In this case study, we will go through how we found over 55 guest post opportunities for one of our clients. We show you the exact Google Search operators and the other tools we used.
We do not actually prospect with “write for us” and similar keyword additions anymore. Linkfarms and similar have catched on to this tactic, the quality of the results you get from using these GSC’s are decreasing by the minute.
When you are prospecting for links. Use the same keywords but without the guest post additions.
Information Gathering
Our client wanted to receive guest post opportunities to fulfill his link-building campaign. The client only wanted to build links to his homepage.
We went through the homepage of his website and wrote down all the possible keywords we could use in Google to find link targets.
It would be best to look at the meta description and headlines used. This gives you a good view of the keywords the website tries to rank for.
You can use the Google Ads keyword planner if you need more keyword suggestions. Log in and put in your domain. Google now starts to discover relevant keywords on your selected page.
Sort these keywords out, Google comes up with quite a few irrelevant keywords, but always gives you some new ones you didn’t think about.
Prospecting
Prospecting is finding suitable link targets for your link-building campaigns. Aka, finding the websites you want a link from. We will do that with Google search operators and the keyword list we built in the last part.
In Google search for this;
Keyword + “write for us”
This will give you all the results with a write-for-us page. You can go through every interesting Google result and do a quality check.
The most important points you have to check are the following;
- Niche Relevance
- Domain Rating(DR)
- Traffic
- No Google Penalties
- No Bad Links(In & Out)
- Maximum Outbound Links
- Good Internal Link Structure
We go over the quality-checking process in-depth in another article.
Now when you are done with this keyword + Google search operator, we can go over to the following Google search operator. Here, you will find a master list with all Google Search Operators to find guest posts.
TIP: Also, use only the keywords as your search term. Many sites you find this way accept guest posts, too. You just have to ask them :).
Outreach
We need to get the contact information of all the websites that passed your quality-checking process. You can do this manually by searching for the contact information. You can use Scrapebox for this with the email scraper plugin.
Or you can use a service like hunter.io. When you quality check the website you should look for the obvious signs for emails (check the contact us page for example). This can save you a lot of time and money on API calls.
Now we will email the website owner asking for a guest post or link insertion placements. We have the best results with a pretty informal and to-the-point email. You could use the following for example:
Hi $name!(if you don’t know the name, hi is enough).
Hope everything is going great.
I wanted to reach out and ask if you’re currently accepting guest posts on $websitename.
If you are interested, would you please get back to me?
Thanks for taking the time to read my email.
Kind regards,
$your name
That’s it. You can send these emails just from your normal Gmail account, and if the account has a bit of age, almost all will be delivered perfectly.
Now that Gmail reminds you about follow-ups using a cold outreach service is unnecessary. When you prospect for guest posts on a small scale.
One thing I would like to add to the outreach email, I never pitch article ideas straight away. Because it just takes too much time to do this on a mass scale.
If they accept guest posts and we decide to post them on them, I first pitch some article ideas and work on the one they accept/prefer.
Results
Using this tactic, we found 55+ guest post placements, using just 3 keywords. It is not a quick method, but it gives great results, and you get links from websites ranking for your desired search terms.