The 10 Types of Content That Work Best for SEO – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

After analyzing hundreds of SERPs over the past few weeks, Rand has identified the 10 distinct content types that work best for SEO and classified which formats are suited for certain queries. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, he explains those content types and how to use them to satisfy searcher intent, match them to the right projects, and enhance your overall strategy.

10 content formats that appeared regularly atop Google

So I made this list of 10. There are actually 11, but I don’t particularly recommend all 11 of these, and what I’ve done is, below the video, you can see in the text content of this Whiteboard Friday I’ve made a list. For each of these 11, I have a URL that’s a good example of this and a search query for which that URL ranks, so you can get a sense of what this type of stuff looks like. So you’re probably familiar with most of these formats:

1. Blog posts and those could have regular updates or be republished on a regular basis
   e.g. Live & Dare’s Benefits of Meditation (ranks for Meditation Benefits)
2. Short-form evergreen content and articles
   e.g. Jim Collin’s Piece on Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (ranks for BHAG)
3. Long-form articles
   e.g. Wait Buy Why on the Fermi Paradox (ranks for Fermi Paradox)
4. Photo and visual galleries, I found a lot of these ranking, especially for things that lent themselves to it, for example if you were to search for men’s haircuts styles.
   e.g. Right Hairstyle’s 100 Cool Short Hairstyles for Men/ (ranks for men’s hair styles)
5. Detailed and information-rich lists of information
   e.g. Wareable’s Best Fitness Trackers of 2016 (ranks for Fitness Trackers)
6. Interactive tools and content, got some good examples of those.
   e.g. Zoopla’s House Prices Tool (ranks for property prices)
7. Comprehensive category landers, so this would be like if you search for kitchen designs, how you might land on Houzz’s page of various kitchen designs and that’s really a lander to get you into more content, so it’s not technically a content marketing piece by itself, but it leads you into content pieces or could.
   e.g. HGTV’s Kitchen Ideas (ranks for kitchen remodeling ideas)
8. Multi-page guides, things like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO, but we have some other examples too.
   e.g. Bates University’s “Painless Guide to Statistics” (ranks for statistics guide)
9. Data or complex information that is visualized
   e.g. CNN’s Election Results (ranks for election results 2016)
10. Video, YouTube or embedded video on a particular page, Whiteboard Friday itself being an example of that.
    e.g. Whiteboard Friday itself (ranks for Unique Content)

Then an eleventh format that I don’t actually recommend, even though I found it in the search results quite often, and that is the formal research documents that are usually PDFs or Powerpoints or those kinds of things. The reason I don’t recommend these formats is because they’re actually hard to parse. They’re particularly hard to open on mobile devices. They’re not very user-friendly, and most of the time the reason they rank well is simply because they’re cited by lots of other things. But when you see content marketers invest in one of these spaces and make a document in one of these other formats that’s better and more comprehensive and more useful and more user-friendly, they do a much better job and they tend to rank better too.

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