link building is a Whitby local SEO strategy that is highly effective in getting your website found in the local organic search results. Explore what your city has to offer in terms of the resource pages offered by local businesses. You may be able to form alliances and make the connections with the companies that will catapult your website to the first page of Google.

How Important Is Guest Blogging For 2020?

Hero image for guest blogging in 2020

Guest blogging is a popular strategy for building backlinks that is considered safe and effective for branding, improving authority and building the strength of your backlink profile.

By definition, a guest post is an article published by an author representing another website or entity. Guest posts can be hosted by any website willing to publish articles from a third-party source and are ideal tactics to build links locally.

8 benefits of guest blogging

Guest posting is a way to land links from high authority websites. If you doubt the impact guest posting can have on your site, read Adam Enfroy’s case study on guest posting.

His guest posting efforts resulted in creating over 200K monthly readers and increased his income to over 30k/month. The following are a few of the benefits that guest posting offers that can add to the success of your website.

#1-Increased referral traffic

As a guest author, you have the opportunity to publish an article on a website within your niche, with a link pointing back to your site.

A link on a popular blog site provides you with targeted referral traffic. These visitors are obviously interested in reading your content if they read your guest post and clicked on your link.

Keep in mind that the number of visitors that click through to your site largely depends on how much traffic the hosting site receives.

#2-Provides a targeted audience

Guest posting puts your content in front of readers who are interested in your niche. Aim to publish a guest post on a site that your potential clients visit. By limiting your guest posting prospects to highly relevant sites within your industry (or a direct parallel) you improve the impact your link building strategy has on your ranking.

This also improves the chances your guest posts will be read by visitors interested in the solutions your business offers.

#3-Promotes better branding

This form of link building is considered a branding opportunity because it allows you to demonstrate the expertise of your company. Problem-solving content can be a powerful way for people to learn about your business and compel readers to click through to your site.

A well-written guest post can communicate to people how your company is capable of solving problems related to their own. Successful guest posting strategies promote awareness of your brand and establish thought leadership within your industry.

#4-Increases visibility

As a guest author, you are allowed the opportunity to tap into a third party’s traffic resources. Many blogs have a subscribership/email list that receives every new article that gets published.

Your article gets sent to that audience and you can get your site in front of a whole new network you wouldn’t have normally had access to.

#5-Develops authority

A link from a guest posting opportunity specifically for link building will pass authority to your site. A major reason for posting on a blog site is to gain access to traffic that is a good match for your website. The relationship between your site and the guest posting site should be clearly identifiable, making a link from the site a quality link.

Acquiring links from sites within your niche will improve your site’s credibility and ranking ability.

#6-Enhances optimization

Its best practice to link to the inner pages of your site with anchor text links.

In fact, you enhance the optimization of your pages by using your target keyword in a select number of your anchor text links.

This creates stronger relevance signals for keyword related searches.

Typically you want to use exact match anchor text sparingly to avoid any signs of rank manipulation.

Using a good blend of long-tail keywords, brand links and naked URLs is the best form of implementing a safe backlinking strategy.

#7-Improves ranking

The strength of a backlink profile plays a major contributing role in the ranking your page receives for your target keyword. Quality links will go a long way for moving the needle in the competitive placement of your page.

The more high-quality sites that link back to your page, the more authority and ranking ability your page accumulates.

High authority domains have more impact on your domain authority and ranking ability. The more popular the blog site, the more traffic and the more authority that is passed through to yours.

#8-Builds more entry points to your content

As a method of link building, this is among the most popular because it allows you to cover the basic three essentials of acquiring quality links.

Links are most beneficial when they are

  1. Highly relevant to the content hosting the link. Since the article is being written on behalf of your company, it’s obviously going to have strong relevance to the content in which you’re linking.
  2. The health of the site in which your link resides is another criteria of acquiring a quality link.
  3. Choosing websites that have established traffic and strong readership is the third part of the criteria for acquiring quality backlinks.

How does guest blogging work?

Despite the simplicity of the concept, the process of getting an article published can be quite labour intensive. In order to improve ranking and build traffic, the site you publish your article needs to be targeted to your niche and have a strong readership to provide enough traffic to make an impact on your site.

Find a suitable guest blogging site

The first order of business is to find a site that matches the criteria for providing a quality link. The top sites in your niche should be the first place to look for getting an article published.

Make a list of the sites that are well known for generating content in your industry. Whether these sites publicly accept guest posts or not, they should be considered for submission. When it comes to publishing content most sites won’t turn down a great piece of content that’s worth sharing with their audience.

Apart from the sites that are your top prospects, find sites that are regularly accepting articles from guest authors. These sites can be found by using some search commands to narrow the results in a Google search.

The list of commands that can be used includes commands that instruct Google to look for specific keywords in the URL (inurl), or in the title (intitle). By alternating these commands with related keywords you can come up with a combination of possibilities to produce many different results for sites that accept guest posts.

Here are a few examples:

  • Inurl: [Your keyword] + “write for us”
  • Inurl: [Your keyword] + “guest posts”
  • Intitle: [Your keyword] + “submit a guest post”
  • Intitle: [Your keyword] + “become a contributor”

The keyword can be interchanged along with the search command and the exact match words to be found in the title or URL. Here is a search results for inurl: SEO + “write for us”

Guest post sites from a Google search

Pitch your article

There are literally thousands of sites that are looking to publish quality articles on their blog. The trick is to figure out what type of content they are looking to publish and create an outline that would benefit their readers.

The more detailed you are with your outline, the better understanding they have of what you’re offering and how you will deliver it. Many sites will specifically detail what topics they are most likely to publish-which can be found in their “guest posting guidelines”

Write an article that will represent your business

Upon acceptance, write an article that will be an excellent representation of your business. Approach guest posting the same way you would write an SEO optimized blog post for your site.

It’s not just about getting the link. The goal is to attract readers to click-through to your site. Whether you get a high volume of traffic from the article or not, the article itself is a form of advertising your company and teaching people what you offer as a business.

This is a form of branding for your company so treat it as a presentation to inform, enlighten and engage your readers.

Make the most of a linking opportunity

Although the linking criteria will differ from site to site, be sure to fully understand what the site is allowing in terms of providing a linking opportunity.

A contextual link is the most valuable type of link you can acquire because it provides a reference to related content. As far as search engines go, this is the sole purpose of linking. Links are made to share content that is deemed worthy of sharing.

If the editors allow you to link to your site within the body of your article, take advantage by linking to the inner pages of your site. Your links should be natural, meaning they are not forced and are referencing a relevant page on your site.

Try to incorporate as many relevant links to previous guest posts since you can build on their authority and boost the value of the links to your site.

Answer comments and responses

Respond to any comments or questions your article generates. User interaction provides good ranking signals that give your article more traction in the search results. Many webmasters will actually ask you to respond under penalty of having your links removed from your article!

6 Tips & Tactics For Guest Blogging

#1-Feature your article with your headline

Spend a lot of time creating a headline that’s original and attention-grabbing. It’s the most important feature of your article because it is typically what will determine whether a user reads it or not.

Studies that have proven how specific headline strategies increase the click-through rate of an article. For example, one of the most popular tips that can improve CTR by 20% is the use of numbers in your headline.

Use as many headline tactics as possible to capture the attention of the editor as well as your audience. Your headline can be the deciding factor for whether your article gets published or not.

#2-Summarize your article with subtitles

Use creative subtitles to separate your article into segments that give the reader an accurate summary of what your article is communicating. Many people (editors included) who read online tend to scan through content and if your subtitles can paint an attractive or interesting enough picture you can capture their attention to read further.

A good article will segment your thoughts and ideas into easier to digest blocks of text. The added ease of comprehension is an asset to any article and makes your article a more attractive possibility for publication.

#3-Use Grammarly to proof your article

This app is extremely easy to use and highlights all of your spelling and grammatical errors. The corrections are as simple as hovering over the highlighted text and clicking on the option that is the most suitable correction.

This app is functional on an HTML editor or Google Docs, which makes it ideal for blogging. When submitting an article there is nothing more unprofessional than spelling mistakes and poor grammar when you have a tool like this available to eliminate those errors.

Even if you’re an amazing writer, this tool will catch a lot of mistakes you might otherwise miss which makes your writing much more appealing to editors when submitting content for publication.

#4-Use images & media at every opportunity

It should go without saying how important images are to incorporate in your articles. People retain 60% more information when there is an image to associate with the text. Since some blogs will require images for your article and in most cases, they will add images to your article, you can save them time and include them yourself.

Make your article more enticing by posting some related images to prove points or illustrate examples. If you don’t own the rights to the image be sure to credit the source of the image with a link or proper attribution.

If you own the images, use them as a link opportunity for the page on which they reside.

#5-Scan through previously published articles

Many blogs have a specific style that can be discerned by reading a few of their previously published blog posts. Get a feel for that style so you can incorporate it within your content.

Search Engine Journal has a very definitive style that always begins the same way in their introduction. Most articles will begin with a bunch of one-sentence statements that describe an issue that exists in a topic that leads to the first main subtitle.

Often when you read through a few titles you can get a feel for what that blog is predominantly interested in publishing. This can give you an idea of whether your topic is a good fit for the blog or how you need to set the tone in your headline.

#6-Read the guest posting guidelines for each submission

There is always valuable information that each site will offer in their guest posting guidelines-which is different for every blog site.

The linking policies are a major issue that should be understood before you pitch or submit an article to a site. If they are only offering nofollow links, you may need to look elsewhere to build your link profile.

Some sites will enforce strict protocols when accepting submissions. There are sites that won’t consider your article if you’ve missed one of their requirements. An example of this could be including a minimum number of images or failing to include a closing paragraph marked “Conclusion”. Editors will literally dismiss your article without notification.

For every site you consider, reading the submission guidelines should be a non-negotiable part of your routine. It will save you time and resources in the long run by having a clear idea of what you’re getting as well as what you need to provide.

Conclusion

Guest posting is one of the most effective link building strategies that will remain a viable method for acquiring quality backlinks well into the foreseeable future.

Linking from healthy websites with streams of traffic targeted to your niche is good for branding and increasing traffic. Some of the best links your site acquires come from the efforts of a guest posting link building campaign.

As long as guest blogging continues to get great results within an SEO campaign it will remain one of the most popular methods of link building in 2020 and beyond.

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