What happens if you are a young startup without as much funding as most unicorns and you want to improve on your SEO efforts? Well, most SEO companies charge a ton of money to get SEO done month over month. Sometimes it is not really possible for startups to cater to that outrageous budget in the beginning. Even in public relations, a lot of startups undertake DIY PR strategies at the beginning to just build some momentum. The team over at Wisepops have managed to build 29 back-links from major startup blogs and companies just from adopting a thorough link-building strategy. The company started as a team of two, with a cash budget of only $3,600. This startup then identified the most viable options for their guest posting strategy in order to push the word out about their startup and also get some love from Google.
Why guest posts?
They come with some really good merits. First off, guest posts are one of the few link building strategies that Google considers to be white hat. Secondly, guests post bring in some traffic to your site and will continue to do so for months on end. If the site is an authoritative one, not only will it bring immediate traffic but there is a possibility the guest post may rank highly in the search engines. You will have your link on a guest post that is evergreen as far as traffic and SEO value is concerned. Lastly, guest posts should not cost money most of the time unless you are directly promoting a product or service in which case they become sponsored posts.
Wisepops used various ways to build its outreach list. Here are some you might want to use:
- Websites that have published guest posts from competitors – there is a high likelihood they might accept to publish yours too.
- Keyword monitoring – websites that have mentioned your keyword phrase a lot are more likely to accept a guest post.
- Existing partnerships – every business will have partners at some point. These partners might accept guest posts if you ask.
- The company’s clients – since Wisepop provides a pop-up solution for websites, each and every client has a website. Sifting through the nice websites and asking for a guest posting opportunity worked very well.
Among other strategies, this helped the company grow its traffic and improve the SEO value of the domain. If you would like to learn exactly how they achieved this, read: The Exact Strategy We Used to Place 29 Guest Posts in 7 Months (with a team of two)