Guest posting is worthwhile for major brands. Point. If you want to work around off-page SEO and get involved in the puzzle of link building, none of the other strategies can be scaled up as effectively as guest blogging.
- Are you struggling to get media and link placements using HARO?
- Do you want to grow your brand’s authority without sponsoring content?
- Would you like to lure a massive audience that isn’t aware of your brand?
The answer to the above questions is “guest blogging.” Practice it correctly, and boom! Notice the spark in organic rankings, traffic, and inbound leads. The success of your blog or website starts with the ability to drive organic traffic. Right? Brands try their luck with social media marketing, Google PPC, display advertising, and other marketing techniques, but each of them comes with lots of expenses, challenges, and limitations that can affect their usage.
On the other hand, guest blogging is a powerful way to not only build high-quality backlinks and attract a new audience but also to pump up your EAT score and authority.
While the outreach, content writing, and email follow-ups consume human hours, it’s critical to track and analyze your guest posts’ performance.
How do you measure the success of an individual guest post and/or the entire guest posting campaign? It all comes down to analyzing the combination of metrics and KPIs.
Guest blogging for SEO and Authority building
Guest blogging was at the heart of link building until and unless the release of Penguin 1.0 changed the guest posting landscape. Google started cracking down on low-quality guest publishing, realizing that it wouldn’t want to count links coming from low-quality guest posts.
For blogging to work for you, you’ll have to have an ulterior motive that doesn’t involve yourself alone. You’ll have to do the work like in the good old days”—some old-fashioned research and well-written prose—and forget the rest (or most of it).
Contributing articles to other blogs is still an excellent way to reach a new audience, network with new bloggers, and further the mission of your blog. It also will give you a credibility boost, which is always welcome (right?), and give you the chance to show the Internet what you’ve got. And with more and more bloggers catching on to the benefits, opportunities have never been ampler.
Guest blogging is a social activity. Though we practice it on the web, the essence is mostly the same. One way or another, you communicate with other bloggers. Despite much guidance and information available out there about it, its result can’t be predicted.
You can use several parameters for analyzing the usefulness of a guest post: leads, backlinks, social media shares, referral traffic, relevance, number of user comments, and quality of the target website.
Starting pointers for any business that can be used to highlight some broad content goals are:
- Develop your online reputation.
- Improve your brand awareness.
- Generate new customer leads and sales.
- Attract more traffic to your site.
- Encourage natural links and optimize search engine ranking.
- Benefit from your competitive advantage.
- Boost Audience Engagement
While producing any single guest post, you should be able to achieve one or more of these goals, and your entire content portfolio should accomplish all of them.
Getting Started: What metrics help measure your guest post content?
Accuracy in measuring and tracking efforts against aims and goals is very important when proving a return on investment in any digital marketing strategy. To make your strategy more efficient and effective, specific goals and targets are set in place so that the measurement of different metrics is easier to track.
Let’s focus on the most tangible metric behind guest blogging:
Referral traffic.
The Amount of Referral Traffic that a specific Guest post can throw your way
I hate to tell you this, but most of these guest posts will barely give you amazing numbers in terms of unique visitors. As per a study done by Tim Soulo, the average number of referrals per guest post was just 56. We can get this number easily by doing a couple of tweets or sponsoring a Facebook page, right?
Think of a targeted website. Consider the case of Tweak Your Business. And I just wrote a recent post to explain my point.
The Valasys team published this post, and only they can tell me the exact number of referral visits they get out of this post, but let’s see a couple of things:
- Tweak Your Biz didn’t promote this post on social media. They got no social shoutouts from their Twitter account, which has approximately 11K followers.
- Guest contributors have to insert at least two internal links in their posts, but their editorial team doesn’t look at them manually, so their internal linking is not well-planned.
- As a result, this post has an Ahrefs UR rating of just 13. And it barely has any backlinks, social shares, or traffic.
- And on top of that, you’re just a new member of a long list of guest contributors. You don’t make any connection with their editors; you don’t engage with other bloggers via blog commenting; this website doesn’t follow such practices. What you simply get is a backlink. And that’s not the only purpose of guest blogging.
- Tweak Your Biz has the potential to get ranked organically. So if someone can write a well-researched SEO-friendly post, it can get ranked in Google and get you in front of Google users searching for those specific keywords. But again, their editorial team’s efforts are close to null, and you’ll rarely be able to build links to your guest posts, limiting their possibilities of getting proper exposure.
This example takes me to some factors that can turn your guest post campaign into favorable marketing material for your brand.
Audience Engagement
Engagement is the quickest and most practical way to get a glimpse of how well your post was received. By the term “engagement,” I mean both:
- User comments, and
- Social shares
Comments can help build meaningful relationships with this new audience and introduce you to new guest posts and other collaboration opportunities. Plus, getting comments on your guest post indicates that all the hard work and research that you put into this epic post has paid off.
It also feels amazing to know that like-minded people are not just reading your content but enjoying it enough to leave their opinion.
Eventually, thanks to this relationship with this new audience, you can earn more email subscribers, more traffic, increased visibility, and more blog comments on your blog.
One more metric that assists in the understanding of reaching the readers is social shares. A guest post should be interesting to readers; it can be informative or entertaining, depending on the target audience and the established goals. The most effective way to understand whether the guest post captured the attention of the readers is to check the engagement of the audience. If people like and share this post, the goal is reached.
You know what happens when a person shares a post via social media. This post appears in a timeline where more people can read and share it. In this way, people get to know you and your company. Besides, it is quite easy to estimate the number of social shares even without using special tools and applications.
New Backlinks
The regular backlink analysis will show you whether other authorities and communities have cited this post. If other websites and blogs place references and links to your guest post, you’ve reached the desired goal and further accelerated your exposure.
Backlinks work as an important SEO signal for the organic performance of a website. If other resources start to link to your site (in this case, to your guest post), the page-level authority of the guest post increases, and in turn, you can leverage more link juice.
Brand Mentions
Guest blogging builds your authority and expertise within your niche. For smaller businesses that can’t run PR and influencer campaigns due to budget constraints, this makes more sense to get their names out.
When you get published among top blogs and magazines, people, and publishers should start noticing you, and ideally, it should result in brand mentions.
- Do people recognize your brand?
- Does your content encourage people to buy your company’s product?
- Has your content marketing campaign enhanced the brand image of your company?
Answers to these questions summarize the success of your brand’s guest post campaign.
Relevance
First and foremost, the targeted website should be relevant to your niche. Otherwise, you will not be able to reach your audience. Of course, the content’s theme should also be contextually relevant. Additionally, you should check whether the keywords, meta tags, headings, and localization fit your niche and are related to your expertise.
- If the targeted website is not authoritative, well-designed, and user-friendly,
- The content quality is low, and the engagement is weak.
Don’t call it a classic guest post. It’s just like a random one that doesn’t reward you with much exposure but is a kind of spam thing Matt Cutts talked about years ago.
Keywords Ranking
Using Google’s free tools (or a third-party tracker), you can measure how your site is ranking for individual keywords. Some programs can tell you which specific pages are ranking, not just your homepage.
In addition to telling you how your site is ranking, keyword metrics also include things like:
- Search volumes for specific keywords
- How tough the competition is
- Real-time changes in ranking
- Ranking trends (monthly, seasonally, etc.)
Each of these can help you plan your SEO strategy.
Monitor the benchmarks, and after a certain period, let’s say 6 months, you can compare your current numbers to those metrics and see the real-time improvement.
Closing Thoughts
Guest blogging is about adding value to readers’ and publishers’ blogs, not just gaining a backlink for SEO purposes. Guest blogging can be an SEO goldmine as long as you focus on quality and aren’t simply hunting for links. There’s no reason why you should exclude it from your marketing plan just because of all the debate and anticipation floating around the subject.
I’m a strong advocate for value, community, and quality, and when it comes to guest blogging, having those things in mind will bear the greatest fruit for both you and your publishers.