Tactical Guest Posting: Ranking for keywords out of your league

There’s a very high probability that you want to rank for a wide range of queries or have even attempted to and the rankings just aren’t there. You hit publish on your page, leave it a few months and it doesn’t rank in the way you wanted it to. Sigh.

Why not use somebody else’s platform to help?

I’m not talking about trying to build up another websites ability to rank for your core commercial queries, but in almost every niche, there are leading publications that have been publishing high quality content for years, with established link profiles and a digital presence to match.

Here’s what the SERP looks like from London for the query ‘Link reclamation’ (guess who wrote the ranking results in position 4 and 6…):

Being a new domain, there’s no way I could do a post on Root and expect to rank for ‘link reclamation’ just yet. It’s going to take a lot of link building, building our presence through digital PR and seriously good content creation before algorithmic signals put us in a position where we can rank for key service head-terms.

However, my name is established in some verticals and that’s through tactical placements. Having previously been a Senior Consultant at Builtvisible and written about link reclamation during my time there, I had the strength of their existing domain to work with. Separately, I’ve also been fortunate enough to write regularly for Moz, who a process centred post I produced on link reclamation ranks extremely well for.

The key here is to work with domains who have this existing strength, who rank for competitive queries and could put you in the frame.

Pro Tip: You could conduct a piece of keyword research and identify top ranking domains in your niche who have the metrics you need to break into keywords that are large opportunity areas for you or key focuses. In some cases, you’ll already know who to go to (and it should be more than one) but…data.

Focus on quality

The two articles I produced on link rec are well over a year old and still going strong. That’s largely because, of course, with any article you produce, you want it to communicate your knowledge and the quality of your work.

Tactical guest posting in this sense should exceed any rules for content creation you’d follow for your own site. Not only do you need to build a genuine knowledge sharing relationship with websites who have a like-minded target audience, but the quality of whatever you produce has to speak volumes.

Whenever I have the opportunity to write for another publication, I spend days putting the time and effort in to create an article that is actionable with a genuine insight I thought useful to share. The more your article achieves this, the more chance you have to generate the positive engagement signals necessary to rank at or near the top of competitive SERPs.

Not only will this be an opportunity to influence people who may become clients or customers for your goods or services, but sub-par content, which unfortunately started to dominate the guest posting landscape, isn’t going to be effective.