If you took my advice from my last blog post, you landed a great guest blog post on an awesome industry related website, helping to solve your customers’ problems.
Now, you have a choice to make: Do you spend time crafting a second post for that site, even though you’re not getting as much SEO value with the second post? Or do you target another site and use your resources to land another post via a different site?
The choice is always tough, because ultimately, your team does not have unlimited resources. Usually, I would say to go after the second site, because getting links from more referring domains is always an excellent choice from an SEO perspective.
However, if that first site is sending your website great traffic, it might outweigh the SEO value. Here are two ways to help determine whether it is worth your time to keep contributing to the same site:
1. Check Your Analytics Tool
- Are you getting website visitors? Analytics tools are great for helping your marketing team figure out how your website visitors navigate your site. They are also great at telling you where visitors came from. Look through the list of top referring sites or search for the sites you are guest contributing to, in order to see how many website visitors came to your website because of reading your blog post. If these numbers are high, it might make contributing again worth it.
- Bouncing or converting? It is also important to look at what that traffic is doing once it gets to your site. Are visitors leaving after not looking at any other pages (bouncing)? Or are they viewing a lot of pages per session? Are these visitors completing other micro conversions you have on your site? Or, better yet, are they filling out your forms or giving your reps a call and becoming leads? Look at all of these factors and compare them to other channel averages. If the numbers are producing results, it justifies investing the time to write more for that site.
- Is guest posting worthwhile? Look at the numbers … It is tough to provide specific numbers to use as a benchmark, because every industry is different. Yet if a website is sending you consistent traffic that is navigating your site and converting visitors in some fashion, you should continue to write for that audience. You have already invested the time to get in front of these people. Why not maximize the impact it can have on your site?
2. Check the Social Metrics
One of the great aspects of guest blogging is getting your brand in front of a new audience. While you want that audience to turn into leads, that is not the only task the audience can help with. Readers can also help you spread the word about the content you created.
- Consider using tools like Topsy or Share Count to see how people are sharing your content. If no one is sharing your content via social media, it might make sense not to contribute on that website anymore.
- Though if that publication is helping you by amplifying your content and getting that blog post in front of more people that could potentially become leads, it could justify contributing to the site again.
- Sometimes, referral traffic can be a numbers game. If you find a site’s audience that is really engaged with your content and frequently shares it, then strongly consider feeding that hungry audience with more helpful content.
Generating leads is crucial to growing your business (nothing shocking or ground breaking there). In any link building and content marketing effort, it’s important to grow the amount of domains that link to your site, but that is not all you should pay attention to.
Getting exposure on sites is challenging. If you are lucky enough to find a site and write content for it that turns its audience into referral traffic or an amplifier of your brand, it is worth sacrificing resources to feed that audience. Just make sure to check your analytics tools and the social metrics to justify the investment.