You'll want to find websites relevant to your firm's practice areas, with high authority, that provide dofollow links from their blogs to external sites.
For example, other legal websites, software that serves the legal industry, and tangential industries like chiropractic, physical therapy, automation, etc.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority is a score developed by Moz to predict a website's likelihood to rank in search engine results pages. The higher the score, the better. Sites with a DA score lower than 30 shouldn't be targeted for guest posts because this is a cutoff point for what Moz sees as “lower authority” sites.
Look for relevant, high-authority sites in your niche. Make sure the topics covered on that site are close to your practice area.
For example, a defective product lawyer might seek out websites providing advice to new parents with a blog post pitch on the most dangerous toys for kids. It's relevant and highlights the exact kind of cases that a lawyer wants.
Guest posting on legal blogs makes sense in some scenarios, but it depends on the total readership, the volume of guest blogs posted overall, and how many other attorneys within your practice area and region have posted there.
Domain Rating
Ahrefs, an SEO tool, maintains a database of websites to help calculate a page's Domain Rating. The tool looks at data points across all the other sites in the database and produces a score between one to 100. Much like domain authority, the higher the number, the better.
At Rankings.io, we like to use Domain Rating (DR) as our primary metric instead of domain authority—though each are often used interchangeably to mean the same thing.
If you use Ahrefs, you can find relevant websites by using the Content Explorer tool.
Type in a keyword that’s related to your niche and hit the magnifying glass to search. Ahrefs will then return a list of all the pages in their index about that term.
You can see the DR for each of the sites in the results in the highlighted column.
Next, select “One page per domain” to limit the results. Since you’re only looking for sites that write about the topic and not all of the pages on those sites about that topic, this will help you eliminate duplicates in a later step.
Note that this takes the page count down from 123,000 to 63,000 results.
Next, you can add a filter to remove low DR websites by clicking on “Add filter” then selecting “Domain Rating” from the drop-down.
Then select the minimum DR that you want to see on your list. You can also set an upper boundary since some high-DR websites do not accept guest posts.
You can also set a filter to only show content that has been published recently by selecting the “First published” filter. This can help eliminate sites that are defunct or do not publish often.
Here, we’ve selected only pages published in the last 12 months.
You can also select “Highlight unlinked domains” and enter your domain name in the dropdown to show you sites that are not linking to your domain.
Next, you can select the “Websites” tab to view a list of the top 100 sites posting on the topic.
You can sort this list by the number of authors to show you which domains may accept guest posts. More authors may indicate that the site is open to outside writers creating content for them.
From here, you can export the list as a .csv file, which you can use in Google Sheets or Excel.
Once you have exported the list to Sheets or Excel, you can more easily sort, filter, and refine your list. As you're finalizing your list, check that each site is actually relevant to your niche and take into account the DR and traffic for that domain.
