What Issues Might You Face When Guest Posting for Your Clients in 2019?

What Issues Might You Face When Guest Posting for Your Clients in 2019?

Guest posts are one of the most demanded services by online marketing agency’s clients. They help both SEO and the branding.

Moreover, they look much better than pay-per-click advertisements, and are more familiar to the average client that has lived all their life seeing advertorials in newspapers.

However, it is not a bed of roses, and I think it is important to be aware of some of the most common issues I have experienced as freelance copywriter in Spanish. I will avoid issues like editors not answering messages and not knowing what to write about, because I think they have already been discussed comprehensively on the internet.

So, let’s see some issues from the point of view of the online marketing agency or SEO professional:

Your client expects the full article to always just be about the brand/company

We all know, guest posting is about to bring value for readers. In exchange for that, you can add a link to your site, but some clients are not so familiar with the online marketing business, and they do not understand why on earth they have to pay for an article that is not 100% about their brand.

You have to explain that, while that is sometimes possible, it is not always the best option because depending on the topic, you can introduce a more natural and subtle link that will work for its purpose.

If you want a cheap result, you can’t get everything

I have worked for some local clients. Sadly, my city is very traditional and many people do not understand online advertisement well. As a result, the local newspapers with low potential when it comes to SEO ask for a lot of money because they are selling you a very well segmented audience. That is fair, but it is not always interesting for the SEO purposes of my clients. Sometimes I have suggested publishing guest posts in newspapers from other regions of Spain. For SEO, this can work very well as long as the topic is related to the link and you find an excuse to write the city name a couple of times. There are many ways to do this and still offer value to readers in other city. It is not ideal, but sometimes is more cost-effective.

However, not all my clients understand why they need to pay for a guest post in a newspaper that is targeting people out of their area.

The publication removing the link

Time wins us all. There is a point in which sites need to clean their archives and they remove the links. When you agree to a guest post, you will likely agree with them to hold the link for at least for a year or two, but after that, many things can happen.

This is a nightmare that always makes you look bad in the eyes of the clients.

You find the same site at a cheaper price after the publication

You buy a link at a fair price, and a few days after that, you realise that you could have bought it in another place much cheaper. This happens in every aspect of life. To avoid this, I usually reach the sites directly instead of using link-building platforms. While link building platforms save you a lot of time, the truth is in most cases you can easily get the link directly from the site if you make the effort to write to them. By doing so, you are also removing the platform margin, so it is usually cheaper. Of course, you also need to take into consideration the bulk discounts that these agencies may get and you may not.

Moz update the algorithm and the links lose value

This is tricky. Moz, or any other SEO tool, does not have the truth about linksquality. Their measures are valid as far as people trust in them, but from what we know, not a single search engine uses those metrics. This means that if Moz, Majestic, or any other platform changes the values of your links, in reality your links will have the same value that they had before.

My advice would be to choose high quality sites with real audiences. If you do that, probably the site will just improve with time, no matter the updates of algorithms, and even if an update does not favour them, the search engines will still get a good opinion about them.

Your competitors publish in the same site soon after you do it

Again, avoiding the link building platforms makes this less likely, but it still can happen. SEOs usually research where competitors have links, and once they see that a site accepted a guest post about a topic for which they have a client that fits, they will also get that link.

You cannot do many things against this. Just try to do the best article possible so readers notice the difference between your brand and the others.

Conclusion

I have avoided mentioning issues like editors not answering your pitches, because that is more than treated over the internet.

These issues are real issues I have faced when working with guest posts and clients that are not internet savvy.

There are two main things to do to minimise the issues: Communicate and educate your clients, and only choose real high quality sites to publish on.

I personally do not use link building platforms, but they can provide a good service if you use them with responsibility. Although they offer you the site and some measures, you should always check the sites yourself before buying the link in the platform.

Search engines are created to serve humans. If you create your content with the same purpose, it can only benefit you in the long term.

Posted by Miguel Bratos

Miguel Bratos
Miguel Bratos is a freelance copywriter in Spanish that focuses his activity on internet texts. He has more than six years of experience as an SEO content writer in highly competitive markets like investment, antivirus programs, law and gambling, just to name a few. Among these services, writing guest posts in Spanish is one of the most demanded by the agencies he works with.

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