Guest-posting is a game of perseverance. And many ignore doing a proper Guest-post topic research.
You put a lot of effort in collating a bunch of high Domain Authority (DA) websites, send a pitch to the content owners, and finally…
You don’t get a response!
I understand. It’s frustrating. But, among the hundreds of reasons why you didn’t get a response, one main reason could be this: The website has already covered the topic that you intended to submit a guest-post on!
That’s a bummer.
If only you knew beforehand, you could have suggested a different topic. You could have saved so much time, effort and hopes.
Don’t make this mistake again.
In this post, I will tell you how you can check if the topic of your choice has already been covered on a website. And you don’t need fancy tools, you can do it with Google Site Search.
What is Google Site Search?
Google site search is the method letting Google know through your search query that you intend to see results only from a particular website.
Basically, you add a phrase, right ahead of the topic you want to search. Try it out:
- Go to Google and type in a topic, for example, let’s consider “backlink strategy” as the keyword. If you hit enter right away, Google shows all the webpages in it’s index that have the term – backlink strategy.
- Next put in this in front of the keyword: site:{website-of-your-choice.com}. In this example, we will use Quora. Suppose you want to write a blog on backlinks for Quora, you will type this: site:quora.com backlink strategy. And this is what you’ll see:
A list of all the webpages on Quora that has the word – backlink strategy
You can use it for any domain extension, not just .com extension.
Go broader with boolean search
Google allows you to search for multiple keywords in a single search session through Boolean search.
AND operator
Suppose, you want to find if a particular website has covered blog posts on backlinks and citations, within the same blog. You can use the AND operator, or the symbol ‘&’.
Going back to our example, you can try this out on Google. Copy-paste this on Google search and hit enter: site:quora.com backlinks AND citations
You will get all the results from the Quora domain that has both the words backlinks and citations mentioned. You can review all the topics that have been covered. It will also give you ideas for your future blogs.
OR operator
However, if you want to see individual links for backlinks and citations both on one page, you can use the OR operator, or this symbol ‘|’.
When you type site:quora.com backlinks | citations in Google search, you will see content that has either of the two words and both the words.
For instance, the 3rd link in the below image on the SERP has only backlink mentioned while the first two have both backlinks and citations mentioned.
Conclusion
Getting a guest-post publish is a straight-forward process from a content owners perspective.
The better you follow their guidelines, more the chances you will hear back from them.
Peruse the write-for-us or guest-post-guidelines page of the website you want to get a backlink from. Prepare your pitch with a topic they haven’t covered, or if you offer a different perspective on it, and you chances of getting a response shoot up.
Happy guest-posting folks.