The Skyscraper technique could also be a benchmarking as it contributes to the creation of new ideas and approaches, as well as helping to improve the experience of your clients by improving external content for your blog.
The Inbound Marketing is consolidating increasingly in the market and has a membership of new companies every month.
However, as every positive effect also has consequences, competition to continue on the front pages of search engines has increased dramatically.
As a result, blogs and websites need to constantly rethink their SEO techniques to stay well positioned in the ranking of top search engines, as just writing good content may no longer be enough.
In addition, search engine updates themselves and changes in business-consumer relationships make ranking an interesting game for those who always want to be on top.
One of the strategies that is being used as a new feature in Search Engine Optimization is to leverage good competing content to improve the customer experience that is seeking to learn more about a specific subject. This is the technique known as Skyscraper.
Learn more about this interesting strategy and understand how to apply it to your blog. So that you don’t miss any details, we have organized this article as follows:
Read on and check it out!
What is Skyscraper Technique?
Skyscraper is a SEO technique that aims to build good external links to a blog post. It basically consists of defining a keyword that is important to the business and analyzing the results by searching for it in search engines.
Next, the idea is to select competitor content that is very good, related to the chosen keyword. This material needs to be relevant as well as rank well.
That done, you need to analyze the aspects that make it so relevant to searchers , ie identify the positive points that make the material stand out.
After this review, it’s time to think of ways to make better content! It is important to consider if there is any information or update that can be added and especially if there is any specific knowledge that your company can add to the material.
In short, using the Skyscraper technique, you build great content based on something you’ve created before.
And good content has to be publicized, right? So the next step in this strategy is to get in touch with sites that indicate competitor content to point to their new version – better and more up to date.
This is a technique that increases the chances of having a highly qualified link building on every piece of content you work with.
However, for a good marketing strategy , even before selecting a keyword or theme, it is essential to consider whether it is worth investing in the Skyscraper technique for the specific subject.
This is because, first and foremost, content needs to be relevant to your audience in order to build the authority you need in your niche.
Since the idea is to bring more traffic and potential customers, attracting the wrong audience through content that is not ideal for your business can be a bad idea.
Skyscraper is also known as Content Builder for Link Builders, and may work for those without a high budget or contact with major sites, as well as market influencers.
What is this strategy for?
Skyscraper’s main goal is to build brand authority through valuable content.
In this technique, this is done using the relevance of high market influencing websites whose role is to indicate the content. That is, the goal is to strengthen link building for your site.
The main focus is to provide better content for the persona that adds value or helps solve a problem.
In addition, taking into account all the necessary analysis, this is also a technique that allows you to identify the maturity and competition level of your market.
Is Skyscraper an ethical technique?
If used properly, Skyscraper can produce good results. At the same time, it is essential to be aware of some points.
This technique is not a type of permission to take a competitor’s content or idea and take it for themselves . In addition to characterizing plagiarism – which is a crime – appropriating another company’s material is also unethical and at least unprofessional.
Collaboration with an ethical and fair market where competition serves to raise everyone’s knowledge is essential .
With this in mind, it is important to reinforce that the goal of Skyscraper is to analyze what is already good in the market and improve it, that is, to put into practice an idea of your company that adds knowledge to the public.
The Skyscraper technique is not a simple copy of content, with some added details to disguise. We’re talking about creating something unique and superior to what is found in search engine searches.
Not least because, by definition, your content needs to be clearly better than anything else that has been produced before. If it is the same, similar or only slightly higher, why would sites recommending older material change the recommendation to yours, do you agree?
Because this technique does not employ the use of paid traffic, influence traffic, or the like to gain links, content must necessarily be more qualified. Therefore, whoever produces it needs to have mastery and knowledge about what will be presented.
How does the Skyscraper technique work?
Now that we’ve seen what the Skyscraper technique is and what it’s for, it’s time to explain step by step how the strategy works. Check out!
Choose a keyword that matters
As we pointed out, the keyword needs to be relevant to the audience and your business, and content must be based on that element. This is essential to bring greater authority to your blog.
Find content with excellent backlink performance
The next step is to analyze the content already present on the web to find one that has good sharing on social networks, and many backlinks from other sites that recommend it.
For this, it is important to use a tool that makes this analysis. The most suitable for this study are: Ahrefs , SEMrush and BuzzSumo . With them, you can even see which sites link to the article you choose.
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All three are paid, but provide free trial time. A fourth option – and free – is Moz , an extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, which can also help with these searches.
Review the articles
When selecting content from a competing blog, it is important to ask some questions, such as: Why was this article so recommended? What’s special about him?
Rather than simply analyzing external content, you need to identify certain elements to create even better content. Here are some tips to make this analysis easier:
- find out what types of content are most shared on social networks and recommended by other blogs;
- follow the most sought after and shared subjects by the public
- note how the texts were written (they are more informative or persuasive) and what language they use;
- look at the format used to spread the information (text, video, image, etc.) and identify the audience favorite you want to reach;
- keep the best content ideas for your blog to use in some way – as inspiration, not as plagiarism.
Preferably, organize your choices between articles that appeal to social networks and those most recommended by websites. Thus, it is possible to better explore the behavior on these two fronts and perform a deeper analysis.
Sometimes, a theme that is most appealing on social networks is not as successful on blogs, and vice versa – especially with regard to the format of the content.
Put your hand in the dough
Once you’ve chosen the best performing article, it’s time to see how you can improve it.
Some ideas are to enlarge the text size, add more images to exemplify the written part, insert videos and update the presented data.
Sometimes just changing the design of images gives a new face to content that has been read many times and makes it more attractive and interesting.
Finally, you need to select something that makes people feel the need to choose your content instead of the first version.
Search sites to link to your content
Promoting your content on social networks helps a lot in promoting, but the Skyscraper technique’s main goal is to get other sites to link to your article.
Therefore, he needs to come up with more relevant ideas, as this will be chosen to complement other content.
One of the advantages of Skyscraper is to get qualified recommendations for your content. That’s because blogs on your radar have already indicated links similar to yours, so they probably already have a profile audience interested in the services and products you offer.
So, the idea is to contact those responsible for these blogs and indicate the content developed by your business, highlighting that it can complement the content disclosed on these pages, making them more attractive to the public.
But remember that these are cold contacts, ie people you don’t know. So, don’t expect 100% referrals for your new material.
Any link obtained through this technique represents a larger slice of your market, so it is still an opportunity to achieve good results.
Also, by writing good content, you’ll probably get links organically from blogs that weren’t even on your radar at first.
How to apply skyscraper technique to a blog?
To publish content using the Skyscraper technique, you can rely on one of our suggestions on how to optimize material already posted on the web:
- refocus on more specific ideas if you think the post is too generic;
- apply fixes or updates on the subject, and new related topics
- come up with different ideas about something your company has already talked about or even a fresh approach to the article analyzed.
For example, if the first version of content contains 10 tips on a particular subject, why not write an article for your blog that contains 25 tips on the same topic?
For structured content in list format, an interesting idea is to write and develop a little more about each topic, rather than just listing them.
Finally, optimizing the visual aspect of content, adding images that complement text or working on design, is a great strategy. Regardless of the changes made, the article needs to be relevant to clearly present the information that the persona seeks.
There’s a quote from Backlinko ‘s Brian Dean that shows why the Skyscraper technique succeeds: “It’s human nature to be drawn to the best”.
With Skyscraper, you can come up with ideas and see new possibilities for approaching content that you might not have otherwise.
Inspiration – not plagiarism – is part of the maturation of any niche market , as well as improving the customer experience, which will find more and more materials to help them make better buying decisions.
Remember, update your blog content constantly to keep it always relevant to your target audience.
And have you heard of Link Juice? This is another very interesting strategy for SEO and ranking.