SEO
Everything You Need to Know
Not only is guest blogging well and alive, it’s still highly effective. In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about guest blogging.
But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.
Guest blogging is the practice of writing and publishing a blog post on another person’s or company’s website.
For example, I wrote a guest post for Grow & Convert several years ago:
Guest blogging is a win-win for both the writer and the publisher.
Benefits for the writer:
- Build links back to their site
- Develop relationships with editors and publishers
- Expose their brand to a new audience
- Build their reputation and position themselves as a thought leader
Benefit for the publisher:
- Leverage the expertise and experience of writers. For example, we couldn’t have written about Zapier or Pet Keen’s firsthand SEO experience without guest writers.
Getting your first guest post published can be daunting. I’ve been there. Following the steps below will make the process easier and maximize your chances of success.
1. Find guest blogging opportunities
Most people use Google search operators to find blogs with “write for us” pages. However, if everyone’s following this tactic, then everyone’s finding the same opportunities. Competition will be rife, and publishers may ignore your pitch.
You don’t have to limit yourself to this small pool of blogs. Even if they do not advertise it, most blogs will be happy to publish a guest post as long as it’s good.
So here’s how to find relevant blogs to pitch:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Enter a broad keyword or phrase related to your niche
- Select In title from the drop-down menu
- Run the search
Here, you can see more than 2 million potential opportunities. That’s too many, so let’s narrow the list down by applying these filters:
- Domain Rating (DR) from 30 to 60
- Click the One page per domain filter
- Click the Exclude homepages filter
- Click the Exclude subdomains filter
Then click on the Websites tab.
These are the potential websites you could pitch.
2. Develop guest post ideas
The blogs you pitch will want winning content ideas. So how can you come up with good guest post ideas?
Here are some techniques you can use:
Copycat Technique
Three things are true:
- Every blog wants more search traffic.
- To get search traffic, you need to target topics people are searching for.
- Every blog has more topics to write than resources to cover them.
So why not help your target blogs out? Find topics they should be ranking for and pitch them those topics.
Here’s how to find them:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
- Enter the domain of your target blog in the Target section
- Add the first three suggested competing domains in the Competitors section
- Click Compare
This report shows you the keywords the competing domains are ranking for, but your target blog isn’t.
Go through the report and look for keywords that are relevant to your target blog. For example, this seems like a potential topic to pitch:
Refresh Technique
Refreshing outdated content can provide a huge traffic boost, as seen when we updated our post about free SEO tools:
Your target blog will likely have outdated content that has declined in search traffic. Pitch them an update.
Here’s how to find pages with declining traffic:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter the domain of your target blog
- Go to the Top pages report
- Set the Compare filter to Previous year
- Sort the Traffic change column from lowest to highest
This will show you pages on your target blog that have the largest decline in search traffic since the previous year. Go through the report and look out for suitable topics, especially those with declines in traffic and keyword positions.
For example, SmartBlogger’s post on membership sites has dropped in both keyword positions and search traffic:
If you were writing for SmartBlogger, this would be a good topic to pitch.
Robin Hood Technique
Popular blogs are popular for one reason: They have great content. Lesser-known blogs are lesser-known for the opposite reason: They have yet to publish tons of great content.
So why not take content ideas from the top blogs and offer them to lesser-known ones?
We call this the Robin Hood Technique, named after the English folk hero who stole from the rich and gave to the poor.
Here’s how to execute the Robin Hood Technique:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter the domain of a high-DR blog in your niche
- Go to the Top pages report
- Toggle SERP titles on
Look through the report and see if there is any idea that resonates. Put a unique spin and pitch it to a lesser-known blog.
For example, if you’re writing for a personal finance blog, this seems like a good topic to be inspired by:
A potential idea to pitch can be “free (or cheap) things to do on a date.”
Splintering Technique
Our link building guide is so comprehensive it spans five chapters:
Each chapter could be a post on its own.
So we can break this post into “splinters” and create standalone articles. Each of these splintered articles can be pitched as a guest post.
Since we already did the research by creating the original piece, the “splintered” articles would likely not take much time to write.
Perspective Technique
You can easily reuse a topic by switching up the perspective.
For example, let’s say we wrote a guest post titled “Best Remote Jobs for Students.” We can cover the same topic for different publications via multiple perspectives:
3. Pitch the blogs
This step is both the easiest and the most nerve-wracking. It’s easy because it’s simply an email you send. It’s nerve-wracking because your fate is in the other party’s hands.
It doesn’t have to be that anxiety-inducing, though. Here are some tips to improve your chances of getting your pitch accepted:
Read the guidelines
If the site you’re pitching has a “write for us” page or writing guidelines, read and follow them. For example, this is what CoSchedule expects:
Find the correct email
If the publication has a “write for us” page, then it’s likely it’ll provide either an email address or a form.
Otherwise, you’ll need to find it.
Publications and blogs are typically managed by a managing editor, head of content or, if they’re a small site, the owner themself. So you want to first make sure you identify who that person is.
You can usually find them by visiting the “teams” or “about” page. For example, a quick scroll on our “team” page shows you should pitch to our head of content, Joshua Hardwick:
If the “team” page is uninformative, then a search on LinkedIn or Twitter usually suffices.
Once you’ve identified that person, use an email discovery tool like Hunter to find their email. Add their name and website, and Hunter will do its magic:
Write an amazing outreach email
Several years ago, I wrote a guest post for Grow & Convert. Benji Hyam, the co-founder, was so impressed with my outreach email that he did an analysis.
Publications get a lot of emails. You have to stand out; otherwise, your email will be ignored.
Rather than look for a template that you can copy-paste, you want to understand the principles behind what makes a good outreach email.
You can look at Benji’s analysis of my email to see what publications are expecting. You’d also do well to read the post below and follow the principles it lays out.
4. Write the guest post
If your pitch is accepted, then it’s time to write.
I recommend starting first with the outline. Some sites may request this. But even if they don’t, an outline will help flesh out your thoughts, organize the post, and prevent blank page syndrome.
To create an outline, you need to know what subtopics to cover. The easiest way to find these subtopics is to look at the common keyword rankings among top-ranking pages and eyeball the list for subtopics.
Here’s how:
- Enter your target keyword into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Scroll down to the SERP overview
- Select the top-ranking pages you want to analyze
- Click Open in and choose Content gap
For example, if we analyze the topic “affiliate marketing,” we’ll see that the top-ranking pages also rank for:
- what is affiliate marketing
- how to become an affiliate marketer
- how to do affiliate marketing
These would make good H2s for a blog post on “affiliate marketing.”
Once you’ve created your outline, all that’s left is to fill in the “gaps,” i.e., write the actual post. If they have one, make sure you go back to the guidelines, read it carefully, and follow it to a T.
Where relevant, don’t forget to include links back to your own content. Don’t overdo it, though; one to two links should suffice.
5. Promote your guest post
You should expect some back-and-forth as the publisher edits and sends feedback about your draft. Once they’re satisfied, they’ll inform you of a publishing date.
Don’t just disappear when the post is published. Follow up! Thank the editor. And if there’s a comment section, stay around and reply.
Help promote the post by sharing it on social media too:
You can even go the extra mile by promoting the post in relevant communities. In my case, Benji did it for me by submitting it to GrowthHackers. But I stayed around to answer comments.
It was likely the reason why it got so much engagement:
It was even the #2 post in that year’s year-end roundup:
Everything above will get you 90% of the way. But guest blogging is not a bed of roses. So I’m sharing the tips below to help you overcome some of the common roadblocks.
1. Pitch more blogs than you can handle
The cruel reality of guest blogging is that even if they’re good, your emails can be rejected or ignored. That’s no fault of yours—publications are just too busy.
So here’s a controversial tip: pitch the same topics to multiple blogs. Then offer the article to whoever replies first or has a higher authority (if you get lots of replies).
This way, you’re never lacking for guest posts. You won’t even need to be worried about rejection, for there will be another blog willing to accept your ideas.
If you get more than one reply, simply tell the truth:
Sorry, you weren’t responding for a few days, so another blog took this idea. I’ll be in touch with more article ideas that’ll be just as good.
2. Write for blogs that have never linked to you before
Our study of 1 billion pages shows a strong correlation between organic traffic and the number of backlinks from unique websites (referring domains).
That may be one reason why you want to write for blogs that have never linked to you before.
To find unique websites, hit the Highlight unlinked dropdown and add your website as you’re following step #1:
These tools will make your guest blogging process more efficient:
- Ahrefs – Research guest post opportunities, find content gaps to pitch blogs, build your outlines, check backlinks from guest posts, and track your guest post rankings.
- Hunter – Find the email addresses of website owners and editors.
- Pitchbox – Send outreach emails at scale.
- Ahrefs’ free AI writing tools – Generate outlines, titles, and proofread your drafts.
- ChatGPT – Generate guest post ideas, create outlines, flesh out posts, proofread your work, and more.
Here are some frequently asked questions about guest blogging:
How does guest blogging help SEO?
Links are an important Google ranking factor. By writing a guest post, you can build links back to your pages and, therefore, boost their performance in search engines.
Is guest blogging bad for SEO?
In 2014, Google’s former head of web spam, Matt Cutts, published a blog post proclaiming that “guest blogging is done.” However, he was primarily referring to low-quality guest blogging published on low-quality sites for links.
Writing a valuable blog post for an established site with a relevant audience will still help your SEO and is unlikely to hurt it.
Can I get referral traffic from guest blogging?
Several years ago, our chief marketing officer, Tim Soulo, asked 500+ bloggers how much traffic they got from their guest articles.
The average referral traffic across 239 guest articles was only 50 visits.
So yes, you can get referral traffic from guest blogging—but don’t set your expectations too high.
Final thoughts
This guide contains everything our team has learned about guest blogging over the past few years. I hope it will help take your skills to a new level.
Did I miss out on anything? Let me know on Twitter or Threads.
SEO
YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features
YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.
- YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
- New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
- YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.
SEO
How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Crawl Budget
Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Michal in Bratislava, who asks:
“I have a client who has a website with filters based on a map locations. When the visitor makes a move on the map, a new URL with filters is created. They are not in the sitemap. However, there are over 700,000 URLs in the Search Console (not indexed) and eating crawl budget.
What would be the best way to get rid of these URLs? My idea is keep the base location ‘index, follow’ and newly created URLs of surrounded area with filters switch to ‘noindex, no follow’. Also mark surrounded areas with canonicals to the base location + disavow the unwanted links.”
Great question, Michal, and good news! The answer is an easy one to implement.
First, let’s look at what you’re trying and apply it to other situations like ecommerce and publishers. This way, more people can benefit. Then, go into your strategies above and end with the solution.
What Crawl Budget Is And How Parameters Are Created That Waste It
If you’re not sure what Michal is referring to with crawl budget, this is a term some SEO pros use to explain that Google and other search engines will only crawl so many pages on your website before it stops.
If your crawl budget is used on low-value, thin, or non-indexable pages, your good pages and new pages may not be found in a crawl.
If they’re not found, they may not get indexed or refreshed. If they’re not indexed, they cannot bring you SEO traffic.
This is why optimizing a crawl budget for efficiency is important.
Michal shared an example of how “thin” URLs from an SEO point of view are created as customers use filters.
The experience for the user is value-adding, but from an SEO standpoint, a location-based page would be better. This applies to ecommerce and publishers, too.
Ecommerce stores will have searches for colors like red or green and products like t-shirts and potato chips.
These create URLs with parameters just like a filter search for locations. They could also be created by using filters for size, gender, color, price, variation, compatibility, etc. in the shopping process.
The filtered results help the end user but compete directly with the collection page, and the collection would be the “non-thin” version.
Publishers have the same. Someone might be on SEJ looking for SEO or PPC in the search box and get a filtered result. The filtered result will have articles, but the category of the publication is likely the best result for a search engine.
These filtered results can be indexed because they get shared on social media or someone adds them as a comment on a blog or forum, creating a crawlable backlink. It might also be an employee in customer service responded to a question on the company blog or any other number of ways.
The goal now is to make sure search engines don’t spend time crawling the “thin” versions so you can get the most from your crawl budget.
The Difference Between Indexing And Crawling
There’s one more thing to learn before we go into the proposed ideas and solutions – the difference between indexing and crawling.
- Crawling is the discovery of new pages within a website.
- Indexing is adding the pages that are worthy of showing to a person using the search engine to the database of pages.
Pages can get crawled but not indexed. Indexed pages have likely been crawled and will likely get crawled again to look for updates and server responses.
But not all indexed pages will bring in traffic or hit the first page because they may not be the best possible answer for queries being searched.
Now, let’s go into making efficient use of crawl budgets for these types of solutions.
Using Meta Robots Or X Robots
The first solution Michal pointed out was an “index,follow” directive. This tells a search engine to index the page and follow the links on it. This is a good idea, but only if the filtered result is the ideal experience.
From what I can see, this would not be the case, so I would recommend making it “noindex,follow.”
Noindex would say, “This is not an official page, but hey, keep crawling my site, you’ll find good pages in here.”
And if you have your main menu and navigational internal links done correctly, the spider will hopefully keep crawling them.
Canonicals To Solve Wasted Crawl Budget
Canonical links are used to help search engines know what the official page to index is.
If a product exists in three categories on three separate URLs, only one should be “the official” version, so the two duplicates should have a canonical pointing to the official version. The official one should have a canonical link that points to itself. This applies to the filtered locations.
If the location search would result in multiple city or neighborhood pages, the result would likely be a duplicate of the official one you have in your sitemap.
Have the filtered results point a canonical back to the main page of filtering instead of being self-referencing if the content on the page stays the same as the original category.
If the content pulls in your localized page with the same locations, point the canonical to that page instead.
In most cases, the filtered version inherits the page you searched or filtered from, so that is where the canonical should point to.
If you do both noindex and have a self-referencing canonical, which is overkill, it becomes a conflicting signal.
The same applies to when someone searches for a product by name on your website. The search result may compete with the actual product or service page.
With this solution, you’re telling the spider not to index this page because it isn’t worth indexing, but it is also the official version. It doesn’t make sense to do this.
Instead, use a canonical link, as I mentioned above, or noindex the result and point the canonical to the official version.
Disavow To Increase Crawl Efficiency
Disavowing doesn’t have anything to do with crawl efficiency unless the search engine spiders are finding your “thin” pages through spammy backlinks.
The disavow tool from Google is a way to say, “Hey, these backlinks are spammy, and we don’t want them to hurt us. Please don’t count them towards our site’s authority.”
In most cases, it doesn’t matter, as Google is good at detecting spammy links and ignoring them.
You do not want to add your own site and your own URLs to the disavow tool. You’re telling Google your own site is spammy and not worth anything.
Plus, submitting backlinks to disavow won’t prevent a spider from seeing what you want and do not want to be crawled, as it is only for saying a link from another site is spammy.
Disavowing won’t help with crawl efficiency or saving crawl budget.
How To Make Crawl Budgets More Efficient
The answer is robots.txt. This is how you tell specific search engines and spiders what to crawl.
You can include the folders you want them to crawl by marketing them as “allow,” and you can say “disallow” on filtered results by disallowing the “?” or “&” symbol or whichever you use.
If some of those parameters should be crawled, add the main word like “?filter=location” or a specific parameter.
Robots.txt is how you define crawl paths and work on crawl efficiency. Once you’ve optimized that, look at your internal links. A link from one page on your site to another.
These help spiders find your most important pages while learning what each is about.
Internal links include:
- Breadcrumbs.
- Menu navigation.
- Links within content to other pages.
- Sub-category menus.
- Footer links.
You can also use a sitemap if you have a large site, and the spiders are not finding the pages you want with priority.
I hope this helps answer your question. It is one I get a lot – you’re not the only one stuck in that situation.
More resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
Ad Copy Tactics Backed By Study Of Over 1 Million Google Ads
Mastering effective ad copy is crucial for achieving success with Google Ads.
Yet, the PPC landscape can make it challenging to discern which optimization techniques truly yield results.
Although various perspectives exist on optimizing ads, few are substantiated by comprehensive data. A recent study from Optmyzr attempted to address this.
The goal isn’t to promote or dissuade any specific method but to provide a clearer understanding of how different creative decisions impact your campaigns.
Use the data to help you identify higher profit probability opportunities.
Methodology And Data Scope
The Optmyzr study analyzed data from over 22,000 Google Ads accounts that have been active for at least 90 days with a minimum monthly spend of $1,500.
Across more than a million ads, we assessed Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), Expanded Text Ads (ETAs), and Demand Gen campaigns. Due to API limitations, we could not retrieve asset-level data for Performance Max campaigns.
Additionally, all monetary figures were converted to USD to standardize comparisons.
Key Questions Explored
To provide actionable insights, we focused on addressing the following questions:
- Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance?
- How do pinning assets impact ad performance?
- Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better?
- How does creative length affect ad performance?
- Can ETA strategies effectively translate to RSAs and Demand Gen ads?
As we evaluated the results, it’s important to note that our data set represents advanced marketers.
This means there may be selection bias, and these insights might differ in a broader advertiser pool with varying levels of experience.
The Relationship Between Ad Strength And Performance
Google explicitly states that Ad Strength is a tool designed to guide ad optimization rather than act as a ranking factor.
Despite this, marketers often hold mixed opinions about its usefulness, as its role in ad performance appears inconsistent.
Our data corroborates this skepticism. Ads labeled with an “average” Ad Strength score outperformed those with “good” or “excellent” scores in key metrics like CPA, conversion rate, and ROAS.
This disparity is particularly evident in RSAs, where the ROAS tends to decrease sharply when moving from “average” to “good,” with only a marginal increase when advancing to “excellent.”
Screenshot from author, September 2024Interestingly, Demand Gen ads also showed a stronger performance with an “average” Ad Strength, except for ROAS.
The metrics for conversion rates in Demand Gen and RSAs were notably similar, which is surprising since Demand Gen ads are typically designed for awareness, while RSAs focus on driving transactions.
Key Takeaways:
- Ad Strength doesn’t reliably correlate with performance, so it shouldn’t be a primary metric for assessing your ads.
- Most ads with “poor” or “average” Ad Strength labels perform well by standard advertising KPIs.
- “Good” or “excellent” Ad Strength labels do not guarantee better performance.
How Does Pinning Affect Ad Performance?
Pinning refers to locking specific assets like headlines or descriptions in fixed positions within the ad. This technique became common with RSAs, but there’s ongoing debate about its efficacy.
Some advertisers advocate for pinning all assets to replicate the control offered by ETAs, while others prefer to let Google optimize placements automatically.
Image from author, September 2024Our data suggests that pinning some, but not all, assets offers the most balanced results in terms of CPA, ROAS, and CPC. However, ads where all assets are pinned achieve the highest relevance in terms of CTR.
Still, this marginally higher CTR doesn’t necessarily translate into better conversion metrics. Ads with unpinned or partially pinned assets generally perform better in terms of conversion rates and cost-based metrics.
Key Takeaways:
- Selective pinning is optimal, offering a good balance between creative control and automation.
- Fully pinned ads may increase CTR but tend to underperform in metrics like CPA and ROAS.
- Advertisers should embrace RSAs, as they consistently outperform ETAs – even with fully pinned assets.
Title Case Vs. Sentence Case: Which Performs Better?
The choice between title case (“This Is a Title Case Sentence”) and sentence case (“This is a sentence case sentence”) is often a point of contention among advertisers.
Our analysis revealed a clear trend: Ads using sentence case generally outperformed those in title case, particularly in RSAs and Demand Gen campaigns.
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen)
ROAS, in particular, showed a marked preference for sentence case across these ad types, suggesting that a more natural, conversational tone may resonate better with users.
Interestingly, many advertisers still use a mix of title and sentence case within the same account, which counters the traditional approach of maintaining consistency throughout the ad copy.
Key Takeaways:
- Sentence case outperforms title case in RSAs and Demand Gen ads on most KPIs.
- Including sentence case ads in your testing can improve performance, as it aligns more closely with organic results, which users perceive as higher quality.
- Although ETAs perform slightly better with title case, sentence case is increasingly the preferred choice in modern ad formats.
The Impact Of Ad Length On Performance
Ad copy, particularly for Google Ads, requires brevity without sacrificing impact.
We analyzed the effects of character count on ad performance, grouping ads by the length of headlines and descriptions.
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen Data)
Interestingly, shorter headlines tend to outperform longer ones in CTR and conversion rates, while descriptions benefit from moderate length.
Ads that tried to maximize character counts by using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) or customizers often saw no significant performance improvement.
Moreover, applying ETA strategies to RSAs proved largely ineffective.
In almost all cases, advertisers who carried over ETA tactics to RSAs saw a decline in performance, likely because of how Google dynamically assembles ad components for display.
Key Takeaways:
- Shorter headlines lead to better performance, especially in RSAs.
- Focus on concise, impactful messaging instead of trying to fill every available character.
- ETA tactics do not translate well to RSAs, and attempting to replicate them can hurt performance.
Final Thoughts On Ad Optimizations
In summary, several key insights emerge from this analysis.
First, Ad Strength should not be your primary focus when assessing performance. Instead, concentrate on creating relevant, engaging ad copy tailored to your target audience.
Additionally, pinning assets should be a strategic, creative decision rather than a hard rule, and advertisers should incorporate sentence case into their testing for RSAs and Demand Gen ads.
Finally, focus on quality over quantity in ad copy length, as longer ads do not always equate to better results.
By refining these elements of your ads, you can drive better ROI and adapt to the evolving landscape of Google Ads.
Read the full Ad Strength & Creative Study from Optmyzr.
More resources:
Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock
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