How do you get authoritative sites in your niche to link to you, even if you don't  have a fortune 500 marketing budget or connections with influential bloggers? If  you've ever asked yourself this question, then you'll love the skyscraper  technique. It's a strategy that I've used to build high quality backlinks to sites in  pretty much every niche under the sun, from internships to insurance. I'm Brian  Dean, the founder of Backlinko, the place of marketers turned for higher  rankings and more traffic. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how  you can use the skyscraper technique to generate links and traffic to your site.  Keep watching. So before I get into the nuts and bolts of Skyscraper Technique,  let me tell you a quick story. When I first started my blog, backlinko.com I knew  that I was entering one of the most noisy competitive spaces online internet  marketing, and I knew from growing other sites in competitive industries that  unless I did something crazy to stand out, I was going to end up like pretty much every other site in the internet marketing space, no traffic and buried on the 10th page of Google. And I also knew that publishing great content was one of those  things that sounded nice but didn't really work in the real world. Maybe you've  seen this yourself. You work hard to publish great content on your site all the  time, but you barely get any links and traffic for your effort. So I knew that, and  that's when I decided to utilize the skyscraper technique, and I literally doubled  my search engine traffic in two weeks, and here's exactly how I did it, and  exactly how you can do the same thing for your site. So it's time to break down  the exact three step process that I use. So the first step is to find content in your  industry that's already done well in terms of attracting links, social shares,  comments and traffic. And one of the easiest ways to do this is just to search for  competitive keywords in Google, because if you find a piece of content that's  ranking well on Google, you better believe that there are a lot of links pointing to  it. And if you want to just double check and make sure that it's actually an  authoritative page, you can put it into a tool like Ahrefs, Majestic SEO and Open  Site Explorer to see if there are a lot of links pointing to it. In my case, I noticed  that content around things like Google's ranking factors and Google's 200  ranking signals tended to attract a lot of links, and that's the content I decided to  use as a base of my skyscraper. So now that you've identified a piece of content with a proven track record of generating links, it's time to create something even  better. And actually, this is why this strategy is called the skyscraper technique.  You probably never wondered what the 11th tallest building in the world is, right? Everyone's attracted to number one. So what you're doing with step number two is taking the base content that you found in step number one and then slapping  20 stories on the top of it, and all of a sudden you have the piece of content that  everyone's talking about so how can you make something head and shoulders  above what's already out there? Well, there are three strategies that work really  well. The first is to make your content more thorough. In my case, I noticed that  most of the content out there that talked about Google ranking factors talked 

about how there were 200 but they didn't even list all 200 and despite that, they  still generated a ton of links and social shares. You can also make your content  more up to date. I've found that despite Google's supposed preference for fresh  content, there's a lot of outdated stuff sitting on Google's first page. So just  

making something that's out of date and updating it for today is one of the  easiest and best ways to make content that's clearly better than what's already  out there. And finally, you can make the content better designed than what's  already out there. And make no mistake, design is huge, because it influences  how valuable people perceive your content to be. In general, the better designed it is, the higher the perceived value. In my case, I noticed most of the Google  ranking factors content was not only not thorough and out of date, but also really ugly. So I decided to invest in nice custom banners for my blog posts. Now, once you have something that's clearly the best out there, it's time to get the word out. Now, how do you get the word out about your content with good old fashioned  email outreach. Now, most people approach email outreach link building the  wrong way. They just email random people and beg for a link. And that's not  what we're doing here. We're strategically reaching out to people who are very  likely to link to us, specifically people that link to the inferior content that you use as your base. And here's the exact word for word script that I use to generate  dozens of links to my piece of content. Hey, Dave. I was checking out some  articles on your site and found your post about SEO strategies, great stuff. I  couldn't help but notice you linked to that classic article about Google's ranking  factors. I also love that resource. In fact, it inspired me to create a more  thorough and up to date version. Here's the link, in case you want to check it  out. It might be worth a mention in your article, either way, keep up the awesome work. That simple email script converted over 15% which is significantly higher  than most email outreach campaigns. And as you know today, it's with links. It's  all about quality, not quantity. And a lot of those 15% were real gems, including a PageRank five page link on a demo. Listed site, and besides, the results speak  for themselves. Less than two weeks after publishing and promoting my post,  my organic search engine traffic doubled. So that's the power of the skyscraper  technique, something myself and dozens of Backlinko readers have used to get  better results from their content. Did you learn something new from this video?  Then subscribe to my YouTube channel right now, or, better yet, head over to  backlinko.com and sign up for the newsletter where I show exclusive marketing  tips and strategies 



Last modified: Friday, August 8, 2025, 1:27 PM