
Trying to improve Google ranking of your website and get to the first page of Google? We have prepared an ultimate guide on how to hit the front page and stay there using the Skyscraper Technique 1&2!


Why Skyscraper?
High-quality content still reigns supreme on Google search results. Ensuring you have the best most relevant and up to date content, basically blowing any other content out of the water can help. It increases audience retention and has the ability to create a positive experience for your potential customers and compel them to come back for more.

Good backlinks will help drive you up the rankings, backlinks are a good indicator of its popularity or importance with search engines. Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.
Getting a user to reach your page is only half the battle, making that page stick takes some extra work. Google now looks at user intent so getting a user to stay on the page is extremely important. Targeting great content and ensuring it’s useful to your audiences is the best way to keep users engaged. To do this you really need to understand what user intent is and set about enhancing the user’s experience. This is done through really understanding how usable the site is, what the user gets out of it and if it is even answering their original question properly.
It sounds difficult to implement one of these techniques let alone all of them. Well today, we at Digital Ethos are going to help you by showing you both Skyscraper 1.0 and 2.0 technique. These are both step by step processes to getting these things right. These techniques will almost certainly guarantee that you get high-quality backlinks from every piece of content that you publish, and once you have nailed these techniques you will feel on top of the world.
What is Skyscraper Technique 1.0?
Skyscraper 1.0 is the tried and tested method of building great, shareable content and has been around for a while. I’m sure you’ve heard all about the Skyscraper link building technique a thousand times already, but in case you haven’t the technique was created by ‘Backlinko’s Brian Dean’, and is a system for turning content into high-quality backlinks boasting your content up to the first page. If skyscraper 1.0 was all about getting content to the first page, then the skyscraper 2.0 technique is about getting content that will stick there.
The idea is to pick popular pages, improve upon them, and then reach out to sites that linked to those lower‐quality pages and get them to link to you. If you’ve been neglecting this method all this time but want to give it a try, you’ll probably find today’s post really useful.

What is the main Objective of Skyscraper Technique 1.0?
The main objective of the Skyscraper Technique 1.0 is to optimise a piece of content for Google to crawl through, creating powerful content which is long and informative has a number of benefits. Google rewards long and relevant content with plenty of links boosting up the page. The page then becomes a useful piece of content as well, so it becomes immensely shareable. Partnering this with a targeted outreach strategy makes it much easier for content to hit that front page. However, this is only half the battle. Now Google’s method of reading your pages is becoming more sophisticated. It allows you to get backlinks both naturally and after reaching out to the right people. That’s exactly how skyscrapers become popular — you take the highest existing building, add a few more floors and voila — everybody’s talking and writing about you.

How to implement Skyscraper Technique 1.0?
To implement a successful ‘skyscraper technique’ you need a process and below are three essential steps which will help you to achieve top quality links:

What is Skyscraper Technique 2.0?
Earlier in the decade, Google came under fire for allowing ‘content farms’ to run rampant. Articles were published on how the algorithm had been ruined by these exploiters. Two examples of this were Demand media (eHow) and Answers.com. These were firmly established inside the top 20 website properties and were pumping out 7,000 pieces of content a day. Their aim was to quickly distribute a lot of low-quality content, with content based on search value alone.

This is when Google introduced Google Panda in 2011, an algorithmic update aiming to tackle this. Google Panda, initially a separate algorithm, was given a rigorous set of questions to answer when looking at content. These were all aimed at the user and human quality ratings. It basically tries to assess if the content is high-quality or not and relevant to the users. This led to the decrease of these content farms and in 2016, Panda was introduced into Google’s core algorithm. This means the quality of content matters more so than ever now.
The main algorithm now works in conjunction with Google RankBrain to assess content and rank it. RankBrain is a separate algorithm, which assesses user experience with content in a different way. While Panda wants to make sure it looks good and asks hypothetical questions of the content, predicting what users will do, RankBrain instead analyses how users engage with the content to determine if it’s good or not. RankBrain focuses on user experience signals (UX signals) and the two most important are:
Dwell Time
How long someone spends on your page before heading back to the search results page.
CTR
The percentage of people who click on your link in search results.
Dwell time is how long a searcher spends on your page. It’s relevant because if a person clicks on your search result and decides that it isn’t relevant or doesn’t answer the query, it clearly shouldn’t be high up on the first page. How many times have you wanted to find out some information, clicked on the first result and realised it was irrelevant and left immediately. Google sees this and is constantly trying to adjust the first page due to this.
Therefore RankBrain penalises pages with low dwell time and boosts pages with high dwell time. The average dwell time is around 3 minutes and 10 seconds so you need to try and keep users around for at least this time. Therefore you not only need people to click your content but you need them to stay there for RankBrain to view it as relevant.
What Does This Mean For Your Content?
This shows that Google is all about the user experience, deciding if the content is relevant and engaging for searchers. Before these changes, you could optimise content for Google to read, but not users and searchers. Now Google focuses immensely on user intent and user experience with your content. This completely changes the game when it comes to keeping your content on the 1st page, you no longer just have to worry about getting there, consolidation is part of the game. You now need to have positive user signals from your site and satisfy user intent. Users have to engage with the content positively to keep it at the top else it will shoot down in the rankings.
So one big way to have a positive user experience and generate great user signals that Google can read is to satisfy user intent. If you are satisfying user intent, the user ideally won’t be leaving your page. If a user searches for, for example, Wallmart or Asda, you need to research why they’re searching that. The user is probably not interested in the corporate headquarters but in their nearest store. Making sure the content you are producing satisfy user intent around your targeted keyword is essential.
Written content is not the only issue here, the whole website experience is now pivotal. If your content ranks well for keywords, relevance and backlinks it all could be pointless if a user doesn’t like your website design and leaves immediately. Optimising sites for user-friendly experiences is now more important than ever as it can be directly measured with these new metrics. Maybe your website looks good and your content is relevant, you’ll still lose those who are engaged by visual or auditory inputs if it’s just text with no video or images. Thinking about all members of your audience and how to best keep them is now something that is important for all areas of your domain.
Skyscraper 1.0 can easily bounce posts and pages up to the first page, but if users are constantly hopping off your page it will sink. Google will see this low dwell time and interpret that as you not satisfying the user intent. This is how skyscraper 2.0 can allow you to optimise existing content for user intent or create better-targeted content.

Using Skyscraper 2.0 To Stick to the First Page
Secondly, you should analyse your keyword itself very closely. If your keyword is a checklist about something, say SEO Checklist, then you need to make sure the format is indeed a checklist. It’s easy for you to lose sight of this structure when writing, what may be great content. The user won’t ever know this however because they will just be looking for a checklist and will immediately leave when they don’t see this.
Conclusion
So understanding how Google is changing allows us to create targeted content easier. Adjusting to Google’s shift towards favouring sites with great usability will keep your domain healthy for a long time. The first page of the search results is a constant battle, so analysing the playing field regularly is essential for you staying on top.
Written content isn’t the only place you should focus on, your website design is going to make a huge difference too. Go back and make those website changes you’ve been meaning to do because they’re going to carry more and more significance.
Construct all future content with the user and user intent at the forefront of your focus. It isn’t too late to go back and change existing content either, so don’t let time hold you back. Never stop trying to improve your pages. Now you better understand how to rank your content and how Google will be measuring your content for user intent, it is time to get out there and build some great content.
