We Tried Ahrefs Skyscraper SEO Link Building Strategy A LOT… And Here Are The Results!

Can the Skyscraper hyperlink constructing technique assist get your enterprise to the highest, or is it simply one other SEO tall story? We determined to search out out…

Here at WPMU DEV, if we’re going to jot down about one thing that may enhance your enterprise, we don’t simply speak the speak, we stroll the stroll. So, once we heard concerning the skyscraper technique, we determined to stroll the steps, take a look at it for ourselves, and share the outcomes with you.

In this text, we’ll cowl the next:

What is the Skyscraper Technique?

The Skyscraper Technique is an SEO hyperlink constructing technique that mainly works like this:

1. Find a competitor’s printed article with a great deal of backlinks associated to your website’s content material or area of interest.
2. Create a greater article (i.e. make it extra in-depth or complete, up-to-date, and related)
3. Contact the websites linking to your competitor’s article and invite them to hyperlink to yours as an alternative.
4. Watch your web page climb up the search engine ladder, then sit again and benefit from the view from the highest whereas new visitors floods into your website.
5. Rinse and repeat, and proceed constructing taller skyscrapers till you possibly can’t breathe in any extra rarified air from the exosphere.

Sounds easy and appears good on paper.

But we’re not right here to jot down a skyscraper article on the skyscraper method, so if you wish to study extra about it, go here or preserve studying to learn the way we fared erecting a dozen of those tall edifices (tl;dr … skyscrapers are usually not a dime a dozen. Read on to study why).

Let’s begin by laying down the foundations…

Our Skyscraper Testing Methodology

You can’t simply plonk a ready-made constructing on a chunk of land and begin promoting items and flooring to lease or promote…you need to plan, analysis, and lay down some concrete foundations earlier than you begin piling on the bricks.

So, let’s begin by taking a look at what it took to get our skyscraper articles off the bottom.

Resources – The Crew, Tools, and Time Spent Building a Skyscraper

Our development crew required everybody and their weblog to leap into the pit and begin digging. From Savo, our Business Development Manager/Foreman who first proposed to punish us, to Alec, our Partnerships & Outreach supervisor, who researched appropriate subjects and ran the outreach campaigns, to our whole writing workforce who then researched the content material and put the articles collectively, plus members of our advertising workforce and builders who reviewed articles for SEO, content material, and technical accuracy…even James, our CEO, rolled up his sleeves and acquired his palms soiled.

While in principle a solo builder might erect a skyscraper article all on their lonesome, it’s in all probability greatest to deal with the skyscraper methodology as you’ll if constructing a residential residence complicated. You’ll must get your complete workforce concerned in its development.

Here are among the instruments we used to assist velocity up the method along with utilizing WordPress (in fact) to jot down and publish the articles:

• Ahrefs – Assess subjects, carry out competitor evaluation, get hold of backlink information, watch movies about easy methods to do it
• Google trends – Assess subjects.
• Google search (should you want a hyperlink, search Google and also you’ll discover it) – Review competitor posts.
• Jira – Our undertaking administration instrument for monitoring skyscraper matter evaluations, article manufacturing and outreach duties.
• Google sheets (Excel, and many others.) – Prepare monitoring sheets, monitor marketing campaign outcomes, preserve Martin pleased
• Email contacts – While utilizing paid options to determine contact information or automated options to ship outreach emails would have considerably lowered the hours we spent on these duties, it might have veered into spam territory, so we opted to not do it. We largely checked websites manually to determine contact info instruments like Hunter.io (e mail tackle finder – free plan), Phantombuster (e mail extractor – free trial), Verifalia (free e mail tackle validator), and our Help Scout account to ship outreach emails, and reply/ship follow-up emails.

In phrases of time spent, bearing in mind all of the common content material manufacturing duties (e.g. assessing appropriate subjects for articles, researching, writing, enhancing, moaning about it, and many others.), every skyscraper required on common 2-3 weeks to jot down (we usually take 2-4 days to jot down a weblog put up or tutorial.) Also, whichever author was assigned the article labored on it full-time for the complete interval, so the remainder of the writing workforce needed to decide up the slack and do some precise work.

Meanwhile, Alec spent on common 8-10 hours per skyscraper operating the outreach campaigns and monitoring outcomes.

The backside line: If you have got the sources to create a skyscraper article, it’s also possible to construct an thrilling firm to rival any of Elon Musk’s (SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal…even a Boring one!)

Now that you understand what it takes to construct a skyscraper, let’s present you ways we did it brick-by-brick.

Campaign Target

You gotta have a goal, so should you shoot for the moon and miss, a minimum of you’ll clear some bushes.

So, we set out with an expectation of attaining a 5% success price, which is to say that we aimed for five% of contacted websites to hyperlink to our skyscraper articles.

Selection Criteria

First, we needed to give you a listing of article subjects and consider their suitability for the skyscraper method.

Some of our concerns for eligibility included:

• Will the subjects present enough curiosity to basic customers that different web sites will need to hyperlink to it?
• Do these subjects “fit in” with what our enterprise is about? We are a WordPress firm servicing net builders and their shoppers, so our article subjects needed to make sense to our readers.
• Can we write a greater article than the perfect article there may be on the subject? In principle, you simply exit and discover the article that the majority web sites are linking to and write a greater one. In follow, nevertheless, you’ll usually end up asking one thing akin to “how would Jesus write a better bible?”

After brainstorming and developing with over 30 article concepts, Alec arrange a undertaking board on Jira and went via every of those subjects to evaluate their suitability as candidates for skyscraper articles and do aggressive evaluation.

As the objective of doing aggressive evaluation for the skyscraper methodology is to ask the query “can we get websites to want to link to ours instead and knock this article off its perch?” and get a “yes” as a solution, our aggressive evaluation standards included assessing the variety of backlinks the articles being linked to had, and the way outdated (and hopefully outdated) the put up is.

Skyscraper Articles

Out of 30+ subjects that Alec completely evaluated, we ended up with 12 articles – some had been written from scratch and a few required current posts to be rewritten and up to date:

1. WordPress GDPR Compliance
2. Website Headers
3. Update PHP WordPress
4. Parallax Themes/Plugins
5. Forminator Advanced Features
6. Chrome Extensions
7. HTTPS & SSL Guide
8. Web Application Firewall Guide
9. CDNs & Cloudflare Guide
10. Anti-Spam Laws
11. Spam Prevention
12. Web Accessibility & WordPress

Outreach Campaign Setup

After choosing our skyscraper put up subjects, Alec created spreadsheets to trace every marketing campaign, emails to ship out, and documented the method as follows:

• Step 1: For every listed backlink within the Backlink column of every Target sheet (Target #1 to Target #6), discover a contact e mail on their web site, by way of Google search, or on-line instrument, and add it to the Contact Info area. If no contact e mail may be discovered inside a couple of minutes, skip it and cross out the backlink within the spreadsheet.
• Step 2: For every backlink with an recognized e mail within the spreadsheet, ship an preliminary outreach e mail by way of HelpScout utilizing the e-mail outreach template (supplied under). Refer to the instance e mail as wanted. Then, add the date to the First Contacted area.
  Be positive to swap out the placeholder textual content with the related info (e.g., goal put up title, aggressive website). Double-check the e-mail earlier than sending it to keep away from making any errors! A HelpScout workflow has been configured to route these to the undertaking folder.
• Step 3: Review responses as they arrive in, and set the flag within the Responses column to ‘Yes’ accordingly. If a website has added our URL, first confirm this, then set the flag within the Changed column to ‘Yes’, and reply with a ‘thank you’ e mail. If a website says no or asks for cash, don’t reply – simply set the flag within the Changed column to ‘No’. If a website asks for a hyperlink change, don’t reply immediately – assign it for additional assessment.
• Step 4: 3/7/15-day follow-up response (await additional steering)

Here’s our e mail template…

And right here’s an instance of a spreadsheet we used to trace every backlink outreach marketing campaign.

Each spreadsheet contained the next info:

Rows:

• Target # – The URL of the article different web sites are linking to that we’re competing towards.
• First Published – Date competing article was first printed.
• Last Modified – Date competing article was final edited.
• Backlinks – The competing article’s variety of backlinks (obtained from Ahrefs).
• Contacted – Total variety of websites contacted with a request to level to our article.
• Changed – Total variety of websites that modified their hyperlinks to level to our article.
• Link Exchanges – Total variety of websites that entered right into a reciprocal hyperlink change settlement with us.
• Success Rate – This determine is routinely calculated by dividing the variety of websites that modified their hyperlinks to level to our article by the full variety of websites contacted.

Columns:

Each of the spreadsheet columns under was used to trace outcomes and most are pretty self-explanatory.

• Backlink – This is the URL we’re concentrating on for our article.
• Domain Rating – The backlink URLs area ranking (from Ahrefs).
• Contact Info – Who we’re sending our e mail request to.
• First Contacted
• Followed Up
• Replied (Yes/No)
• Changed (Yes/No)
• Link Exchange

We then launched into a scientific means of writing and publishing the articles, then implementing, monitoring, and documenting outreach marketing campaign outcomes.

The outcomes are proven within the part under.

Our Results

Alec created this fancy-shmancy spreadsheet report back to doc the outcomes of our skyscraper outreach campaigns…

Here are the columns within the Outreach Campaigns part of the report and what they imply:

• Campaign – Clickable hyperlinks take you to the posts.
• Month – The month we targeted on for the outreach marketing campaign.
• Posts – Number of focused aggressive posts.
• DF Links – Number of do-follow backlinks throughout all focused posts.
• Contacts – Number of web sites contacted from the record of do-follow backlinks.
• Replies – Number of latest backlinks earned on account of outreach marketing campaign.
• Backlinks – Number of backlinks earned from all outreach emails despatched.
• After 1st – Number of backlinks earned from the preliminary outreach e mail.
• 3 Days – Number of backlinks earned from a 3-day follow-up e mail.
• 7 Days – Number of backlinks earned from a 7-day follow-up e mail.
• 15 Days – Number of backlinks earned from a ultimate 15-day follow-up e mail.
• Success Rate – Success price = backlinks / contacts.

Here’s a condensed and extra legible model, so you possibly can see that we’re not fudging our outcomes…

Our ultimate Skyscraper Strategy outcomes:

• Campaigns – 12
• Sites Contacted – 1,108
• Replies – 205
• New Backlinks – 72
• Success Rate – 6.50%

Skyscraper Technique – A Tower of Link Power or Just SEO and So?

So, did the skyscraper technique improve visitors to our weblog? Did it drive new enterprise? Was it price it? Would we do it once more? And what might we’ve completed higher?

First, listed below are some ideas to assist us analyze the method:

• We focused 71 aggressive posts throughout all campaigns which had a mixed 3,657 do-follow backlinks. However, only one,108 (30.3%) warranted reaching out. The relaxation had been largely reposted articles and/or spam, or had been in any other case of inadequate worth.
• The GDPR put up carried out the perfect (19.3%) and the Accessibility put up carried out the worst (2.2%). So it’s unclear whether or not broad attraction had as a lot of an affect as we first anticipated, contemplating a distinct segment put up like ‘Forminator Advanced Features’ had above-average success (6.9%).
• 19 (26%) of the contacted websites that supplied us with a backlink didn’t reply by e mail or follow-up in any means. So it was essential to verify for added hyperlinks throughout all contacted websites, not simply people who responded to us.
• 58% of the contacted websites that supplied us with a backlink did so after the preliminary e mail, 14% did so after a 3-day follow-up e mail, 15% after a 15-day follow-up, 13% after a ultimate 15-day follow-up. Clearly some diminishing returns from repeated follow-ups, to not point out some grumpy responses after the third or 4th e mail (e.g. “stop emailing me!”).

Additionally, when it comes to elevated backlinks from outreach campaigns vs natural SEO, right here’s how our skyscraper articles fared…

• Although articles like HTTPS & SSL Guide gained over 27% of its complete backlinks from outreach actions, on common over 90% of complete backlinks got here from natural SEO.
• Ironically, many of the complete backlinks gained for our Spam Prevention article had been spam hyperlinks from a single area.

In conclusion…

Keeping in thoughts that we began with a goal of getting a minimum of 5% of contacted websites to hyperlink to our skyscraper articles, our exams present that if yow will discover a very good matter with LOADS of potential backlink alternatives, this methodology could also be price pursuing (for instance, our WordPress GDPR article, which gained 52 backlinks). However, whereas a skyscraper put up could also be good for passively gaining extra backlinks (after placing in quite a lot of lively effort), we additionally ended up with posts like Update PHP WordPress, which solely netted 2 backlinks, so this methodology would possibly be worthwhile to make use of for evergreen posts with a number of stats and information that attraction to a large variety of websites in your business or area of interest.

So, if in case you have the sources and the need to construct articles that may tower over these of your competitors, it’s possible you’ll need to placed on a tough hat and provides the skyscraper methodology a strive.