Archives for 

seo

Using the Correct Hreflang Tag: A New Generator Tool

Posted by Aleyda

One of the challenges that International SEOs face is correctly targeting the right web presence to the appropriate search audience. Let’s start with a couple of scenarios with these challenges so you can see clearly what I’m talking about.

If I search from a Mexican IP (using a Proxy service, to simulate being in Mexico) in Google Mexico for “comprar zapatos en linea,” which in English means “buy shoes online” I get the following results:

Non Aligned GeoRanking Results

As you can see, Dafiti has a Mexican website version that is ranking no. 1, which is relevant in this case; but also has a Colombian version ranking no. 3 and an Argentinian version ranking no. 7. All of them are using ccTLDs, which should “ideally” give geolocation signals to Google. Additionally, there’s a Spain site ranking no. 2 called Sarenza, also using a ccTLD.

Here’s another example, this time for a couple of branded searches, first only for the brand, “edreams” in this case, which is a popular travel site with a strong international presence and then for “vuelos edreams,” which in English means “edreams flights:”

Branded Results with Non Aligned Georanking Results

In the previous image you can see how:

  1. For its brand name results, despite being searched from Google Mexico with a Mexican IP, the first result is actually the Spain web version and the second is the American one! The Mexican web version—the relevant one for this location—is ranked third.
  2. For the “vuelos edreams” branded search, the Mexican web page version ranks first (yay!) but the second result shows a webpage that belongs to their Spain site.
How can you identify that you have an international search results alignment issue like the ones shown above?

The easiest way is to take a look in Google Analytics at which countries your organic search traffic is coming from, by going to the “Audience > Demographics > Location” report (along the appropriate organic search segment) and identifying which landing pages and keywords are bringing those visitors. You can do something similar with the language, with the “Audience > Demographics > Language” report.

You can also verify potential misalignment issues of any website, by checking their top rankings in the different Google international search results (not only your own but any site, which is great if you want to analyze the competition) by using Search Metrics and SEMRush. For example, checking the rankings of the Spain version of eDreams in Google Mexico:

SearchMetrics Domain Results per Country

What can we do to prevent those issues? How can we avoid ranking with the incorrect web version in some international search results, or cannibalizing them with many non-relevant Web versions? How can we provide a relevantly targeted web version to the right international audience?

The rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” annotation came to the rescue, initially released at the end of 2011 and updated in April of this year to support the x-default value. It’s used by Google (and Yandex too) to correctly identify the language and the country targeting of web pages, that can include them as a link element in the HTML head area, in the HTTP header or XML sitemap.

HrefLang tag specifications by Google

So why can we still see the misalignment issues in international search results, as the ones shown in the previous examples?

From my experience, most of the time Google does a good job in these scenarios when the hreflang annotations are correctly included. You can take a look at:

Nonetheless, many sites are still not making use of the hreflang annotations. Some of the issues I’ve seen come from the fact that sometimes we don’t correctly use the hreflang annotations.

Take a look at the number of questions about hreflang in the Moz Q&A Forum and Google’s Internationalization Webmaster Forum; there are still clearly many doubts about how to use it.

One of the error scenarios is the misuse of the hreflang link element by including non-supported values, especially for the region, in the HTML’s <head> area. Google specifies in its official documentation that they support the ISO 639-1 format for the language, and optionally the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for the region.

Let’s use the web code search engine Nerdy Data to find sites that, instead of including the “en-gb” value to specify that a page is in English targeting the UK (since the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 code for the UK is “GB”), are mistakenly including “en-uk”:

HREFLang Error - Country attribute: UK instead of GB

Or, as another example, pages that are including “en-eu” to specify they’re in English and targeting to the European Union (the “EU” code in this case is not supported, since regions are limited to countries):

HREFLang Error - EU is not supported

You can see more specifically the case of Hollister—that was shown in both of the previous cases in the Nerdy Data results—how they’re targeting the UK with the “en-uk” value and also, for their general English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish versions targeting to the European Union, they add the “eu” value for the region, which is not supported:

HREFLang Error - EU and UK values

As you can see, although we already have a couple of tools that facilitate the hreflang validation and its inclusion in sitemaps (check out the hreflang validator from DejanSEO and the hreflang sitemap tool from the Media Flow) it would be useful to have another, even simpler tool, that would serve to generate the required hreflang tags according to the languages and countries, thus helping us to avoid the previous issues.

To fill this need, I’ve published the hreflang tags generator tool:

Hreflang tag generator tool

The tool’s goal is to assist you in the generation of the correct hreflang annotations for the different language or country versions of a specific page. You will need to place these in the HTML <head> area of each of its URLs, and that will serve as a reference to generate the rest of the hreflang tags for all of your site pages, with the correct syntax and formats.

When you generate the hreflang annotations the tool allows you to copy/paste the results or download them as a CSV file, so it’s easier to use than other tools, too:

hreflang tag generator results

This is only the first version of the tool, and I’m already planning to include more functionality to assist with hreflang annotation generation on a massive scale. If you find any issues with it, or any feedback or ideas, please contact me via Twitter or send me an email at aleydasolis at gmail.

I hope the tool, although very simple, can be helpful to clarify the doubts about how to generate the correct hreflang annotations in your specific case. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

12 Scalable Link-Building Tactics

Posted by kaiserthesage

Link building/earning is essential in online marketing, and not just because it improves your SEO. It also helps a website be discovered (click-through visitors), generate leads, connect with other publishers (relationships), and build a stronger online brand presence.

Although establishing yourself as an authority to eventually earn links throughout the process is what search engines naturally want websites/brands to do, you still can’t disregard artificial link building (link marketing).

Link marketing is an initiative that should also be strongly considered, as this practice makes a brand more well known in its online space—and sets it up to genuinely earn links in the future.

The tactics listed in this post are from the 4-part newsletter series that I launched a couple of weeks ago. Below are the guidelines covered by the series, mostly about implementing some of the most scalable link-building tactics today. These can be used by agencies, SMBs and enterprise-level companies.

#1: Create your own database of premium images and cinemagraphs

This can be a good investment for agencies and/or companies who’re in for the long-haul (targeting specific niches).

Though this tactic may require a budget (as you’ll need to invest in hiring a professional photographer or graphic artist), this can certainly improve your link-building campaign through link attribution from bloggers who’ll use your premium images.

Once you have set up your own private gallery of rich images, you can then start making a list of bloggers that you can reach out to (in your specific niche). There are tons of bloggers who are in need of unique images that they can use, so having this as your value proposition (offering the images for free or giving them access to your private gallery) will increase your pitches’ conversion rate.

Another strategy that you can integrate to scale this type of link building approach is using reverse image search—in case other bloggers start using your images without permission/attribution. You can use tools such as Google’s image search and Tineye to track blogs/websites that have used your images.

Other helpful resources:

#2: Outdated content acquisition

There are millions of pieces of content on the web, and many of them aren’t timeless—and many are also under-maintained.

This clearly brings a lot of opportunities for link building, wherein you can search through hundreds of outdated pieces of content in your industry that have managed to get natural links in the past (or successful link bait with time-sensitive information) and try acquiring the content.

You can use Greenlane SEO’s Outdated Content Finder tool to find under-maintained content that you can still repurpose or recreate.

Contact the blog owner(s) and see if you can purchase the old page, and have it redirected to your new version of the page hosted within your domain (with updated information about the topic).

Pro tip: Tell them that you’ll still give them credit as the original creator (w/ brand mention), to enhance your chances of acquiring the content.

In choosing outdated web documents that you can revive:

  • Use tools like Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer to check for links pointing to the old content.
  • Assess if it’s possible to add more valuable and up-to-date information to the topic covered by the content.

Another option that you can take, aside from buying the content, is helping the webmaster update the content—this can also lead to getting a link from that very same content.

Other helpful resources:

#3: Massive interviews

Doing interviews of popular personalities in a certain field has been one of the oldest tricks in link building, particularly for websites that are just starting up.

Doing it on a massive scale can drive a ton of natural links to a website, and can certainly get your name out in the open (like launching an interview series or designating a section for expert interviews).

I’ve seen many sites that have been successful using this tactic (like Mixergy, Under 30 CEO and Max Minzer’s Max Impact to name a few).

And just recently, I’ve seen Media Shower’s interview with me get a natural in-content link from Page One Power’s weekly roundup.

Imagine the number of links you can naturally acquire if you’re consistently sharing valuable insights from influential people in your industry—and imagine the relationships you can build with influencers by using this tactic.

#4: Reverse guest-blogging campaign

Guest blogging has been the go-to tactic for the past couple of years in the world of link building. But it seems that only a few have realized the value of being on the receiving end, acquiring content from other great authors.

There are a lot of advantages to inviting guest bloggers who really know their stuff to contribute to your site:

  • Getting free expertly made content that can rank for keywords (long tails) that you are also targeting.
  • Absorbing the guest author’s followers once they start sharing the content they’ve contributed to your site (more unique traffic and potential leads).
  • Seasoned content publishers will almost always reference/link back to their previous works, and their contributions on other websites are not an exemption.

Find and reach out to bloggers who write exceptionally in their respective fields (and who can cover topics that are in your audience’s interests as well). You can use tools like Followerwonk to identify authors in your niche that have a strong social following.

You can also do a simple Google Search to determine if they’ve been active in guest blogging (inpostauthor:”Author’s Name”).

A few tips on implementing this tactic:

  • Start with those who you’ve seen to be active in their own guest-blogging campaign. Doing a Google search to find active guest bloggers in your industry (use queries like: “real estate guest post by”) can make it easier to find them.
  • Make sure you have a value proposition once you start contacting your prospects. Let them know what’s in it for them (ex: mentioning that you have bunch of readers/subscribers/followers, promoting their content, or offering to pay them for the content).
  • Build relationships. It’s easier to invite people to write for your site when you’re already friends with them.
  • Read their content. Make sure that you like it.

Other helpful resources:

#5: Online billboards through long-tail content distribution

Building more brand visibility is one of link building’s vital roles in online marketing. There are many ways to get this done, but there’s one tactic that will seem to continue to be effective despite the constantly changing/evolving search landscape.

The method: distributing content (targeting long-tail search terms) on user-generated content sites that have high search share.

Pages hosted on UGC sites like Youtube, Slideshare, Pinterest and Scribd (there are a lot more, actually) obviously have better search-ranking power, especially for long-tail keywords.

The probable reasons why these domains show more often on SERPs lie in the level of trust search engines see from these domains (domain authority) and the amount of traffic, as well as interactions that these pages are getting.

Implementing this strategy on a larger scale can help generate constant traffic and brand impressions for your site (which you can consider as robust links/assets).

Steps for implementing this tactic:

  • Create content based on your campaign’s targeted long-tail keywords. Repurpose them into several content formats (videos, slide presentations, infographics, comics or whitepaper/PDF).
  • Upload them where it’s appropriate (content platforms like Youtube, Slidshare, etc…).
  • Promote these through social and/or build links to them (including them on your blog posts or linking to them through your other off-site marketing efforts).

#6: Getting more Google+ shares

As Cyrus Shepard mentioned on his recent (controversial) post here on Moz, Google+ posts pass link equity (because the links within Google+ posts are followed).

This means the more your Google+ posts are being shared within their social platform, the more high-value links you are able to get (if you’ve included a link to one of your site’s pages within the Google+ post).

For instance, a few months back, I did a weekly roundup of the blog posts I’ve read each week on Google+. My first one was shared 40 times within the network, which means 40 Google+ profiles have just linked to the URLs I’ve shared.

Google+ is a microblogging platform that can offer ton of opportunities for marketing a brand/website if maximized.

Tips on getting more Google+ Shares:

  • Start building a strong follower base (to enhance the chances of getting your posts shared). You can start by integrating Google+ with your content marketing efforts (let people know that you’re active on Google+).
  • It’s a microblogging platform, so start blogging on Google+! Lengthy posts (that are useful and valuable) have higher potential for getting shared.
  • Add relevant links to external pages (your website) within your Google+ posts, so that you can build links when people start sharing your posts. Link to other people’s works as well, to build relationships (and to get them to share your post too).

Other helpful resources:

#7: Republishing viral posts from Tumblr and Facebook

Tumblr and Facebook are definitely two of the best places to get inspiration for content creation, and are sometimes the best channels from which to get linkable content assets.

This tactic has been running around my head for weeks now (and we’re already in the process of testing it on one of the test sites I’ve been managing).

Republishing/reposting has been a norm in the social space—and is always ethical if you’re giving attribution to the original source of the content.

Basically, this tactic is about finding the most successful pieces of content posted on Facebook and Tumblr (based on the amount of likes and shares) that are related to your niche—and having them republished on your site’s blog (or if you have microsites, then that could work, too).

Given that these pieces of content have already proven themselves as interesting on social platforms, they’ll have better chances of getting natural links.

For instance, I saw the Facebook post I’ve shared above get republished on a small WordPress blog:

The republished post did well in terms of social shares, as it got 2,000+ retweets:

And the Wordpress version of the FB post also got 288 links (from 81 linking domains)—knowing that a lot of people got to see the content:

How to find viral posts in your niche from Facebook and Tumblr:

You can use Google search to find successful posts on Facebook and Tumblr (by using the queries I’ve used below).

A few tips on republishing viral posts from Facebook/Tumblr:

  • Always give attribution to the original creator of the content!
  • Include your own insights or personal takeaways in your republished content.

#8: Reverse engineering

Knowing where your main competitors are getting their links from, as well as the entities they’ve built relationships with, has been one of the most important methodologies in search marketing.

Aside from helping smaller brands compete in search using this tactic, analyzing your competitors’ link sources also allows you to determine partnerships and understand methods that will most likely work for you.

Tools you can use to extract your top competitors’ link data:

List the top domains linking to your competitors in a spreadsheet and segment them by difficulty of acquisition (how hard or easy will it be for you to get a link from them).

Another thing that you also have to consider is identifying the sites/domains that your competitors are linking out to.

You can use ScreamingFrog to generate a list of URLs that your competitors have linked out to the most.

Once you’re done assessing and sorting the list of domains linking to your competitors, and the list of domains that your competitors are linking out to, you can then start listing each website’s contact details.

You can use tools like Citation Labs (Contact Finder Tool) and/or Link Research Tools’ Contact Finder to easily generate the list of emails.

Though you must also remember that it’s not about the amount of data you have, it’s about how you can use your data to your advantage. Making use of your list of link prospects:

  • Pitch them for guest-blogging opportunities.
  • Do an interview of the influential ones on your list.
  • Letting them know about your content(s) that their readers/followers are most likely interested in.
  • Collaborate with them in content creation (getting insights from them and including them on your upcoming blog posts).
  • Connecting and engaging them through interactions (through social or their already-existing communities).

Other helpful resources:

#9: Improving content discovery through targeted content promotion

If you’re already investing in developing content assets on your website, then up-sizing your efforts to make them more visible to your target audience is a surefire way to enhance the ability of your website/brand to continuously attract natural links.

Because the more people who are able to see your content assets, the higher your chances to force multiply the results (more traffic, more social shares, more links, better rankings, and more leads).

There are many ways to promote your site’s great content, and below are some of the most efficient ways to build traffic that will result to more traffic:

Linker outreach

Start with those who’re really into the topic/subject that you’ve covered on your content—and have a history of sharing/linking to similar content.

The easiest way to find them is by mining your competitors’ similar content. Tools that you can use to find linkers in your industry:

  • Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer—to find blogs/websites that have linked to your competitors’ content
  • Topsy—to identify Twitter users who have shared your competitors’ content
  • Google Search—to find people who have shared your competitors’ content on Facebook, Google+ and other social networks (using search operators)

Pro tip: You can also mine your competitors’ most-linked content assets (pages with high # of LRDs) using Open Site Explorer, as this will reveal the linkers in your industry.

It’ll be easier to reach out to them, seeing that they’re genuinely interested in the topic of your content.

Pro tip: Don’t ask them to share your content, since they are linkers, and they already know what to do next after seeing your content.

Paid social ads

Another great way to put more eyeballs on your content is through paid Social Ads—from Facebook’s sponsored stories or Stumbleupon’s paid discovery.

The best thing about these services is that you can configure your ads to only be displayed to specifically targeted users (those that are highly interested in what your content is providing).

Simon Penson wrote a great case study on how to make Facebook your primary traffic source that you might also want to read.

Related discussions

This is probably the easiest way to promote and build links to your site’s content assets. Participate in already existing discussions that are thematically related to your content (forum threads, Q&As, other blogs, and online communities like Facebook groups, etc.).

Using your content as a reference to your contributions on these discussions will make it more enticing for other people to click on your link.

Linking through your content distribution efforts

Use your other content marketing efforts—like your guest blogs, columns, slideshows on Slideshare, or videos uploaded on Youtube—to promote your site’s linkable assets.

Internal linking

I’ve always been a firm believer that internal links are the most valuable ones to have in a link building campaign, because you have full control of them.

Create more content that can stand to support your site’s content assets. This way you’ll be able to distribute Page Authority to your site’s key pages and you’ll be also able to build continuous traffic to them.

You can also utilize your site’s high-traffic pages (based on your analytics) to make your other low-performing content assets be more visible (and more inclined to receive inbound links).

Other helpful resources:

#10: Find specific questions and answer them (long-tail link building)

People will never run out of questions to ask, especially now that the information age makes it easier for people to solve their problems almost instantly with the help of the web.

Find online discussions that pertain to the product(s) you or your client provides (from forums, Q&A sites like Quora, and blog comments). It’s best to genuinely add value to the discussion, by contributing only relevant information (and not make it too promotional).

The best thing about how the link-building space is evolving is that it’s also giving marketers new ways to build signals that search crawlers can use.

In using this tactic, you won’t necessarily need to use hyperlinks to promote or build signals to your website. Given that search engines are also using phrase-based indexing, even an unlinked brand mention will now count as a vote that’s as good as a link (based on the concepts of co-occurrence and sentiment analysis).

With this approach (building unlinked brand mentions on related discussions), you lessen the chances of getting flagged as a spammer by forum/community moderators. But always remember that you have to ensure that people will get value from what you’re contributing (think marketing!).

Another advantage of using this tactic is that you’re also building brand awareness, which can eventually cultivate branded searches (seeing that you didn’t provide a link).

#11: Link reclamation

This method is probably the oldest trick in the book of white-hat link building. Despite that fact, as well as all the changes that have been made in the search game, link reclamation is still considered one of the most effective tactics to use out there.

Reclaiming links—from links to your site that are broken, linking to the wrong version of the URL, or from unlinked brand mentions—are very much applicable to brands/websites that are active in online branding, content marketing, and offline marketing (print ads, events, etc…).

The best thing about this method is that it has a very high conversion rate for link acquisition. The main reason is that you’ve already earned the mention/citation, which makes it much easier for you to request to have the mention optimized (like your preferred anchor texts and/or the link’s destination).

Common practices that you should integrate with your link-building campaign to find better link opportunities:

  • Set up Google Alerts for your brand name (and resident authors)—to track blogs/websites mentioning your brand or your site’s content.
  • Use Topsy to track people mentioning your brand (or your site’s homepage) on Twitter. It’s easier to request links from them, since they’re already vouching for you.
  • Make it a habit to search for mentions about your brand, author(s), product(s) or events through Google’s blog search (consider it a monthly task).

  • Look for sites linking back to you that use the wrong version of the URL.

  • Check incoming links pointing to your site’s broken pages (404s) using Google Webmaster Tools. They are the easiest ones to reclaim.

#12: Static marketing

Consistency is a common factor that you’ll mostly notice from successful brands on the web.

And this is something that even smaller brands can apply, especially in performing off-site marketing activities.

As perfectly described by Ross Hudgens, static marketing acts a force multiplier of future active marketing efforts through a series of branding initiatives (from naming conventions, persona, aesthetic impression, and overall brand identity).

Interactions with other people in your industry, particularly with content publishers, have been vital in today’s age of link building.

And as most of us know, to be really able to compete in online marketing these days, we need to be almost everywhere. Static marketing makes that approach much easier, as you tend to be more consistent, which enables you to become more recognizable to people active in your industry’s online space.

When your targets recognize you, you become linkable.

A few tips on how to be remarkable in your target communities:

  • Use a username that’s easy to recall.
  • Stick to your personal brand’s unique selling point and identity (establish expertise in a single niche first, before expanding on the others).
  • Be consistent with the avatars you use in different social platforms or online communities you’re actively participating in.

How about guest blogging?

Many link builders are abusing the tactic. Google is already on to it.

The method is very effective, when done right. But here’s my personal take on it:

I don’t do guest blogging that much anymore. But when I do, I do it on Moz.

If you’re looking for more tips on link building, you can check out my blog Kaiserthesage and you can also follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Avoiding Disaster: How to Prevent the 3 Most Common Content Marketing #Fails

Posted by Adria.Saracino

During my SearchLove San Diego presentation last week, I talked about “Why Your Content Marketing Initiatives are Failing (And How to Fix Them).” I highlighted eight ways content marketing programs can fail or suffer, along with ways to prevent or overcome these various obstacles.

I separated my presentation into three distinct “sections” of failure: tactical, strategic, and internal. While all sections and associated #fails are important to address, strategic failures are the ones that tend to affect the other two. For example, if the strategy is off, then how you tactically execute your content and campaigns will suffer. Likewise, if you can’t prove your “strategic game,” you won’t get the internal buy-in required to set up an optimal content marketing program.

Thus, strategic is the area you really want to focus on when optimizing your content marketing initiatives. While there are many ways you can up your strategic game, there are three biggies. I’ll go through each of these in more depth than my presentation allowed, and provide resources for additional reading throughout.

First way to fail: Confusing content marketing with link building

Let me just say it: Content marketing is not synonymous with link building. We shouldn’t make content only to address those “viral” topics in hopes of “winning the internet” and attracting a lot of links and social shares to our brand. While this could help spread brand awareness and attract potential customers, if we’re not using content to address users’ wants and needs throughout their purchasing paths, we’re just attracting more eyeballs but then not knowing what to do with them once they are on us.

The fix: Know where link building fits into the full promotional landscape

Content marketing isn’t only a tool for spreading brand awareness. Rather, it is a philosophy that should touch every part of your website and offline marketing initiatives. Since content—written, visual, you name it—is a part of just about every marketing channel, we need to start treating content marketing not as its own separate silo, but as an integrated part of all the marketing opportunities we have available to us.

So, what does this mean? It means we need to understand what type of content is required in order to get our customers to convert and become brand loyalists.

Let’s look at two different scenarios. Say Brand A is amazing at creating that “viral content for link building,” but doesn’t have very informative or user-friendly content on the rest of its site. Brand A probably isn’t going to see an increase in sales because it is losing customer interest or trust by not helping them throughout the purchasing journey with its content.

On the flip side, say Brand B creates “viral” content and uses that opportunity to lead those visitors to more useful content further down the funnel with strong calls to action. Brand B is more likely to see its content marketing initiatives leading to sales because it’s holding customers’ hands throughout the purchasing journey.

If you want to be like Brand B, you need to stop looking at content marketing as only a brand-awareness tactic. Link building is fundamentally a brand awareness tactic because we’re getting coverage on third-party sites, oftentimes on ones whose editors never heard of our brand before. To illustrate where link building fits into the promotional landscape, I’ve created the below image that matches the different types of promotion we can do to the funnel. Note, I’ve included link building under the umbrella of outreach, as while outreach doesn’t only include link building, this is where that tactic typically falls.

As you can see, PR and outreach/link building functions are only suited for content that addresses the mid/top and the very bottom of the purchasing funnel. If you’ve ever done any outreach, you know the hardships that come along with trying to build links to content that is very brand or conversion focused, such as e-commerce product pages. The reason it’s hard is because publishers do not care about your brand unless you’re willing to pay for the coverage—hence why advertising is such a great promotional tool for content throughout most of the funnel.

Now, you might be questioning why some of the other promotional activities sit where they do on the funnel in the above graphic. Please note that you can find ways to use these promotional activities for content in other areas of the funnel, depending on the content topic and exact angle. However, in my experience this is where each promotional function should be in order to see the best results.

The main takeaway here is that you want to match what stage of the funnel your content is addressing to the appropriate promotional activity in order to see the best returns. So, don’t try and force link building as the main promotional tactic for all your content because chances are you’ll meet a lot of publisher resistance to content addressing those other areas of the funnel. You do not need to host a mind-blowing promotional campaign for every piece of content you create, so stop chugging money down the drain. It’s not about promoting harder, but rather promoting smarter.

Second way to fail: No, or improper, goal alignment and tracking

There are two scenarios here. First, many companies churn out content and dub it “content marketing” without any real goals mapped out. I see this a lot with blog content, where companies decide they need to have a blog and just start churning out articles that they think are cool, not really looking at the results to determine if it’s making the business money.

The second scenario is only tracking short-term goals. I see this a lot among companies that confuse content marketing with link building (as noted above). These companies often have one goal in mind: quantifying if it went viral or not. This includes monitoring metrics like links, social shares, and mentions.

However, these metrics are only the first step to making money. Rarely do links placed result in direct sales, particularly with top-of-the-funnel content. Thus, these companies aren’t aligning their content marketing initiatives to the appropriate goals.

The fix: Know the different types of goals and metrics for tracking

All [content] marketing goals and their subsequent tracking metrics can be compiled into four buckets. These buckets quite nicely match with the different stages of the customer purchasing funnel.

For content covering top-of-the-funnel topics, we often measure consumption metrics to better understand if those topics are “sticky” to our target audience(s) and indeed spreading brand awareness. Once we get into heavy search and consideration content, we start trying to find ways to turn those visitors consuming our content into leads. From there, we hope that it turns into a sale, and then we hope to retain them.

What I don’t like about the above visual though, is that while it helps map goals to the funnel, it seems to have a very definitive start and end point. Really, you want to figure out how to make your goals cyclical. Thus, I like the below visualization of these buckets a bit better.

A cycle is a better visualization, because think about it: we’re hoping to get our audience to consume our content, which we hope will lead them to a sale. Once they finish with their purchase, we hope to retain them as loyal customers, who will then ideally become repeat consumers and buyers (hopefully bringing new customers along the ride with them via word of mouth and brand advocacy!).

In the above visualization, I put a red box around the consumption metrics because unfortunately our industry tends to concentrate only on these short-term measurements. Yes, new customer acquisition is important to growth; but a lot of us ignore the opportunity to increase revenue by investing in community and retention building. In order to realize our full content marketing potential, we need to start mapping our content to goals throughout the cycle, using the above KPIs to ensure they are actually measurable.

Third way to fail: Not doing the research required to devise a strategy

I get this question a lot: “What’s the difference between content marketing and content strategy.” This is how I look at it. Content marketing is an umbrella term to describe any marketing function that includes content (see why I think it’s so integrated with other channels? Pretty much everything includes content!). Content strategy is one of the threads (along with your brand message and editorial standards) that weaves your content marketing initiatives together and aims them at a specific end goal.

To say it bluntly, having a content strategy is essential to running a successful content marketing program. If there is no strategy, it could result in a bunch of inconsistent pieces of content that aren’t all working in unison toward the same end goal. Inconsistency is the kiss of death in marketing, because without consistency you can easily lose customers’ trust. And who gives their credit cards to a brand they don’t trust?

And when I say “strategy,” I don’t mean just making a wild claim and saying, “This is our strategy.” Rather, I mean developing a strategy that has the most likely chance of success; one that is the least risky to pursue (or that is a calculated risk). How do you come up with an actual strategy that takes risk and forecasting into account? You need to start with research.

The fix: Do THIS type of research

This is the process I use here at Distilled when a client comes to us and says he/she wants a content strategy. It can be broken down into four distinct chunks of research, demonstrated in the visual below.

I’ll go into more detail about each of those research components below. Once the research is complete (we’re talking, ideally, 2-3 months out), all of it can by synthesized to produce a content strategy.

However, remember when I said the strategy is just one of three threads needed to direct your content outputs? You also need to ensure you have a sticky brand message (this can be for internal use only or both internal and external use) and editorial standards. Before creating any content, you’ll need to filter your strategy through these other threads in order to ensure consistency.

Benchmark audit

Essentially, this is doing the research necessary to really understand your brand and current performance.

You want to answer the following four questions:

  1. How are we currently performing?
  2. Where are we underperforming/where are the opportunities for improvement?
  3. Are we measuring the right things? (i.e. is tracking and measurement set up correctly?)
  4. What is our USP?
To answer these four questions, below are the actions to take to get a clear understanding of your product/service and current performance.

Look in Google Analytics: A good place to start is Google Analytics. Here you’ll be able to look at the company’s online performance over (at minimum) the past year. The areas you’ll want to explore include:

  • What is traffic like? Any seasonality?
  • Unique vs. new visitors?
  • Any significant geographic info?
  • What pages were visited most?
  • What is the typical visitor flow? Can we aggregate typical paths?
  • What are considered conversions? Are goals set up?
  • What pages get the most conversions?
  • How did conversions perform last year? (Also, how much money did we make?)
  • Where did visitors spend the most time?
  • Bounce rates?
  • How long did visitors stay on the site?
  • How did visitors get to the site? Direct vs. referral vs. organic vs. paid?
  • What are the top referring URLs/sources and keywords?
  • What is the breakdown of non-branded vs. branded traffic like?
  • Any interesting mobile vs. web data?
  • Any significant traffic from social?
  • Top landing pages?

Do a technical audit: This is also the time to do (or redo) a technical audit. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here with more info, considering my colleague Geoff Kenyon wrote this ginormous post a while back on how to do a technical audit and it’s ridiculously complete.

The only other portion I’d add to this is to make sure you’re paying attention to the site structure from not only a technical, but also a user perspective. You’ll want to make sure your IA is setup optimally for mass content production later on. Trust me; you don’t want to get into the business of creating a ton of content and pushing it live when your site structure is disorganized. Do the work to figure out how you should setup your site first so you don’t make mistakes of redirecting content later. Here are two resources I like a lot regarding setting up your IA for content and SEO success.

Conduct a content audit: Doing a content audit isn’t so difficult, it’s just a monster of a job because you’re weeding through a lot of web pages. There are a ton of different metrics you can gather about your content to do this. What I typically pull includes:

  • Landing page URLs
  • Status code
  • Page title
  • Word count
  • Pageviews
  • Unique page views
  • Time on page
  • Bounce rate
  • % Exit
  • # Entrances
  • Referral entrances
  • Organic entrances
  • Pages/visit
  • Overall goal completion
  • Breakdown of goal completions
  • CPA (if applicable)
  • # unique root linking domains
  • Page Authority/Domain authority
  • Social Metrics (# FB shares, tweet, likes, +1s, etc.)

Once all this data is pulled, I’ll go through the content assigning a quality score to each page and assigning it a stage in the funnel. Later on I’ll go back to find gaps in the quality and funnel stages being addressed by the content. While a content audit might not be the most fun thing you can do as a marketer, I’d argue it’s one of the most insightful. Oftentimes you find pieces to look into for your technical audit, so don’t skip this step. You need to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going with your content!

Note: ideally you’re pulling all pages on your site that have content. However, depending on your site this might be unreasonable, so you can break it down into chunks. For example, if you’re an online directory with millions of really thin pages, you can start pulling just your blog/resource center content. Know, though, that ideally you do a content audit of all your web content!

Benchmark current keyword rankings: While the value of keyword rankings is argued to be diminishing and changing, I like to look at this now to be able to pinpoint areas for more organic growth later on. Also, this can be a great tool for getting buy-in from superiors to do content marketing, particularly when you compare current rankings to those of competitors!

Make sure you know the company in and out: If you are an agency and this is a new client, you’ll also probably want to ask more general questions about the company in order to get a really clear sense of how it operates and makes money. These would include things like the following:

  • How does the brand earn customers and revenue?
  • What words/phrases would the company use to describe itself?
  • What can the company tell us about its customers?
  • Ask the company this, “What makes you different from your competitors?”
  • What is the company’s current brand message? (It’s a good idea to see if they [think they] have one!)
  • What are the different product/services it offers?
  • What is the company’s organizational structure?
  • Who else creates content for the website?
  • What does the current content development process look like?
  • Who will have sign-off on any work that we do?
  • What is the typical lead time for sign off?
  • Does the company have a PR/outreach team and/or social team, internally or externally?
  • What are the goals for this engagement?
  • How is our point of contact measured? What metrics does he/she report on?
  • Does the company have any technical or PR launches coming up? Can the company provide us a calendar for the rest of this year?
  • What other marketing initiatives does the company use to draw in new business?
  • Does the company have a newsletter? if so, how many subscribers? How active is it? How engaged are recipients? (you’ll want to know this for customer research later)
  • Is the company currently working with any other external agencies? If so, what do they work on?

Pro tip: One of my favorite things to do is to go through the sales process for my client’s company, pretending I am a customer. This process must include going through customer service. Another great idea would be to have your mom or dad go through the process and you can watch them. This could be effective if the client’s industry doesn’t cater to internet savvy marketers.

If you’re in-house and don’t necessarily need to go through as granular of a discovery period about your own company, check out this video on how you can mine your sales department for content marketing.

Competitor research

Competitor research is so important to making an informed content plan. There are a lot of really good resources out there on how to conduct competitor research, everything from the more traditional to an analysis viewed through a content marketing lens.

I won’t go into too much detail about how to conduct this, as it varies depending on your niche and also your level of investment (for example, that latter link suggests conducting a content audit on your competitors’ content—bloody brilliant, but time consuming!).

I definitely look at this through a content lens when I need to prioritize what to look for. Some questions I ask once I know what competitors I’m targeting include:

  • What products/services do they offer? How are they different from ours?
  • What are the competitors’ brand messages?
  • What are the competitors’ USPs? What makes them different?
  • What types of marketing are competitors doing (i.e. social, content, offline, etc.)?
  • How are they performing with these different marketing channels?
  • What type of content do they create?
  • How is this content performing?
  • Do they have a community? If so, how big and engaged is it?
  • What are they doing well? What could they be doing better?
  • How are competitors performing in SERPs?

Pro tip: One of my favorite things to do, like above, is go through the sales process for each competitor, and this process must include going through customer service.

Oh, and I really like Annie Cushing’s article on mining competitors’ backlinks.

(Online) market research

I put the “online” in parentheses because there are many more ways to do market research than just through the web, such as via focus groups or direct email surveys/census data. However, since we’re predominantly focused on search as an industry, I’ll highlight a few main areas to direct your attention.

Conduct keyword research throughout the funnel: Again, the tools available to do this are diminishing, but conducting keyword research allows you to understand users intent when they search for information. You’ll want to use your findings to prioritize your content initiatives later, most likely addressing the ripest opportunities for search domination first.

I’m not going to get into too much detail about how to conduct keyword research because there are a TON of articles out there already. However, I cannot stress enough how important getting creative and conducting keyword research for opportunities throughout a customers’ potential purchasing path is. Don’t just focus on those conversion-focused head terms. Think bigger and further removed from the purchase.

Check out Google Trends: Mike Tekula wrote a great post on underappreciated marketing resources from Google, most of which can be applied to this market research phase. One of my favorites from that list is Google Trends. You can use it to look up the historical search volume estimates for different keywords, which gives you a much clearer picture on popularity than just doing research for a single point in time. Plus, it results in pretty graphs that you can use to get buy-in later on.

Find out what’s trending socially: Mining data from social media is a great way to get a sense of what the interweb peoples find interesting. I really like this article from Marketing Sherpa via last year about how to mine Twitter for actionable data. What social platform is right for you to mine depends on your industry and where your customers hang out. Here is a list of 69 social media tools you can use for getting a better grasp on what goes over well socially.

Customer research

The last, and I’d argue most important part of this research process is the customer research portion. I wrote an article on Search Engine Watch on ways to develop customer personas, and honestly, there are even more ways than that. This is one area of research that I encourage you to keep thinking about and keep evolving, because there’s so many creative ways to do this. Here are some of the ideas and approaches I’ve been playing around with, some of which I’ve tried, others I haven’t yet:

  • Surveys: You can send this both to your current customers and to non-customers using tools like Google Consumer Surveys. You can even survey users directly on your site using tools like Qualaroo.
  • Interviews and focus groups: Yes, this is probably one of my favorites because I’ve found it the most useful. More on this below.
  • Real-people studies: Okay, that’s a really crappy group description, but essentially what I mean here is using available tools to allow non-customers to test out different portions of your site and give feedback. You can use things like Mechanical Turk, UserTesting.com, Feedback Army, and Crazy Egg.
  • Scrape live chat logs or talk to your customer service department. You can also scrape FAQs (or just research them if you don’t have an expansive FAQ platform on your site).
  • Scrape forums or communities like Quora or LinkedIn groups to get a sense of what questions are being asked related to your product/services and/or industry.
  • Use big-data APIs to mine social insights from your users: I love this article about how to mine FullContact to get a better understanding of your customers.

Since our industry is made up of very technical people, I won’t get into the nitty gritty of how to execute some of the more quantitative approaches above. What I will dive a bit deeper into is the qualitative approaches, such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups.

First, you need to know that usually you cannot directly ask the questions to get the information you really need to know about your customers. What you’re really trying to figure out is the following:

  • What is their typical role(s) in the decision making process? (Initiator > influencer > decision maker > buyer > user > gatekeeper)
  • What does their typical purchasing journey looks like?
  • How much content, and what type, do they consume at different stages?
  • What factors drive their purchasing decisions?
  • Who influences their purchasing decisions?
  • What are their most common objections to the company and/or its product/services?
  • How quickly do they make decisions?

You can probably see why you can’t ask these directly—the truth and what a customer will tell you are two different things! I find that survey questions vary widely depending on the industry, thus, I won’t go into too much detail on the surveys but rather focus on the questions I like to ask during in-person interviews.

However, before I jump into this, I will say a few things about surveys. First, I use customer surveys as a way to source people for interviews. I typically give an incentive for filling out the survey (like being entered to win a $75 gift card). However, I’ll also give a guaranteed incentive for those who volunteer to do an interview (saying things like “if you do an interview, I’ll give you an automatic $25 gift card). I find this works like a charm, and is super valuable in being able to narrow down exactly who you interview.

This comes to my second point with interviews. You want to make sure you get the quantitative demographic information out of the way during the survey vs. during the interview. For B2B, you definitely want to ask job titles so that you can ensure you interview at least one person from each of the roles in the decision making process. You can also ask Net Promoter Score questions in surveys (i.e. “how likely are you to recommend us”) to make sure you choose interviewees who both like and dislike your services. Remember, customer interviews aren’t just a time to get all the good info—you want the bad just as much (if not more)!

Okay, back to interviews. Here are the questions I typically like to ask. Some are more appropriate for B2B than B2C, and vice versus, but hopefully this gives you some ideas of questions to ask during your next interview.

B2B Specific Interview Questions:

  • Describe your role.
  • How is your job measured?
  • What does a typical day look like?
  • What skills are required to do your job?
  • What knowledge and tools do you use in your job?
  • Who do you report to? Who reports to you? How much autonomy do you have in decision-making processes?
  • What are you responsible for?
  • What does it mean to be successful in your role?
  • What do you like best about your role?
  • What do you like least about your role?
  • What are your biggest challenges at work?

B2C or B2B Interview Questions:

  • Why did you seek an INSERT PRODUCT/SERVICE solution < best for recent customer
  • What were some key factors you looked at to evaluate the different solutions available? < again for recent customers
  • Do you use the internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how do you search for information?
  • Describe a recent purchase
    • Why did you consider a purchase?
    • What was the evaluation process?
    • How did you decide to purchase that product or service?
    • Who signed off the purchase?
  • What do you like best about INSERT COMPANY?
  • What do you like least?
  • What do you like to do in your spare time? < want to get places they hang out on the web, both social media platforms and specific sites they frequent

If you need more ideas, here are some more thanks to Content Marketing Institute.

Once you have all of these components together, that is when you can start identifying a content strategy. You want this content strategy to go after opportunities for growth (based off your benchmark audit), gaps in the market (what aren’t your competitors doing that you can be?), and what your current or target customers want and need in order to make a purchasing decision. It’s not until you have all these vital research components that you can eloquently develop a data-driven strategy to achieve some amazing content marketing success.

Takeaways

While there are many ways your content marketing initiatives can fail, many of these reasons stem from these three strategic biggies:

  1. Confusing content marketing with link building, which affects the type of promotion you’ll do and the effectiveness of each campaign.
  2. Not aligning goals and tracking them correctly.
  3. Not conducting enough research in order to develop a cohesive, effective strategy for your forthcoming content outputs.
Sort these three parts out, and it’s likely that you’ll start seeing results from your content marketing initiatives. And you know what that means? You’ll then be able to use your results to tackle the more difficult content marketing woes, such as earning internal buy-in and changing your company culture into one that eats, sleeps, and breathes content.

I would love to hear in the comments what failures you’ve experienced during your various content marketing initiatives, and how you overcame them!

If you’re curious, there were a ton of great presentation’s at last week’s Distilled SearchLove San Diego, and there’s many more to come at the SearchLove London conference next month. If you’re interested in seeing my full presentation, you can play it below.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

The Kind of Video You Should Create for Your Business – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by PhilNottingham

Businesses are quickly realizing how valuable videos can be to their marketing efforts, but few have a good sense for what kind of video content they might produce. From product videos to creative stories, what makes the most sense for each business, and what if we have a limited budget? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Phil Nottingham shows us great (and hilarious) examples of many places to start.

WBF Phil Nottingham

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard:

Video Transcription

Loads of companies are starting to wonder: “How should I do online video?” It’s not enough to just say, “We’re going to go and do video,” because it begs the question, “What kind of content should we create?”

And so today I just want to talk through a number of the different kinds of styles of video that you should be making as a business and explain what kind of style that content looks like, where it should be hosted, and all that kind of thing.

So I want to start with things that you go and make in-house. If you can go and purchase a camera, a set of lights, and a microphone like this one here, then you can go and create all these different things, and it won’t cost you too much money. You just need a little bit of editing skill. If you need to hire in some freelance talent to do that, then that’s absolutely fine.

The first one of these is product videos. What I’m talking about here is really videos that are going to help improve conversions on a specific page. Videos designed to maybe help you take a customer from that point of initial interest saying, “Am I going to buy this product,” to definitely knowing that it’s the right thing that they want to buy and pressing the Add to Cart button.

So what do these look like? Well, I think they look a little bit like this.
“Have a look at this Roger Mozbot toy. It comes in a really, really nicely branded box. It has fully posable arms, and, actually, it will help find all the links on the Web so you can work out who’s linking to you.”

With product videos, it’s incredibly important to make sure that you host them securely on your own site and you do not put them on places like YouTube or Vimeo. That’s because they’re not really relevant for an audience on YouTube or Vimeo or any of those social platforms. They should be really secured to your page using a hosting solution like Wistia, for example, that Moz use, which you can make sure the video is only on your site. Then customers searching in the Google search results will find the version of the video on your site rather than the version on YouTube, where it’s very, very hard for them then to go back to your site and convert. So make sure you’re self-hosting those videos.

Then the next kind of content you can do is tutorials and how-tos. The value of these videos is that they can be incredibly useful to build up your brand with an audience on YouTube. So I’m going to explain exactly the kind of style that you should be creating, that’s not too heavily branded, very informational, and not focused on selling.

Like this. “To pretend to be Rand Fishkin, start with a plaid shirt, and then you need some glasses. After that, it’s about waving your arms around lots and just change your voice slightly, like this. ‘Howdy everybody! Welcome Moz fans. It’s great to be here.”

You can also do a lot of thought-leadership content. Thought-leadership content can get you links, it can get you great presence on YouTube, help you build your brand as well, and demonstrate that you’re really an expert in whatever field it is you work in.

What do thought leadership videos look like? Well, exactly like this kind of thing here, right, Whiteboard Friday.

“Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I’m wearing flannel, and I want to talk to you about one of my favorite inbound marketing strategies, and that is buying links.”

Then there are video news releases that you can do as well. A video news release is a video that you will send out with a normal press release, and the real value of these is that they will help you get to the top of an editor’s pile at a newspaper or a website, wherever, get to the top of the pile much, much better than just a normal, standard text release.

So how do you create those? Well, actually, they’re very similar in style to thought-leadership videos. It’s just that you need to be much more product-focused and concentrate on that hook and why the specific news in question is exciting. Like this. “Breaking news from Moz HQ. We’re rebranding Moz to Zow.”

If you work for a company with a bit more budget, then you can go and create content that’s on this list here. It’s normally best to go and hire a video production company to do this stuff, rather than doing it in-house, because the quality will really, really matter for the success of what this content looks like.

So the first one is creative stories, and really what I mean by creative stories is what’s often referred to as like viral video or stuff that you’re going to put on social platforms, like YouTube and Vimeo, to help build your brand and help more eyeballs understand you and get to know more about your business.

What do they look like? Well, it’s this kind of thing. [plays video]

You can also create link bait. Now, link bait is not really the same as this viral, created video, because it’s much more focused on providing a specific value to a group of people, a specific audience, who are then going to link back to you in a relevant niche. So I think this content normally looks a little bit more like this. [plays video]

And lastly, if you’ve got a good budget, I recommend everybody goes out and creates ads, but not ads like TV ads. Actually, ads that are going to be useful on YouTube, and really I think that those have to be ads advertising softer things, not just demanding sales. So what I really like to do is advertise content. If you’ve got a great blog or you’ve got a good email list, why not create an advert and target people on YouTube and tell them why they should come and explore your content and learn more about your business and start to engage with all those inbound marketing channels that you’re creating content for.

So what does this look like? Well, I think it’s this kind of thing. “Howdy everybody. Come and check out the Moz Blog. We have loads and loads of free content marketing and inbound stuff and real company shit, and oh, it’s amazing.”

And lastly, if you have absolutely no budget at all, then I recommend having a play with Vine. There’s going to be great rewards for the kind of companies that work out how to do something exciting with Vine and Instagram video. We don’t know which one’s going to be more dominant yet, so I recommend you have a play and do some really cool stuff and see what you can come up with. A bit like this. [plays video]

And you can also do Google+ Hangout on Air. All you need to do Google+
Hangout on Air is have a laptop with a webcam and a microphone. I’m sure everybody has one of these. This is a great way to actually build your brand through doing some nice thought leadership kind of content very, very, very cheaply.

Thank you very much. I hope you found that useful.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Five Steps to Finding (the Right) Guest-Blogging Opportunities

Posted by MackenzieFogelson

Guest blogging isn’t just a link building tactic (that has been spammed and abused). It’s an excellent way to build your credibility, your community, and your customer base.

But you have to be strategic about it and put some quality effort into it.

When you guest blog, you’ve been provided the opportunity to leverage someone else’s audience, someone else’s brand, and someone else’s established forum.

That means, if you’re doing it right, guest blogging should be some of your best work. Think of it as a speaking engagement. You wouldn’t get up in front of a group of people unprepared. You would take the time to carefully craft your message in order to make the biggest impact on your audience.

And when you’re putting in all of that hard work, you don’t just want to guest blog anywhere. You want to strategically put your effort into blogs that are a match for your values, philosophies, and company. Because ultimately, you’re using guest blogging as a tactic to attract customers to your business.

Finding a guest-blogging match


So let’s say you want to use guest blogging as a tactic for your business development and community building efforts. How would you find those opportunities?

How about these five simple steps:

[1] Determine goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

Success in anything, but especially in guest blogging, starts with identifying goals. What are you trying to accomplish? What are you expecting to gain from it? And, also very significant: How will you measure success?

Let’s say I’m looking for blogging opportunities. There are three things that I would like to accomplish:

  1. Become part of new communities and build relationships with people outside of SEO. (Not that there’s anything wrong with SEOs. It’s just an example, folks. Carry on).

  2. Attract business that is a match for Mack Web’s culture and values.

  3. Find new information sources (blogs) where I can learn, teach the team, and better serve our clients.


I would measure success in connections made, qualified leads generated, and new quality blogs to read.

[2] Define your audience by developing personas


In order to determine the right guest-blogging opportunities, you’ve got to identify your target audience. One way to do that is to develop personas. This will help you define the specific people you want to attract to your community and your company through your guest-blogging efforts.

For example, if I’m looking to attract people who are curious about social media marketing, possibly community building, and how that can help them build their business, one of my personas may look like this:

Name: Joanna

Title: CMO

Company: A small SaaS startup

Desires: Rapid growth, increased revenue generation

Goals: Drive ROI through social and community building



Having an understanding of who you’re targeting will assist you in filtering guest-blogging prospects later.

[3] Find some targets in your niche 


Now that you’ve figured out who in general you want to target, you’ll want to actually find the specific people that you want to reach out to for guest-blogging opportunities. You can start by looking for influential people and then determining whether they have blogs to which you could contribute.

Using myself as an example, I would go to Followerwonk and do some searching. I’m going to start with the phrase “social media marketing” and then sort the results by Social Authority.

After sifting through just the first page of results, I recognize Jeff Bullas as a possible guest blogging target. He’s not the CMO I’m looking to attract, but I’d be willing to bet there are CMOs that read his blog. So let’s work with him as a possible target in the social media marketing niche.

[4] Qualify the source


Once you’ve found some possible targets in your niche, you’ll want to do a little legwork to make sure they’re the right fit. You may want to keep track of this stuff in a spreadsheet so that you can organize and filter your results later.

There may be bunch of things that you investigate with these opportunities, but if you’re trying to do this quickly, try some of these:

1. Check for a blog

Clearly you cannot guest blog for someone who does not in fact have a blog, so that’s step number one.

On Jeff Bullas’s blog, I can conduct a simple search for [guest post]:

By clicking on these results, it’s clear that he allows guest submissions (and, in fact, that he allows them quite frequently). So if this ends up being a good fit for me, I may have a greater chance of getting a spot.

2. Check for domain authority and link profile


You’ll want to make sure that you’re putting all of the hard work of your quality content on a blog that has strong credibility.

You can type the URL of the blog into Open Site Explorer to check their domain authority and link profile. You will certainly be earning a link from this blog, so even if it is nofollow, you want to ensure that you’re being associated with a quality site. Not that a low DA is always an indication of a poor blog; some are just new and haven’t yet built their authority. You just want to make sure you’re building trust and not hurting your reputation, your brand, or your own link profile. In addition to DA, then, you’ll want to check their profile:

At a quick glance, Jeff Bullas’s link profile looks pretty swell; he’s earned links from some reputable places. I would say he passes the domain authority and link profile check.

Just make sure when you’re qualifying blogs that are not as established or well known that you’re picky about this stuff so that you don’t pay for it later. You want to be associated with high quality, so that’s what you’re looking for.



3. Check for engagement

You also want to make sure you’ve qualified this guest-blogging opportunity on the social side. What kind of engagement does the blog get? What does its community look like? What is its reach?

Looking at both Jeff Bullas’s posts, and especially at his guest authors’ posts, you can see that there’s quite a bit of engagement. Not only do they get shared, but they even elicit comments:


Another way to look for engagement is to search for the URL of the guest blog post in Twitter. This will allow you to investigate the people who have actually tweeted this guest blogger’s post:

Chances are many of the same people who read and tweet these posts are the same ones that may read or share mine (if I were given the opportunity, of course). Based on who is tweeting these posts, I can determine whether that audience is a match for the persona I’ve defined.

[5] Check yes or no

Once you’ve worked through each of the steps above, you’re probably ready to make a decision about the guest-blogging opportunity that’s in front of you. But before you check “yes” or “no” (and ask for the opportunity), I’d highly recommend asking yourself one final question:

Is this guest blogging opportunity a culture and value fit for your business?

Ultimately, if your guest blogging is a success, you will attract customers from this blog to your website and blog. So, most importantly, you’ve got to make sure the people who are part of this community are in alignment with your brand.

Go read the entries on the blog. Is the content of good quality? Do the posts resonate with your philosophies? Are the other contributors to this blog reputable? Would you hang out with them? If you were to guest on this blog, would it speak well of your brand?

 Are you going to want any of their readers as your customers? Would you spend time with their community?

Just some important things to think about before you spend a whole lot of time on guest blogging. Make sure it’s a match for your business.

Time well spent

Guest blogging is a really powerful way to connect with people, build relationships, and find qualified leads for your business. If you take the time to strategically seek and qualify the right opportunities, it will be time well spent.

Have you had success in finding quality guest blogging opportunities? Share your successes and techniques in the comments below.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →