If there is one thing you need to know about the Skyscraper technique, it’s that you need to find the perfect topic for your campaign. Otherwise, no one is going to want to link to you.
So, if you’re producing a piece of content to promote and do outreach for, you really need to find a good topic.
I have created content for campaigns that no one wanted to link to. On the brighter side, there have also been campaigns where more than a hundred people have linked to a single article that I created.
Content can either make or break your campaign. In this article, I am going to teach you how to find the perfect topic for your Skyscraper campaign, that will get a ton of backlinks to your site.
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What’s the best place to find a Skyscraper Topic?
You can begin your research on Ahrefs.com. This is a great place to find a Skyscraper topic simply because you can see the number of links a specific topic has, how competitive it is, the people getting links, and who is linking to others in your field.
When it comes to the Skyscraper technique, you want to find topics that have loads of links and are hyper-competitive. After all, the more links there are, the more opportunities there are for you to get links.
There are three techniques you can use to search for a Skyscraper topic. And with these techniques, you can also use three explorer options, that can all be found on Ahrefs.com.
The Keyword Explorer
First of all, you have the Keywords Explorer technique. On the Ahrefs search bar you can simply type in your keyword and click the orange search button.
You will then be brought to the homepage for that keyword, which will give you some keyword ideas for that particular Skyscraper campaign.
The next step is to go to the Questions section to see common questions that people are searching for on Google that are related to the keyword and have a lot of links.
You will find the KD (Keyword Difficulty) just beside the list of questions, that will show you how competitive each search term is and how many links are there. The higher the KD is, the more links there are going to be.
Because you need a Skyscraper topic with a really high KD, go to the filter section, change the KD to a minimum of 30, and remove the ones with low keyword difficulty levels.
After you get the results, you can start to filter out the questions and find the ones that look suitable for your Skyscraper campaign
You don’t want anything commercial because people don’t want to link to content that asks for money. Look for informative topics that people are interested in and that you can write a lot of good content about.
The Content Explorer
The previous technique isn’t going to work for everyone and you may be in a niche where you just cannot find any competitive keywords, or suitable Skyscraper topics.
When that happens, you can use the Content Explorer approach on Ahrefs to find decent opportunities for link building.
Once you open the page for the Content Explorer, change the drop-down box to “In title”. Type in your keyword on the search bar and click the search button. This will show you a list of really popular content that has links.
You want to go for topics that have the most links, but also filter out the irrelevant topics. Sort the list by “referring domains”, and look for informational topics with high referring domains. It is likely that if you do more research on that topic, you will find even more prospects around it.
If a topic has over 200 referring domains, it’s probably a good opportunity for the Skyscraper technique because there are lots of prospects to contact. In theory, the more prospects you have to outreach to, the more links you are going to get to your website.
You might also get topics that blend your niche with another niche, which is really good for your Skyscraper technique.
For example, in the topic “gardening”, you may encounter a topic such as “Why gardening is good for your health?”. This is a great topic because it blends both gardening and health, allowing you to find prospects not only in the gardening niche, but in the health niche as well.
You could potentially approach both mental health and gardening websites about this topic to promote your content.
The Site Explorer
The final technique I recommend, is to look at your competitors and find out how they are getting links. By looking at how they get links, you can reverse-engineer the process and find Skyscraper topics for yourself.
It’s likely that if someone’s linked to your competitor about a topic, you can create better quality content that’s more in-depth, up-to-date, and well-researched, and they will want to link to you.
Have a look on Google for some competitors in your niche. Look for a specific site related to your topic. Once you find one, go to the Site Explorer and key-in the competitor URL to pull up a general profile of this website.
On the profile page, scroll down, go onto “pages” and to the “by best” link section. This will show you the most linked-to content on your competitors’ website.
Look for the pages with the most referring domains (best pages by link). This will allow you an insight into how your competitor is getting links. You can then reverse engineer the process and start researching some topics for your own website.
With all three of these techniques, you can find great topics for your website. You could start putting them into a spreadsheet, create a shortlist, and discover the perfect topic for your Skyscraper campaign.
