Stripping Down the Skyscraper SEO Technique: The What, Why, and Everything in Between

Let’s play a simple game. I’ll ask you two questions; you are to take your time to think and answer the first in your mind before reading the second. I know it doesn’t sound like much of a game, but bear with me.

• What’s the tallest building in your city?
• What’s the second-tallest?

The chances are excellent that you got the first one right. Unless you have a special interest in buildings, there is no way you got the second one right. 

My point is, being number two is just being the first to lose. Very few people take anything other than the first position seriously because humans naturally tend to be attracted to the best.

Take Google search rankings, for example. The result in the second position gets 6% fewer clicks than the winner. That’s not even close at all. It reminds me of the 2017 Eastern Conference Finals, where Cleveland Cavaliers bet the Boston Celtics by over 40 points.

Any basketball fans here? No?

But how do you ensure you create content that can dethrone top-performing content without too much content marketing? Through the skyscraper search engine optimization technique.

Relevant Reading:

Ultimate Guide to Creating Content Clusters

The Fine Art of Creating Pillar Posts

Flesch Reading Scale: Everything You Need to Know

What is the Skyscraper SEO Technique?

Let’s go back to our game. Even if the height difference between the two tallest buildings is minimal, the tallest attracts the most attention; it’s human nature. You may even find that the price of leasing in the tallest is significantly higher in the second-tallest, even if they are almost identical inside.

This is the idea behind the skyscraper SEO strategy. If competing content with a high level of success is a skyscraper, it allows you to create relevant content that is feet, yards, or even miles above it.

The approach to content strategy helps you create and publish longer and more valuable content. Your tall building, if it beats the competition, will get you more attention, which raises your rank and increase organic traffic.

This link building strategy was initially coined by SEO expert Brian Dean of Backlinko, who had enormous success using it. Of the two types of links, inbound and outbound links, it focuses on inbound links. Lots of links outbound don’t mean much.

Everyone from seasoned to beginner bloggers can use it. It enables content creators to create all types of content and reach their content goals without relying on content marketers. There are several other approaches to building links, such as guest blogging and guest posts, but this is among the most effective and affordable options.

Does the Skyscraper SEO Technique Work?

Of course, it works. Why else do you think we have put this guide together?

On a serious note though; some link builders have had high success rates from the technique. Here are some examples of people who have implemented it and their results.

• Brian Dean, the inventor of the technique, had an 11% success rate.
• A content marketer and full-stack developer, Dale Cudmore had a 6.5% success rate in 2017.

These are just two of the famous, successful implementations of the technique. But it can also fail. Olga Mykhoparkina, Chief Marketing Officer at Chanty, had a big skyscraper failure. She failed because she isn’t well known or reputable, and she selected the wrong target keyword.

So, when this technique wins, it wins big. But it can also flop as Olga Mykhoparkina’s. So, how do you execute the skyscraper technique to reduce its risk of failure?

How to Execute the Skyscraper Technique

In the words of Brian Dean, “what you’re doing here is finding the tallest “skyscraper” in your space…and slapping 20 stories to the top of it.”.

That’s essentially all there is to the technique. But you need to follow specific steps with several details, which we highlight below.

Step 1: Select Your Keyword

One of the reasons Olga Mykhoparkina details as the cause of the failure is picking the wrong keywords. So, to increase the chances of success during implementation, you need to choose your keyword correctly.

Relevant keywords should be:

• Valuable in terms of dollar value (use SEMrush to check the cost of advertising with that keyword) or blog traffic
• Relevant to your business and the interests of your target audiences.
• Focused on the needs of the potential customers depending on their buyer stage.
• Something you can create an interesting content about. If you can’t use it to create pieces of content that can engage your blog post readers and reduce the bounce rates, it’s not worth it.

With the right keywords, you move to the more technical step: finding and analyzing the top search engine rankings for that keyword.

Step 2: Find and Analyze the Top-Ranking Content for Your Chosen Keyword

Now, it’s time to look at the skyscrapers to know how tall you are going to build yours. Search for your keyword on search engines. Say your quick search keyword is “whitepaper writing tips”.

Open the first five results in different tabs. Unless you are doing intensive research, the first five results are your main competitor sites and should be enough. A top performing article on topics similar to yours could also work. These competitor content will give you valuable content ideas.

After identifying the top results, it is time to analyze them.

The analysis involves reading through each piece of pillar content to see how comprehensive it is. As you read each piece of content, note all their flaws, including missing information. These are the extra floors that will make your skyscraper taller than theirs.

If you aren’t sure what information they are supposed to contain, compare them against each other. What does result number 1 have that number 2 doesn’t? What does number 3 have that number 4 doesn’t? Doing this will give you the extra floors to add to your skyscraper.

The process is the same whatever type of content you are creating.

While analyzing, keep in mind that not all the top results are high-quality. Some of them only make it to the top position due to high authority domains like the Huffington Post or Neil Patel. They could contain bad skyscraper content so if you feel that some are low quality, it would be a bad idea to use them just because they occupy the top spot.

After reading through them, the next step is to check their backlink properties. You can use several tools to do that, including Google Analytics, ahrefs, SEMrush, and AnswerThePublic. 

These tools allow you to know how many incoming links these top results have.Content with lots of backlinks means valuable and popular content. Think of them as a vote of confidence in the quality of the content. But they have to be high-quality backlinks such as a backlink from news outlets. Low-quality backlinks add nothing to the value of the content.

Step 3: Create Better Content

Now that you have an idea of how tall the current skyscrapers are, it is time to create taller and better ones that better satisfy the appetite for readers and internet users.

The first step, which I am sure you are well aware of and use, is to create antable of contents of your skyscraper content. The outline will allow you to capture every topic, subtopic, and point that the competition doesn’t have, to come up with link worthy content.

With a complete outline, you can make your worthy article more valuable and improve a poor reader experience by:

Creating longer content

Simply creating longer content could make it appear more valuable to your target audience. And long-form content performs better than short-form content.

For example, if your reference pages contain an article covering five sites to help you write better whitepapers, you can create yours that covers 10X more sites if you will. Just make sure the additions are not too far-fetched. The information must be relevant if you want to earn more backlinks.

You can also add more visual elements such as tables, images, and infographics to set yourself apart, and improve the customer experience.

Adding More Details

What details can you add to the information on the referral sources to make it more juicy or accessible to all audiences? If you’re an expert in the field, you can tell when the content just skims the surface of what there is to know on the topic.

You can also add more details by:

• Taking the listed items in the content and adding descriptions
• Taking the links to studies and research and add any details relevant to the study.
• Adding statistical data
• Explaining difficult terms
• Adding examples of use cases
• Adding subheadings to break up the content more.

Adding more details is different from making it longer. You can add more information and remain within a similar word count to the current skyscrapers or increase its length without adding any valuable details.

Updating It

If the reference pages contain outdated information, you can add the updated information on yours to make it more valuable to get the attention of businesses looking to point potential customers to a comprehensive source of information.

Creating a Better Design

Check the visual aspects of the content and create yours with a more appealing design. The more attractive the design, the more effective it will be at building traffic. Guide your audience through content by keeping them engaged with an interesting design. Increasing the average time they spend on your page raises your search engine rankings.

Step 4: Check Your Backlinks and Do Outreach

This final step is the key to successfully implementing the skyscraper technique. After creating better content and publishing it, the next step to dethrone the top-notch content is backlink analytics. Backlink analytics lets you reach out to those who have linked to the content you have improved on and ask them to link to the better, more improved content you just published.

For example, if using a backlink analytics tool such as Site Explorer, paste the link to the original postswith plenty of links and click on Backlinks to see the report. The report contains all backlinks to the page, but not all are of value to you. Use the filters to find blogs that link to it. There are several other tools you can use to extract these relevant outreach prospects.

As you create your outreach list, you should keep in mind there are several types of backlinks so you should know which you are trying to attract.

Then, with this outreach list, you can start the email outreach process using outreach principles. Send an outreach emailcontaining details such as the reason for reaching out, a link to your content, why yours is better than the current content they are linking to and ask them to change the link to yours. You can even ask them to link to yours and you’ll backlink in return.

Remember that your success here depends on the quality of your blog content. Even if it’s beginner-level content, it has to be authoritative content that has gone through search engine optimization to ensure it will achieve high rankings. 

If it is a bad post, they won't link to it. And even if they do, you are unlikely to attract quality backlinks, authoritative links and high-quality links.

If there are broken links, include that in the request as well or you can start a separate broken link building strategy. But don’t overdo it, a good balance of backlinks should suffice.

Talk To The Experts

The skyscraper technique has two goals: getting more backlinks to improve the popularity and value of your content and to rank higher, which is almost guaranteed since you are creating content that is more valuable than your competitors.

But, as we have seen, it can fail, as in the case of Olga Mykhoparkina, or not work as expected, as in the case of Dale Cudmore. There are so many conditions that could lead to its failure that even people as experienced as Dale and Olga didn’t see them coming.

So, unless you don’t have much to lose if it fails, you would be better off letting an expert handle it for you. Check out our blog on the 10 best content writing services in 2022 to get a rough idea of who you should hire. A quick hunch: Zoey is at the very top of the pile. Our experts at Zoey Writers have years of experience with all types of white hat SEO techniques, including the Skyscraper SEO Technique. 

Our content writing services are second to none. For the highest chances of creating successful content using the skyscraper technique, contact us today.

Photo by Sean Pollock on Unsplash. Thanks, Sean:)