Guest blogging is a great way to build backlinks to your website, build relationships with people in your industry, grow your referral traffic, and improve your website’s SEO. Check out this guest blog case study about how we successfully landed a guest post for our client Reynolds Transfer & Storage.

Finding the guest blog post opportunity

One of the best tools to find guest blog posting opportunities is free and easy to use – Google! To find blogs and websites that accept guest submissions in our client’s industry, we used Google Search Operators combined with keywords and common phrases related to guest posting.

• Keyword + “guest post”
• Keyword + “guest blog”
• Keyword + “guest post guidelines”
• Keyword + “guest blog guidelines”
• Keyword + “submit a post”
• Keyword + “write for us”
• Keyword + “contribute”

To find guest blog opportunities in the residential moving industry for Reynolds Transfer & Storage, we searched multiple combinations of target keywords and guest post phrases. Through this process, we found a number of relevant blogs that accepted guest post submissions, including Apartminty. Apartminty, an apartment search resource with a blog about apartment living, has a page dedicated to Guest Post Guidelines that appeared in our Google searches. 

Guest Post Outreach

Once we identified Apartminty as a potential guest blogging opportunity, the next step was research and preparation for outreach. The Apartminty Guest Blog Guidelines includes what they’re looking for in a guest post, an application to be considered for a guest blog post, and contact information for the blog. Working with the team at Reynolds Transfer & Storage, we brainstormed potential blog post ideas tailored to Apartminty’s audience and submitted the application to the contact information listed on the page.

Along with the application, we focused on keeping the email containing the attachment short and to the point, with a clear subject line: 

Guest Blogger Inquiry for Apartminty

Hello,

I am reaching out on behalf of Reynolds Transfer & Storage, a Madison, Wisconsin-based moving company specializing in residential moves with a commitment to environmentally sustainable business practices. We are interested in contributing guest blog posts for the Apartminty blog. I have attached the completed questionnaire for your consideration. 

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Hannah Biggs

The Results

Once we submitted the application, we heard back from the Apartminty team with a preferred topic. We wrote the blog post, submitted it for review, and received a publication date. Finally, our guest blog post for Reynolds Transfer & Storage was live on the Apartminty blog. 

The post includes a bio with a link back to the Reynolds Transfer & Storage website. Below is the estimated domain authority for the backlink from Apartminty. 

For more about improving your website’s SEO through guest blog posts, check out our post How to Write High-Quality Guest Posts.

There are now some truly amazing free SEO tools that can get you very close to all the way toward ranking higher for targeted online searches.

Wait.

Is it really possible to fully optimize for Google’s algorithm without paying for expensive SEO tools?

I would say yes. Now it is. And that’s awesome.

How to Optimize Your Existing Website for Search Engines

Once you’ve done your initial pass at optimizing your website for your target keyword phrases, you should monitor and work to improve your rankings over time.

As I often tell our team and our clients, the work of SEO never really ends.

We all need to remain vigilant to continue to reap the rewards of targeted search traffic from customers and clients who are looking online for exactly what we offer.

Here’s the process I follow when I’m optimizing my own pet portrait company’s website for Google search. While I love using fancy paid SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz Pro, I can get pretty dang far using just the following free SEO tools:

• Ubersuggest
• The Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension
• Google Sheets
• Yoast SEO Plug-in
• The new Google Search Console Performance Report
• SimilarWeb
• ScreamingFrogSEOSpider
• GTMetrix
• hunter.io
• Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

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Most business owners would avoid setting up shop to sell things people don’t want, yet they regularly plop content and pages on their website with hardly a thought for what their customers want. Keyword research should be your roadmap; let the search data guide how you create your website, from your regular pages to your blog posts. It’s now possible to know the demand for what you offer before you even create it!
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Business owners often ask us what SEO entails. Despite the still-common belief, good SEO doesn’t consist of “manipulating” Google’s algorithm. To the contrary, ranking on the first page for your services is more a matter of following online marketing best practices and adhering to search engine guidelines and capitalizing on what we actually know about how Google works.

To rank well, you need:

1. Keyword Research to anticipate how people search for your services
2. Onsite Optimization built onto your website so Google and Bing start to associate those keywords with you
3. Speed and Mobility so your website loads fast and works well on mobile devices
4. Accurate business listing citations on the web’s top directories and data aggregators
5. Lots of great reviews on your Google My Business listing
6. Great, keyword-rich content posted regularly on your site
7. Links from other sites showing you are trusted, authoritative, and valuable

Easy, right? Well, not exactly, but it at least helps to know what we’re up against when we want to be in the “modern phonebook” on page 1 of Google and Bing. The following describes how we break this all down in our recommended 6-month SEO projects.

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