What is Skyscraper Content, and How Can you Create it?
In today’s content filled world, there is so much competition and millions upon millions of pieces of content. So how do you make an impression on your audience and start ranking for highly competitive, trending topics? Skyscraper content could be the answer to your question.
What is Skyscraper Content?
Skyscraper content is a technique where you take a trending subject, draw ideas from successful content from a competitor and build on this base to create a better version. Taking the foundation and first few floors and turning it into a skyscraper.
It may seem like a basic idea to build on similar content, however, it is an excellent technique to create hugely valuable, successful and linkable content that can compete with other websites in your niche. If you are just getting started with SEO, you’ll be pleased to know that skyscraper content can contribute to improving your SERPs, obtaining backlinks and traffic if done correctly.
How to Create Skyscraper Content?
There are 3 main stages to creating skyscraper content:
Find Current Trending Content
Before you can start creating content, you need some background research to build on. Research current trends within your niche, viral content on search engines and social media and most importantly, keep an eye on content that has 25 or more links pointing towards it.
The focus on links is important as it shows you how successful the content is, that it is linkable and already has a lot of attention from other authoritative websites. This means, using this a base for your skyscraper content provides confirmation and more potential for backlinks to your website. You can easily check the number of links to certain content using free and paid SEO tools such as, Ahrefs, which analyses a websites top pages and number of links.
Therefore, by researching this content and the potential in the subject matter, you can make an informed decision about creating skyscraper content which holds link power and will greatly improve your website’s SEO.
Improve the Base
Now that you have a base and some ideas of what to include in your skyscraper content, you can start planning out how you are going to build on it. What can you add to make the content more valuable and relevant to your audience? This can include:
- Making the content longer
- Adding visuals
- Including more up-to date information
- Making the content more in-depth
Valuable and high quality content is a part of On-page SEO, but is also what skyscraper content is all about. Making your content more interesting, detailed and evidenced, adding images, illustrations or videos for demonstration will make it stand out and prove its value.
However, it is not necessarily true that the longer your content, the more successful it will be, so think about how you are adding value for both your readers and the websites you want to gain backlinks from.
Market
Once your content is created, you want to market it as much as possible. And the best place to start? Reaching out to the websites that have already linked to similar content. Point out to them that your content is similar but includes more in-depth and up-to date information and catch their eye. There is no harm in asking for a link or for them to replace a similar link, your content should prove that to them.
Additionally, your skyscraper content can be a huge part of your email outreach and link building techniques. Therefore, also propose the content to websites within the same niche or with an interest in the topic to obtain more links.
This will not only improve your SEO through link building, it will also establish your content as more valuable than your competitors. Gaining you more organic traffic, further organic links and huge potential for the growth of your website.
Conclusion
In conclusion, skyscraper content will be an excellent addition for any website to pursue as it provides link building potential and can boost your websites SEO overall.