Day 9

The Skyscraper Technique 1.0 (created by SEO expert Brian Dean) is very simple.

The goal is to find a keyword (problem) you want to rank for and see what posts rank online and then make a better quality post.

So for example, lets say you run a website about 'Astronomy' and through searching you feel that people who want to get into Astronomy will be searching for 'Best Telescopes'.

So, using a professional tool such as Ahrefs we examine the search rankings to see what comes up on the first page for 'best telescopes'

We can see that on page 1 of Google is a post called 'The Top 10 Best Telescopes' another is the best 5 and another the best 16 telescopes.

Well The Skyscraper 1.0 Technique is all about creating a better post.

So you might head over to this and create a post called 'The 100 Best Telescopes You Can Buy'

Your post (just like a Skyscraper) is going to be bigger, bolder and better.

And here comes the kicker.

Using a tool such as Ahrefs you can click on each page that is one the first page of Google and examine their backlinks, find them and reach out to the owner of that website and say something like;

"hey I have seen you linked out to this post about telescopes, my post is far more detailed and I think your audience will find it more useful, would you link to me too?" (or words to that effect).

The result is that you 'steal' the backlinks from your competition and rise through the rankings.

The Skyscraper Technique 2.0 is pretty much the same but....it has the additional aspect of looking at Searcher intent.

If you recall we have mentioned this before.

But a quick recap is always good.

People search the internet for loads of reasons but some people are just browsing, some people are ready to buy and some people just want some education around a subject.

But Google knows and understands what people really want based on what they type or say into the search engines and as such you need to make sure that your content is not only great and larger but exactly what the searcher wants to read.

So...if we go back to our Telescope example you can see that the first page results for the search term 'best telescopes' are either list posts or guides.

So Google is spelling this out for you, if you want to rank on page 1 for that search term you need to create either a list post or a guide.

The Skyscraper 2.0 technique is going to be our rifle in our Sniper Method.

We are going to find our target and create the best content we can that answers the search query AND search intent.

We want people to read our content and feel like that was time well spent.

This is how we are going to win our traffic battle and because of all the other work we will do (that has yet to come), people will like, link to and share our content.

The Second Solution: Pick Easy Targets

The second solution to our problem is to avoid keywords where there are a lot of these beefed up sites dominating.

This is going to allow you to stand a far better chance of ranking online.

In a few years time when your site is big and strong you will be able to compete for more competitive problems.

But for now we do not want that grief.

So we are going to seek out far easier keywords to rank for first.

We will then combine this with the Skyscraper 2.0 technique.

So it looks like this:

Low competition keywords + Skyscraper 2.0 = rankings and traffic

(But remember, they need to be low competition but focused keywords).

Time To Assess Your Customers Problems In Google

The next step in our Sniper Method is going to be simple.

You need to take that list of problems that you wrote down earlier in the course and assess them for the 'easier targets'.

Remember we are snipers and snipers rely on accuracy!

These  keywords are the audiences problems that you identified in the research phase.

If you remember, to calibrate your site to gain 100,000 visitors per year we need to gain just 274 visitors per day.

That is not many. 

Yet the vast majority of websites on the internet never reach this level because they fail to write the correct content for the right keywords.

But I don't want this for you.

So we need to be selective about our targets.

Take that list of problems and  using a tool like Ubersuggest which is free or Ahrefs you will assess each one.

I would also suggest setting up a spreadsheet to contain your data.

With Ubersuggest you would type in a problem/keyword and you will see the data we need:

The key here is to look at the search volume and the SEO difficulty. 

This keyword 'how to train a dog to fetch' shows an 'easy' score. 

We want to avoid searches that are difficult to rank for and go for those that have a low or easy score, this is what makes the Sniper Method so damn powerful.

The Sniper Method is all about selecting the best targets we can and those will be targets that are easy to rank for, so make your list of easy targets.

A Brief Word About Difficulty

I couldn't write a course that covered traffic generation without talking about something we call Keyword difficulty.

If you recall I stated earlier that there are 'playground bullies' in the search engines.

These are website that are bigger and stronger than yours and will be able to outrank you.

They achieve this by having more content and more backlinks, not necessarily better content.

Well to help identify these more powerful sites SEO tools assign various metrics.

Some call this Domain Authority, Domain Score or other variations. 

I do not want you to over worry about this right now.

But wherever possible we are going to try and look for searches where we are not going up against these playground bullies.

We are going to look for searches that we can win without spending hours and hours trying to build backlinks.

So, in our research we need to look for low competition keywords that deliver focused traffic (IE answers a pain point for our target audience).

And yes, this is where the hard work in this course comes in, the research.

How To Decide If You Can Fight For A Keyword

You might be wondering, 'what makes a keyword easy to rank for?'

Well our specialist tools look at metrics such as backlinks and domain strength (the strength of a website).

When the search results are dominated by websites with low domain strength and low strength backlinks it will be easier to rank your website in Google.

Now, depending on the strength of your own website it might actually be easier to rank for keywords or more difficult.

Because every site is different you don't know how weak or how powerful your site is when compared with your competitors.

But to find out there is a way.

I do this using tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush.

To find out a websites strength I go to the tool and just drop in the domain address:

I will be able to see what strength my (or any) domain is.

I won't lie, these metrics take SEO skill to understand and every tool is different.

So I am not going to teach you how to understand the various tool metrics (they have that info for free on their sites)

But remember our goal and approach right now is to try and find low competition keywords that by creating Skyscraper content for you will be able to rank without the need for a lot of heavy SEO work.

We are trying to take all the SEO work out of the equation (once you have good traffic figures you can go back to SEO later on)

So try and aim for a low difficulty score from whatever research tool you are using.

If we have a low difficulty score you should be able to rank well with great content and a handful of backlinks (I will talk about how you are going to get them later).

Why Do This Now And Not When We Researched Problems?

Way back at the beginning of this course I gave you a task and that task was to research problems that your consumer faced.

You used tools such as Reddit, Ubersuggest, Quora, Google and of course Ahrefs.

And you ended up with a big list. 

So you might be asking 'why not get all that data then?'

Well there is a good reason for this. 

You need to understand your audience regardless of how difficult or easy it is to rank for a keyword. 

Because SEO is just one part of the 'traffic matrix'.

We need to be able to gain traffic from other places and this means we still need to tackle the subjects that are harder to rank for because when you are faced with planning on how you will gain traffic you have to realise that it is not all about Google.

Ranking on page 1 of Google can take anything from 6 months to 2 years.

It just depends on your content and your market.

And as we will see, you have plenty of other ways to grab traffic if your content is right.

But you need to know what keeps your audience awake at 2 am.

Homework

Ok, so today your homework is important.

You need to build that spreadsheet/ list.

Organise it with the problems your audience faces/ needs solutions for.

Next add the search volume and the difficulty of ranking (depending on what tool you use).

Tomorrow, just like a sniper, we are going to pick the targets we want to go after, learn how to rank online for this and also how to promote our content.

See you tomorrow