3 Questions To Ask When Hiring A Guest Posting Company

Guest posting can take a lot of time to execute so it might make sense to hire a guest posting company.   

If you are considering going down that route, but have never hired one before, you might be wondering what the best questions to ask might be.

How can you tell between a company who uses dodgy tactics and will be likely to build low quality, risky links, or a company who focuses on quality content & high-quality bloggers?

Before hiring a Guest Posting company you need to understand exactly what the company you work for is going to deliver, how long it will take and how they track success.   It's important your expectations are cleary set before you put any money down.

Let's look at some questions you should ask a Guest Posting Company before you hire them.

1.  What Is Included In Your Guest Posting Service?

This might sound like a really obvious question but you would be surprised how many small business owners don't ask this! Make sure you get a breakdown of what is included in the service.    

Do they include content creative & content writing, for example?   

You will need to know if you need to supply the content angles and campaign ideas or, if they will come up with these.  Creative can take a lot of time and energy, make sure you understand how much you creative input you will need to deliver, before you hire.

If the company provides content then make sure you ask about their writing team.  

Are they in-house or freelance? Do they have experience writing for your industry?

You should also make sure you understand how long the content is and whether it includes graphics. Ideally content should be above 600 words, ideally 700 - 800. It should be fully optimised and include high res images - visual posts do better!

Finally, make sure you know what quality of placement you can expect. Many companies split up their placements and price according to the stats of the website. Cheaper is not always better, if someone is offering very, very cheap Guest Post Placements this should be a red flag.

Ask to see some example placements and then analyze the websites traffic and backlink profile yourself.  Also, make checks for engagement - and ask yourself, does this website have a real audience?

2. Which Placements Do You Suggest For My Company?
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You can ask the Guest Posting company to send through some suggested placements.  Make sure you ask why they are sending these particular placements through to you.  Their answers will give you a big clue about whether they are a high-quality guest posting company or not.

A company which focuses on matching your core audience with the blogger's core audience is a good sign.  They should ask you who your core audience is and if you don't know they might be able to give some ideas about how you could find that out.

A good guest posting company will know marketing. They will be focused on delivering quality content to the right audience.

Analyse the placements that come through.  If you don't know how to do this yourself you could ask a third party or pay a third party to give you an analysis.  This should be very cheap and will save you a lot of hassle in the future.   It is important you are only building high-quality links back to your website.

3.  How Do You Track Success?

Tracking the success of a Guest Post can be a little bit of a challenge for a guest posting company. The reason is that they don't have access to the blogger's analytics, and many companies don't ask for access to their client's analytics either.

Bit.ly tracking links cannot be used because for link building purposes it is best to use a straight link through to the website and not alter it in anyway.

It can also be difficult to track success by checking the rank in Google because the company will not have responsibility for your entire SEO Strategy.

At Ginger Marketing, we track success by the amount of engagement on a post.  Engagement to us means social shares and comments. This forces us to focus on the quality of the content & the content - blogger fit.

Whether we are dealing with a newer blogger or a more experience influencer, engagement is always the metric we use to track our success.

Make sure you know how the company you work with tracks success.

We hope you have found this useful! If you are thinking about hiring a Guest Posting Company make sure you use these questions to figure out how high quality they are.  

As usual please leave your comments below.  Did you learn something new? Do you have another important question to add which will help our readers? 

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