in Mini-Blogs by Jeffrey_Smith

When one is looking at a blog as a potential candidate for writing a guest post for, there are many things that they must do in order to ensure that the site is a good fit.

audience Alexa information

Know Your Audience

Most, for example, check and make sure that a site has a decent PageRank, that it has a good amount of traffic and that the subject matter and writing style of the site are a good fit both for the writer and for the site they wish to link to from their bio line.

However, there is an additional step that many forget to take. Namely, they forget to check and make sure that the audiences between the two sites overlap, especially in terms of the nations they come from.

This causes many guest bloggers to write for sites with completely different audiences than they are targeting, making their efforts largely a waste of time.

Fortunately, this is an easy mistake to avoid if one is simply willing to check Alexa before agreeing to write a new guest post.

How to Check Alexa for Audience Location

When you check Alexa for virtually any site, you are automatically taken to its traffic rank page, which has a “Global Traffic Rank” for the site. Unfortunately, this information can be fairly misleading as it is possible for a site to rank very high in a smaller Internet market, such as the Philippines, but still only get a small percentage of their traffic there.

Instead, one needs to click the “Audience” tab and then scroll down where they will find “Visitors By Country”. That will give the raw data as to what percentage of the site’s visitors come from which countries.

Though you won’t have the actual visitor data for each nation, you can easily estimate that by looking at Alexa’s estimated traffic data and calculating what that percentage would mean.

All in all, it’s a pretty simple fact to check, on my made difficult by the fact it is well-hidden on a tab few people click.

Why This is Important

The reason you want to check this is because you need to know if the site you are writing for will bring you any SEO or branding value.

For example, if you’re targeting a U.S.-based audience, a blog with less than 20% of its audience from the US, most likely, is a very poor choice. Many of the popular guest blogging blogs I looked at had more than 70% Indian and Pakistan audience.

Checking to see where a site gets its traffic from is a critical step when looking at any blog for a potential guest blogging post as you don’t want to spend time and energy creating content for a site that will provide you with little to no benefit.

If you own a US based website you should remember that a link from a non US site is valued much less than a link from a US site.

All in all, it takes only a few seconds to get this important background information and it can save you hours of negotiation and writing time getting a guest posting spot on a site that isn’t going to help you in the least.

This is a guest post by Lior Levin who works for an online task management startup and also advises to iAdvize, a live support tool for websites. 

About Jeffrey_Smith

In 2006, Jeffrey Smith founded SEO Design Solutions (An SEO Provider who now develops SEO Software for WordPress).

Jeffrey has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and marketing strategies to increase rankings, revenue and reach.