Guest blogging can be a great way to extend your blog’s reach, access new audiences, and pump up your site’s SEO. But finding and securing beneficial opportunities isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds.

Certainly, you know how great you are, and how important things are that you have to say, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the blogosphere will automatically recognize your value. And even if they do, it isn’t always clear which blogs present useful avenues to boost your signal, and which are just elaborate ways to waste time.

Thankfully there are some general guidelines you can follow to help sort quality opportunities from empty ones and increase your chances of gaining access to them. We’ve talked about this in a previous blog post in some detail. Today we’ll explore how to vet potential guest gigs, how to reach out to blog owners, and the benefits guest blogging can bring.

How is Guest Blogging Good for SEO?

Tell ‘em to shake it. Shake it. Shake that healthy blog. Baby got backlinks!

Backlinks are where the magic happens. When a website links back to your blog, that’s a backlink. Dofollow backlinks allow Google to scan through those links, cementing the relationship between your guest blog entry and your own website.

If the site you’re blogging for has great SEO, some of that karma is applied to your site. It’s like e “guilt by association”. But in a good way. The more backlinks you have from quality blogs the better your SEO will be. Later you’ll see how to choose quality blogs to write for.

In some cases, blogs won’t give you a contextual backlink. You’ll likely get a guest bio link instead. This is valuable too, as long as the blog you’re “guesting” for has a strong readership. Some of their audience will look up your site, increasing your traffic.

How to Find Opportunities

We covered this in more detail in the previous post, but it bears restating that finding guest blogging opportunities isn’t difficult. One of the simplest methods is to google “guest blog”, or “guest blogging” + the industry you’re interested in.

If you’re a medical blogger, search “guest blog medical”. If you’re a parenting blogger, search “guest blog parenting”. Given the number of possible industries, we could probably list another 275,000 examples, but you probably get the idea. Because most blogs that offer guest blogging opportunities have a page dedicated to the topic, a Google search is usually all that’s needed to find them.

But unless you work in a hyper-specific industry like “albino koala ear cleaning” you’re likely to get a sizable search return. The first step is to visit each site on the list looking for relevance.

Just because a blog is in your general industry doesn’t mean its focus aligns with yours, or that its audience is one that would be amenable to your message. Use relevance to narrow down your choices. After all, there are only so many guest blogs you can write in a given period. Focus on the blogs that are likely to deliver the best results.

How to Qualify the Sites You Find

You can further narrow down your list by focusing on blogs that score high in various reach metrics, like DA (domain authority), spam score, and traffic.

Domain Authority

DA is an amalgam measure created by Moz, a group dedicated to SEO excellence. It indicates a site’s likelihood for ranking high in search results, measured between one and one hundred. If you look at two sites that focus on the same subject matter, the one with a higher DA is much more likely to rank well for given search terms than a low-DA site for the same terms.

When considering a guest blogging opportunity, a high-DA site increases the chances that your guest post will rank in search, which means more eyeballs and greater reach. It’s also far more valuable for your backlink juice, no blending required.

Spam Score

This is also a Moz metric. A site’s spam score is a shorthand for the overall health of its SEO and organizational practices. Using machine learning, Moz has identified 27 different features commonly found on websites that are penalized or banned by Google.

The spam score for the blog you’re researching represents the percentage of those banned sites that share some of these features in common with the blog you’re examining.

So, a high spam score means the blog is very similar to sites that are considered bad players. A low score means the blog is likely doing things right. We tend to prefer sites with a spam score lower than 25 percent. A Moz account will let you discover both of these metrics.

Traffic

If you were trying to sell a novel, would you prefer to place it in a bookstore located deep in the heart of an active volcano, or one set along a busy downtown street in a thriving city? The latter delivers foot traffic. The volcano? Not so much.

Site traffic is important because if only a handful of people visit the website you’re guest blogging for, very few eyes will ever see your carefully-crafted communication.

There are various tools available to help you rate a given site’s traffic levels. You can choose from offerings by SEMRush and Sitechecker among others to pull information on total visits, pages per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rates.

How to Reach Out to Sites You Select

You’ve narrowed down your list to relevant industry sites with high reach metrics. Now how do you get their attention?

You’ll find that most blogs worth their salt will have a guest blogging page on their site which lists requirements and includes a contact form. Make sure to familiarize yourself with the type of content they’re looking for.

A great way to identify preferred subjects is to search for the blog on BuzzSumo. You’ll be able to see their most popular blog posts. This will tell you the sorts of topics their readers like — the subjects that get the most eyeballs.

When you reach out, pitch a couple of topics. Make it clear that you’ve considered their needs, their requirements, and their previously posted content. Explain the value you can bring to their blog. Now’s not the time for modesty. Sell yourself with vigor and passion.

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