Back in the 2010’s, I thought I had cracked the code of content creation. I was on the verge of discovering a magical formula that could make every digital platform I managed hum like a well-tuned engine and purr out endless streams of growth. It’s kind of like those overly optimistic baseball fans – including myself — who think this year is finally going to be our year. Well, they’re almost always wrong, and so was I.
Back then, the digital landscape seemed manageable. But that’s mostly because I wasn’t fully paying attention to how messy it was getting behind the scenes. There’s a certain organized chaos to the world of content strategy that only someone neck-deep in Google Analytics or clawing at SEO rankings can truly appreciate. It’s a job that often feels like trying to herd a hundred caffeinated squirrels and calling it “strategy.” Still, amid this madness, there was a tactic that seemed to bring everything together: skyscraper content.
I don’t know when it became a thing, but at some point, during my career, skyscraper content became the darling of every digital marketer with delusions of grandeur. The idea is simple: write something so long and packed with information on a single topic that it towers over the rest of the internet like a gleaming, obnoxious skyscraper next to a cozy little bungalow. You’re not just writing content; you’re building a monument. The goal is to make that skyscraper so useful to such a wide swath of people that you’ll gain a bunch of backlinks and become the “authoritative source” on whatever niche you’ve chosen to dominate.
In theory, skyscraper content sounds like a real winner. Well, not in my experience. The trouble with these towering content monoliths is that almost nobody actually reads them. You’ll get mostly skimmers, looking for a specific answer among the dozens of questions you’ve deigned to answer just to pad it out. So then, maybe, if the winds of the algorithm gods blow in your favor, someone will decide that it’s worth linking to your encyclopedia of blah-blah-blah for reasons more about SEO strategy than providing actual value. So, often aware of this fact, content marketers like me were still out there playing this game. We just kept stacking words on top of each other with great effort to become the next best how-to page for “How to Peel an Orange.”
Obviously, I understand why trying to build the tallest building, digital or otherwise, is so appealing. Skyscraper content is strongly alluring because “bigger is better, right?” No, it’s not. Not when it comes to content, at least. Some of the best pieces I’ve ever written have been short, punchy, and, most importantly, human. By that I mean I worked in the dark humor and sarcastic wit that I use daily in my real life. Who cares if your article is 2,000 words long if 1,500 of those words are just fluff that’s keyword stuffed? Most skyscraper articles I come across are worse than that, though; they’re packed with copy-pasta cliché advice we’ve read a thousand times, but with fancier formatting.
Content marketing friends, we must stop obsessing over length like it’s the end-all, be-all of content creation. It’s not. In fact, it’s one of the many things that makes me roll my eyes so hard I can practically see the back of my own skull. Sure, your skyscraper might look impressive from a distance. But once readers get closer, they’ll see it’s often built on a foundation of regurgitated ideas, irrelevant quotes, and, occasionally, some really outdated data. To this day I come across many skyscraper articles from 2015 still pretending like nothing has changed in the world. If anything, they now have value as historical lookbacks, unintentional time capsules that never quite lived up to the purpose they were intended to serve.
In my years of attempting to construct these wordy monstrosities, I discovered something that should have been obvious from the start. People prefer quality over quantity. But, in the skyscraper world, that’s blasphemy. If it’s not towering over the competition, what’s even the point? Well, friends; the point is you’re supposed to be writing for people. You know, the ones who are supposed to read your content? They don’t care how tall your article is. They care about whether it’s relevant, useful, and—dare I say—entertaining. If there’s pithy little gems of insight included, all the better.
After years of chasing this skyscraper nonsense, I had a revelation: I didn’t need to build new content. I had a whole vault of old, solid stuff just waiting to be dusted off and spruced up. Why was I breaking my back (and brain) to construct yet another towering pile of words when I could just pull out the good stuff I’d already written, update it, and—gasp—even make it better? Genius, right? Apparently not. Soon as I pitched this strategy to potential clients, I got the digital equivalent of a polite head-pat and a “No, thanks, we’d rather pay a sketchy start-up firm to build us an SEO skyscraper.” I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Fine. Be that way.”
So, I hung up my digital marketing hat, muttered some choice words under my breath, and went back to writing essays that nobody read. At least in that world, when somebody accidentally stumbles across one of your little brain dumps, people expect you to say something of value, not just stack words like it’s a Jenga game with an impending collapse.
Yet, the digital world continues to spin. The skyscrapers are still going up and growing taller than ever. Video marketing has stemmed the tide only slightly. In any case, people are still skimming. Nobody’s diving deep into a 3,000-word magnum opus on the history of hand sanitizer. Now, some people are actually dismantling their skyscrapers into 500-word posts that are supposed to answer specific questions. Here’s the problem. It’s mostly fluff, then affiliate links to things that are only tangentially related.
So, here’s my advice, for what it’s worth (which is probably more than 2,000 words’ worth of skyscraper fluff): Stop thinking you need to build the tallest tower on the internet. You don’t. Focus on the people, not the search engines. Write something that matters. Say something real. Use personal stories, fresh ideas, and data that’s not old enough to have a driver’s license.
Therefore, the solution to all this is quite straightforward: write articles that both hit hard and says what it needs to without the filler. Plus, if it’s short and to the point, it’s easily updated, preferably on a yearly basis, at least.
Sure, skyscraper content has its place. But if you’re constantly chasing the tallest building, you’re missing out on all the interesting stuff happening on the ground floor. Sometimes, the most thoughtful, memorable structures are the ones built with intention, not for their size. After all, who wants to live in a skyscraper when you can enjoy a charming, well-built home with a great view?
~ Amelia Desertsong
