Today, Daniel Vassiliou joins me to talk about the current state of content marketing and its future with special regards to one of its popular strategies, guest posting. He is the CEO of Edivan Digital, a company that specializes in high-end content marketing services for clients all over the world.
Kallen Diggs: Hi Daniel. Welcome and thanks for joining us.
Daniel Vassiliou: It’s always a pleasure.
Kallen Diggs: Last year, Google has stipulated that they will not value guest posting campaigns that are solely designed to gather links. How can a guest posting campaign remain relevant to a company’s content marketing strategy today?
Daniel Vassiliou: Good question! It is a common one. The answer centers around the quality of the article, its value, and whether it is just a platform to gain a link.
What value is it offering? Also, are you looking for link traffic, PR, and/or brand enhancement? This article is a good one from Quick Sprout regarding continued guest posting within Google’s guidelines.
Regarding link building, you want to offer valuable advice, or facts, but you need to justify any lin from an SEO perspective. Why is the link there? It is usually best to avoid linking to sales or product pages unless the actual page is relevant in some particular way.
Keep the resource pages that offer insight relevant to the links within the article. If you have no resources, create them specifically for that article. At least, then your link will have relevancy. The days are gone, where exact match anchor text links help you rank better in the search engine result pages.
For PR or brand building, you want to make sure your actual company associates with the information shared in an article. For example, this interview associates my company and myself with the information that I am sharing with you. If you share your expertise online in an interview or news article, make sure you are able to garner the praise from readers and any accompanying traffic.
Kallen Diggs: So, are you saying that you can still gain link value from SEO and have a separate agenda of gaining traffic and brand authority by changing the content marketing strategy a bit?
Daniel Vassiliou: Basically…yes. Look at it like three kinds of guest posting:
- Guest posting: Gaining links from articles that head back to your site’s resource pages giving you link value that helps raise your site’s overall authority in search engines.
- Super Guest Posting: Supplying quotes or specific information to someone’s article and gaining a mention back to your site for supplying it and helping build the post up. These are quotes or mentions within an article and usually, the link is branded, which helps build your brand, deliver traffic to your homepage and gain decent increases to your search ranking positions.
- Super Super Guest Posting: This is where you give multiple pieces of information, perhaps for a relevant news story, or an interview discussing a specific thing where you have expertise (i.e. as I am doing here). These articles offer everything that the second “Super Guest Posting” offer, yet you are also associated with the article in its entirety. This increases reader engagement with your brand, which increases the flow of traffic to your site. The added credibility of being a major contributor to big news stories or important blog posts will not be lost on your clientele, both current and potential.
Kallen Diggs: Thanks for breaking that down for me. So, we can really mix up on how we guest post from now on. Perhaps, focus a bit more on the brand building side of things when we want to build links…
Daniel Vassiliou: Exactly Kallen. Just thinking about links without thinking about the kind of article those links are in, or the sort of links they are, is not going to maximize your success rate. Search engines like Google are all about the brand now. They also want to see links in articles, where there is a lot of relevance to the sort of links that will be heading back to your site.
Add to that the need for social signals and sharing that needs to happen to “validate” the article. You really need to consider your strategy before just agreeing to gain links from some articles. I always think that an article that draws good traffic and social activity will be safe from Google’s penalties, but I don’t stop there.
I want articles that will enhance my brand, add authority to me and my business, and drive decent traffic. Adding this second part takes a basic SEO strategy and turns it into a decent content marketing strategy that has more than just ranking benefits.
Kallen Diggs: All very interesting Dan. Plenty of insights here. We must do this again sometime! Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. How can people follow or contact you?
Daniel Vassiliou: It is always a pleasure Kallen. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions and hope I added some clarity to some of them.
If your readers want to reach out, they can get in touch with me through Twitter @enduranceseo or my site linked above to ask any questions regarding our interview. I am always happy to share anything that may be helpful. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to do that today.
Photo: Pixabay
