Did you know that skyscraper content and backlinks go hand in hand? In fact, skyscraper content is a great way to build authority while increasing your portfolio of referring domains.
But every aspect of your content marketing strategy should serve your readers. In fact, the goal of every person who contributes to your marketing strategy should be to create articles and blog posts that are interesting, informative, and enjoyable to read.
One great way to do this is through the Skyscraper Technique, which is also called skyscraper content. Learn more about this technique and how you can use it to grow your authority, backlink profile, and SEO rankings.
How does the Skyscraper Technique work?
This technique refers to an authoritative long-form content piece designed to attract high-quality white hat backlinks. These are legitimately earned backlinks, as opposed to those obtained through fraudulent means.
Skyscraper content and backlinks are critical in boosting a webpage to a higher position on the search engine results page (SERP), especially since Google has said publicly that they prioritize domains with more backlinks.
Understanding why and how skyscraper content is made is the first step in implementing it successfully in your efforts to create engaging, high-quality content. So, how do you make skyscraper content? It’s pretty simple.
What are skyscraper articles or blog posts?
A piece of skyscraper content is a long-form evergreen content asset that’s typically around 1,500 words or more in length. Unlike a regular long-form blog post, the creation of a skyscraper article is driven by research done on similar pieces, with the hopes of creating a better piece that can win more backlinks.
Sometimes, this type of content is referred to as a pillar page because it can serve as a ‘pillar’ on which other content can be built. Each related topic referred to in the pillar page is internally linked to other relevant content on that domain, encouraging readers to stay on the same site while helping to establish overall higher domain authority. This approach is often called the pillar and cluster content strategy.
While there’s often overlap between techniques used in skyscraper and pillar posts, it’s essential to understand the differences between them.
How skyscraper articles and blog posts work
Skyscraper blog posts and articles are typically driven by trending or popular search terms and topics. To start, you would carefully perform competitor research and backlink analytics to examine what informational content posts are currently trending in your industry and where there may be room for improvement.
If a post has gained a significant number of backlinks, it’s a sign that it’s popular. However, there is always room for improvement. Once you understand which posts are the most popular based on their backlinks, you can move towards creating a piece on the same topic that outperforms the original.
The benefits of skyscraper content
Let the power of skyscraper content and backlinks work for you. Skyscraper content offers marketers a chance to supply in-depth, useful content while encouraging backlinks. These are vital elements of improving domain authority, according to Google. This focus on providing helpful content improves your user’s experience, making them more likely to return to your site in the future.
There are a few other benefits to be gained from using this approach in your content marketing:
- Saves time: It makes the topic creation process go faster since you’re working with topics that are already performing well.
- Better performance in organic search: Choosing topics that you already know are of interest to your audience makes it easier to reach them through organic search.
- Offers real value: Improving existing content provides real, tangible value to your end-user.
- High success rates: As an approach, it offers a reasonably high success rate. Brian Dean and Dale Cudmore, two marketers who pioneered and mastered the Skyscraper Technique, report success rates of 6.5% to 11% when conducting cold email outreach for their skyscraper content, compared to an average of just 2–3% for regular content.
Skyscraper content and backlinks
There are several different paths you can take when using the Skyscraper Technique. However, each approach must begin with a thorough understanding of your audience.
If you don’t understand your audience, it will be challenging to know how to find the correct search terms to target or topics to explore. This will lead you down a path that may result in high-quality content that simply doesn’t lead to useful conversions and ROI. In other words, it’s technically sound but won’t attract the audience your business needs to grow.
To make sure you don’t make the mistake of investing time and money into content that doesn’t perform well for your business, familiarize yourself with the following steps before getting started.
Do your research
The most critical phase of skyscraper content planning comes early on. It’s essential to ensure you conduct thorough research on the top three to five pieces of content (also called linkable assets) that have driven clicks. Identify which ones have received the most links from other relevant, high-authority sites in the past, then explore their strengths and weaknesses.
There are a variety of SEO, link, keyword, and domain analytics tools you can use to do this, such as Semrush, Content Explorer, or Site Explorer. However, you conduct your research and aim to find blog posts, listicles, and other pieces of content that have received a notable amount of backlinks. This shows that other readers have found it relevant enough to link to it from their own sites.
Write a superior piece of content
Once you have a few linkable assets that can inspire your own piece of skyscraper content, the next step is writing a superior piece of content. There are a few ways you can go about this.
- Write in-depth content: For example, if you were basing your piece on one from a competitor called ‘The 10 Most Popular Dog Breeds of 2022,’ why not do one with 15 or even 20 dog breeds? This immediately provides more value for your audience.
- Make content more authoritative: You can do this by providing more descriptions, adding statistics or case studies, or writing out explanations of more complex terms.
- Include more up-to-date information: The news cycle works quickly, and there may be more relevant information to add even if the original article is only a few months old.
- Improve the graphic design: This makes any piece more enjoyable and user-friendly to read. This could include creating graphs or charts to illustrate statistics, or even just designing a custom-made header to sit at the top of the page.
Conduct outreach to publicize your piece
Now you’ll be able to see the power of skyscraper content and backlinks firsthand. Once your piece is finished and ready to publish, don’t just publish it and let it sit idle. The next step is creating a dynamic and personalized email marketing campaign to promote your new linkable asset.
This campaign should reach out to site owners who have previously linked similar content. Each email (which should always be personalized to the recipient) should make them aware that you’ve published a new piece that may be worth a mention on their page.
Once you’ve published your first blog post or article using the Skyscraper Technique, it’s easy to see how worthwhile and rewarding this approach can be.
Improve your content marketing strategy
Wondering how to use skyscraper content and backlinks to your advantage? If you want to increase quality backlinks to boost your SEO efforts, skyscraper content is a fantastic way to achieve this goal. However, it can be a lot of work, especially if you’re working with a busy in-house team.
Let the team at ClearVoice help. We can assemble a team of freelance strategists, editors, and writers to help you design and execute a high-ROI content marketing campaign using the Skyscraper Technique. Talk to a content specialist today to learn more.
