We’ve all heard that con­tent is king. Google them­selves tell us over and over: “make great con­tent.” The prob­lem? Defin­ing “good con­tent” is often dif­fi­cult. We also are biased about the qual­i­ty of our own work, so we must always fac­tor that in when judg­ing con­tent. Ulti­mate­ly, con­tent is writ­ten for the ben­e­fit and engage­ment of the read­er. If you aren’t attract­ing con­sumers or your audi­ence isn’t engaged, your job has­n’t been accom­plished. So what types of con­tent best attract and engage con­sumers?

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Any good dis­cus­sion about con­tent should start with what con­tent is and why it mat­ters. Let’s look at both.

What Is Content?

Con­tent, in the con­text of web­site mar­ket­ing, is any mate­r­i­al that can be read, watched, seen, or heard.

Con­tent isn’t just blog posts, arti­cles, and web copy.

It extends to video, apps, down­loads, and much more. If it’s acces­si­ble or down­load­able on the web, it’s con­tent.

Why Does Content Matter?

If you ask Google they will tell you that con­tent mat­ters because as they index the web and seek to pro­vide their searchers with infor­ma­tion – if you’ve cre­at­ed the best for­mat and exam­ple of said infor­ma­tion, then your con­tent will rank high­ly.

It’s a nice tidy answer. One day maybe it will be entire­ly true. How­ev­er, there are obvi­ous oth­er SEO con­sid­er­a­tions you need to make when adding con­tent to your web­sites.

Let’s leave aside the “build it and they will come” approach to con­tent and look a bit deep­er. Con­tent serves four spe­cif­ic oth­er pur­pos­es:

• Traf­fic. Set­ting the search engines aside, prop­er­ly con­struct­ed and deployed con­tent attracts vis­i­tors. This attrac­tion gen­er­al­ly relies on one of the three pur­pos­es that fol­low.
• Social shar­ing. Google has said they don’t fac­tor in social shares into the algo­rithm and I believe them. That said, social shar­ing puts your con­tent in front of vis­i­tors, result­ing in traf­fic. The more vis­i­tors it gets in front of, the high­er the chance that it will get in front of some­one with a relat­ed web­site who will link to it.
• Links. We all love links and for good rea­son: They’re impor­tant. Good con­tent attracts good links pro­vid­ed the right audi­ence sees it. The biggest perk here is that con­tent-dri­ven links tend to be nat­ur­al, rel­e­vant, and (best of all) you don’t need to build them one-to-one.
• Behav­ior sig­nals. Google has said they don’t use Google Ana­lyt­ics data in their rank­ings and, again, I believe them. They don’t need to. They know when a user has clicked to your web­site in a Google result and they know the next time that user is at Google. That’s all the data they real­ly need to know if you’ve pro­vid­ed the searcher with a good expe­ri­ence. Pro­vide low-qual­i­ty con­tent and the user will be back at Google in sec­onds; pro­vide great con­tent and a good expe­ri­ence and that time will be far high­er.

So essen­tial­ly, great con­tent is king. Any­thing less is like­ly an exer­cise in futil­i­ty and a waste of your resources, as well as the resources of Google and their users. And Google doesn’t take kind­ly to either.

Popular Types Of Content & How You Can Utilize Them

Now that we’ve dis­cussed why and what type of con­tent is impor­tant let’s move on to the action­able por­tion of this arti­cle.

Before going fur­ther, it’s impor­tant to under­stand that just because one type of con­tent works well for one brand does­n’t mean it will work for your brand. There are two key rea­sons for this:

• The type of con­tent may not apply to your indus­try or vis­i­tors. For exam­ple, if you’re tar­get­ing a region with slow­er band­width, then video may not be the top con­tent for­mat you’d want to select.
• It’s already being done. If a com­peti­tor is pro­vid­ing an excel­lent video series on tying ties, then try­ing to com­pete with their pre-exist­ing trac­tion like­ly won’t pro­duce the results you’re look­ing for. In this exam­ple you would want to look at a dif­fer­ent medi­um or per­haps focus on a series of con­tent on col­or or pat­tern match­ing suits to ties as opposed to tying them.

Let’s dig in by look­ing at some exam­ples of some of the most pop­u­lar con­tent types and how they’ve been done right.

Article & Blog Posts

In this sec­tion alone there are end­less vari­a­tions – from how-to doc­u­ments, to news, to com­pa­ny updates.

When deter­min­ing what type of con­tent to post in this for­mat you first need to con­sid­er what peo­ple are look­ing for and whether the for­mat you are about to put it in is actu­al­ly the best one.

Fur­ther, you want to con­sid­er your end goal. Are you engag­ing your cur­rent clients or are you seek­ing new vis­i­tors? Are you look­ing to attract links or are you look­ing to sim­ply let peo­ple know what you’re doing? All of this fac­tors in and should be asked pri­or to even decid­ing on a sub­ject.

A lot of the ref­er­ence points I’ll be using here will be SEO-relat­ed as that serves as both good exam­ples and the cross ben­e­fit of per­haps let­ting you know about resources you didn’t. While there are sev­er­al great dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing the one you’re on right now, The SEM Post will serve as our exam­ple. The search mar­ket­ing news site launched just over a year ago. Here’s what the back­link graph looks like, accord­ing to ahrefs:

The SEM Post posts up-to-date news and arti­cles rel­e­vant to their niche and they’re reward­ed with both traf­fic and links and much of the con­tent enjoys sol­id social shar­ing num­bers.

Founder Jen­nifer Slegg knew her audi­ence, pro­vid­ed up-to-date news and con­tent that they were look­ing for, and deployed it through social, word of mouth, and sim­ple rep­u­ta­tion. A com­bi­na­tion of online and offline mar­ket­ing result­ing in excel­lent link stats and (from what I know) excel­lent over­all traf­fic met­rics.

Images

There’s more to think about than just prod­uct images (though they’re great too). You also need to think about info­graph­ics, image-inclu­sive tuto­ri­als, memes, and the many oth­er image-based files that can be shared and enjoyed.

One pur­pose of an image is obvi­ous, to con­vey infor­ma­tion that would be more dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble in words. Run a raft­ing com­pa­ny? Try to tell peo­ple ver­bal­ly what the expe­ri­ence is like and you’ll fast learn why images have such an impact.

While images on your web­site are use­ful for get­ting your mes­sage across, there are oth­er ben­e­fits.

Whole Foods’ Pin­ter­est Page is a great exam­ple of a com­pa­ny show­ing that it knows how to use images to their mar­ket­ing advan­tage. They know they have a prod­uct that trans­lates well to image and they know images can con­vey more than just a pic­ture of a prod­uct in a store.

With 58 boards on Pin­ter­est, Whole Foods cov­ers a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent food needs and inspi­ra­tional thoughts. They have 5,020 Pins as of this writ­ing and a whop­ping 264,251 Fol­low­ers. Their fol­low­ers engage and re-Pin lead­ing to many of their images being re-Pinned hun­dreds of times.

Essen­tial­ly, Whole Foods has ensured their images are good, fit the needs of their mar­ket, and are dis­trib­uted on a medi­um heav­i­ly used by their tar­get demo­graph­ic. They also allow Fol­low­ers to share and also include relat­ed con­tent from oth­er boards to ensure they’re ful­ly engaged.

Notice any­thing about the fol­low­ing image?

Did you catch what’s inter­est­ing? No men­tion of their com­pa­ny. In fact, this was a re-Pin from anoth­er com­pa­ny but attract­ed Likes and re-Pins and user engage­ment on their boards.

You don’t always have to be sell­ing. Your prod­uct doesn’t always have rein­force to your audi­ence that you’re the source for rel­e­vant data.

Which leads to anoth­er great use of image con­tent as an atten­tion grab­ber. When you are weed­ing through the end­less con­tent that is the Inter­net, espe­cial­ly on social media sites like Twit­ter or Face­book, what makes you stop and look? Prob­a­bly not a post full of text.

The addi­tion of an image, rel­e­vant or not, will increase the like­li­hood of a user notic­ing what you have to say or click­ing, shar­ing, lik­ing, retweet­ing it etc. Of course I would rec­om­mend that the image be rel­e­vant but it is incred­i­ble how eas­i­ly one can find a way to make a rain­bow-uni­corn-cat image fit your con­tent isn’t it? And how many “#adorable”, “#lol” etc. cat pho­tos have end­ed up being shared?

Now I will stress that rel­e­van­cy does mat­ter but the art of it is cre­at­ing an image that is both enter­tain­ing, share­able, engag­ing and appro­pri­ate.

Video

Video is one of the most pow­er­ful medi­ums and video con­tent one of the most pop­u­lar. That YouTube is the sec­ond largest search engine after Google cer­tain­ly indi­cates a desire among users to view their infor­ma­tion in this for­mat.

Obvi­ous­ly video isn’t for every brand or busi­ness. For a com­pa­ny, videos gen­er­al­ly (though not always) have to be pro­fes­sion­al and pow­er­ful.

When con­sid­er­ing video as a con­tent medi­um you need to deter­mine whether you can pro­duce it in the qual­i­ty nec­es­sary and the spe­cif­ic needs of your vis­i­tors.

For exam­ple, if you sell ties, then a video series on tying them could be very use­ful – like­ly more use­ful than an image-based instruc­tion­al. How­ev­er, if you want­ed to dis­cuss col­or-match­ing between suits, shorts, and ties then an image-based series may be the route to go.

As Patrick Hong dis­cussed in his excel­lent arti­cle on bril­liant mar­ket­ing strate­gies, GoPro makes excel­lent use of video in their pro­mo­tions (admit­ted­ly, they have an advan­tage giv­en that their prod­uct lends itself well to it). The exam­ple he used and arguably the best out there is:

Like Whole Foods, GoPro isn’t using video as a direct sales tool but rather using it as a demon­stra­tion of its uses to tug at our heart­strings. With more than 27 mil­lion views, it’s hard to argue its suc­cess.

Video also made Psy a house­hold name. And if you ever want­ed to get that ear­worm out of you head, with more than 2.7 bil­lion (yes … bil­lion) views – today won’t be that day.

User-Generated Content

The ques­tion whether to allow users to gen­er­ate con­tent on your web­site can be tricky. They can add val­ue or deval­ue the good work you do depend­ing on how you mod­er­ate and edit it.

This arti­cle itself is an exam­ple of user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent. I don’t work for Momen­tol­ogy and yet I’m hap­py to pro­duce con­tent for them. I like to think it adds val­ue to the web­site and with the tweak­ing by their edi­tor it will end up bet­ter than its first writ­ing. This is the key.

Because Momen­tol­ogy invests the time and ener­gy into proof­ing and edit­ing con­tent being sub­mit­ted and because they take their user-base seri­ous­ly and don’t just want “con­tent for content’s sake” they have cre­at­ed a resource for mar­keters and not just low-hang­ing fod­der for search engines.

While I may not have access to their ana­lyt­ics, their link growth graph answers the ques­tions as to whether it’s a suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy:

This site is less than a year old and has thou­sands of rel­e­vant links from hun­dreds of rel­e­vant domains. And that’s not even dis­cussing their reg­u­lar vis­i­tors. They host good con­tent, push it out social­ly, and reap the ben­e­fits of vis­i­tors and links.

This isn’t to say that user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent is right for every­one. You need to con­sid­er the time invest­ed. For many com­pa­nies, even doing this on a small­er scale works.

For exam­ple, if you’re a prop­er­ty man­ag­er in Whistler, BC, why not invite one of the rac­ers at the annu­al CrankWorx com­pe­ti­tion to offer up a guest post on the event? Con­nect the dots right, invest a bit in a social push, add the inter­vie­wees own shar­ing (who doesn’t love their own name right?) and per­haps a men­tion on their blog and you’re attract­ing links, vis­i­tors, and (as a perk) reser­va­tions from their sup­port­ers com­ing to town for the event.

Case Studies & Whitepapers

Arguably one of the more time-con­sum­ing of all con­tent types are case stud­ies and white papers. They involve a huge amount of research and time invest­ed. This doesn’t mean they should be avoid­ed, it sim­ply means that when pro­duced you need to have a strat­e­gy to make the most of it.

Let’s take for exam­ple Search­metrics’ whitepa­per on SEO rank­ing fac­tors. The page has 300 Likes on Face­book, 123 Tweets, 42 Shares and an envi­able 677 links from 262 domains (not count­ing the link here). Did it take them a lot of time to pro­duce? Heck yes, but let’s break that down into the right con­text by ask­ing our­selves, how long does it take to build a qual­i­ty, rel­e­vant link?

Let’s assume that you’re fast and can secure 2 links from unique domains per hour – that means that if they invest­ed any­thing less than 131 hours into the pro­duc­tion of the con­tent they’re in a sur­plus before we even con­sid­er the rep­u­ta­tion boost, traf­fic and brand aware­ness. Here’s what their link acqui­si­tion looked like:

A fur­ther wise move on their part is that they do it every year. They have the tem­plate in place and “sim­ply” need to update the infor­ma­tion with­in it. So they can repeat this every year and know­ing in advance they’ll “have” to they can col­lect the data they’ll need over that time mak­ing it faster to pro­duce each sub­se­quent whitepa­per, thus increas­ing the ROI.

If you don’t have the time or resources to pro­duce a 10x qual­i­ty whitepa­per or case study, don’t try. These con­tent pieces need to be top-notch. The rewards can be great when you do them right.

It’s equal­ly impor­tant to have a strat­e­gy to get that con­tent noticed through either paid search, social, newslet­ters, or oth­er mech­a­nisms. You should have the dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­e­gy in place pri­or to its devel­op­ment and the bud­get to do it right.

Webinars & Hangouts

Webi­na­rs and hang­outs are an excel­lent way of push­ing your voice to the world, allow­ing for inter­ac­tions with your vis­i­tors and/or just a clear tuto­r­i­al. Eas­i­ly the most well-known of the hang­outs in the SEO indus­try are John Mueller’s, where he answers ques­tions about Google. That said, the goal here is “only” pure infor­ma­tion to web­mas­ters and not links or rank­ing improve­ment so instead let’s look at Moz’s webi­nar series.

Moz actu­al­ly does a hybrid of webi­na­rs and user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent as they often use mem­bers of their com­mu­ni­ty to host the webi­na­rs. Despite the fact that these webi­na­rs are only avail­able to reg­is­tered mem­bers the pages have acquired 869 links from 243 domains com­bined with excel­lent social met­rics.

The webi­na­rs top­ics cov­er a wide range of sub­jects, though all relat­ed to Inter­net mar­ket­ing. The suc­cess of this sec­tion is based on the com­bi­na­tion of Moz using their weight and influ­ence to push out the “Moz­i­nars” to their users com­bined with the weight of the guests push­ing that infor­ma­tion out them­selves, most of whom have size­able fol­low­ings. The con­tent is easy to digest in the webi­nar for­mat, takes a rea­son­able time on Moz’s part and serves the dual pur­pose of engag­ing their users as well as acquir­ing links and social sig­nals.

Moz also uses the webi­na­rs as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to col­lect email address­es for their mail­ing list. This will give them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to not just mar­ket but also gain greater trac­tion over time in their series – a win-win and excel­lent use of the for­mat.

 

Lists

Peo­ple love lists. Why? Because we’re lazy and they’re easy to skim and digest.

It’s got­ten to the point where there are sites ded­i­cat­ed sole­ly to lists – and high­ly pop­u­lar ones at that. ListVerse.com is an excel­lent exam­ple.

Ear­li­er this week Neil Patel at Quick Sprout wrote a piece “5 Types Of Con­tent That Attract The Most Back­links” and, sure enough, lists took the num­ber one spot on his … you guessed it: list.

A scan of the back­links of ListVerse.com paints a pic­ture of their pow­er. A top 10 list they pub­lished on the grue­some ori­gin of fair­ly tales acquired 132 links and more than 40,000 shares.

While you may not have their pow­er or traf­fic, it cer­tain­ly high­lights the impact they have. To give you an idea, here’s what their back­link growth looks like:

Accord­ing to Patel, peo­ple love lists because:

• They make a spe­cif­ic promise.
• They are scannable.
• They invoke curios­i­ty.

What I love about lists is that they apply to vir­tu­al­ly all sec­tors from “Top 10 Things You Need To Know To Prep For An Earth­quake” to “20 Veg­an Foods Even The Car­ni­vore Will Love”.

While high­ly share­able, lists tend to take less time to pro­duce than many oth­er forms of con­tent. The research can be low­er but it’s impor­tant to note that the dis­tri­b­u­tion efforts can be high­er than oth­er forms of con­tent because you’re com­pet­ing with a large pool of sites.

When gen­er­at­ing a list the biggest ques­tion is, what should the list be about? A bit of key­word research or review­ing of Google Trends for what’s hot in your niche will often pro­vide the answer.

Anoth­er great source of infor­ma­tion is your cur­rent clients. What do they want to know?

Remem­ber, it doesn’t have to be about your prod­uct as the pur­pose of lists is gen­er­al­ly to acquire shares, links, and brand recog­ni­tion. A list on why your prod­uct is bet­ter prob­a­bly won’t acquire these sig­nals though may be high­ly suit­ed to a sales page. A list of weird uses for your prod­uct or more like­ly a list relat­ed to your indus­try, but not your prod­uct, is far more like­ly to attain the links and social shares you’re look­ing for.

An inter­est­ing take­away from Patel’s piece is the trends month-over-month. He pro­vid­ed the fol­low­ing graph­ic from Buz­zSumo:

We can see that month-over-month lists per­formed well. Con­sis­ten­cy is the key to most mar­ket­ing efforts and this data com­bined with raw num­bers make lists a go-to, pro­vid­ed that there is a deploy­ment strat­e­gy in place.

As men­tioned before, lists work well but they need to be found first. Sim­ply toss­ing up a list with­out a strat­e­gy to get it in front of your tar­get­ed audi­ence serves no one. A large push on social, through newslet­ters, or via adver­tis­ing is manda­to­ry for all but the strongest web­sites.

Tools

In the search mar­ket­ing realm, as with many oth­ers, there are a ton of great free tools that cov­er a wide array of needs. There are two major con­sid­er­a­tions when devel­op­ing a tool giv­en that they can be high in work­load:

• Do they fill a need? If you’ve ever need­ed a tool to per­form a task and can’t find one or can’t find a good one, you’ve filled this require­ment. If you’d found tools that per­form the task well then you may want to recon­sid­er the effort unless your goal is only to stop vis­i­tors from nav­i­gat­ing to oth­er sites.
• Is the need broad in scope? The next ques­tion you’ll want to ask your­self is whether the need is broad in scope. If only a hand­ful of peo­ple would need the tool you are devel­op­ing then you need to weigh the poten­tial gain vs a tool with a broad need and appeal.

One free tool I use often is the Google Title Tag Tool, devel­oped by Dr. Pete Mey­ers at Moz. I’m there pret­ty much every time when play­ing with new title ideas.

When Google changed the length of the title tag snip­pets in search from char­ac­ter-based to pix­el-based Mey­ers was the first I know of to devel­op a tool that didn’t just allow the user to view their title as it would appear in the new for­mat but fur­ther enter queries they hoped to be found under and to view how that title would appear when the bold­ing of those key­words was applied.

For his efforts that page has 1,700 links from 603 domains. So, assum­ing it took him less than 300 hours to devel­op, he’s done well on a pure link count basis. Com­pare that with anoth­er unmen­tioned site that attempt­ed the same tool but not as quick­ly and with­out the abil­i­ty to fac­tor in key­words and we see a page with 75 links from 35 domains.

What’s more, a good tool con­tin­ues to work for you long after the cre­ator’s work is done. Let’s look at the link growth rate of the Google Title Tag Tool page:

We can see that while the tool is over a year old it has con­tin­ued to acquire links for the entire time. It’s a good tool that doesn’t age.

When con­sid­er­ing the devel­op­ment of a tool for your web­site you need to con­sid­er whether you can build a tool that fits an unmet need and/or cre­ate one bet­ter than any pre-exist­ing tools. Fit­ting an unmet need will help it rank well but, as with any time-con­sum­ing project, it’s impor­tant to ensure you have a full deploy­ment strat­e­gy in place to get the tool known by those who would share it. This is espe­cial­ly impor­tant with tools that fit an as-of-yet unmet need as users like­ly won’t even know to look for some­thing with­out a cur­rent solu­tion.

The Final Word

There are obvi­ous­ly many types of con­tent not includ­ed in this list. From sur­veys and polls, to mobile apps, to online games, the vari­ety is only lim­it­ed by your imag­i­na­tion and the avail­able tech­nol­o­gy. Giv­en that tech­nol­o­gy evolves with imag­i­na­tion, how­ev­er, it’s pret­ty safe to assume that if you can dream it, you can do it.

The key to all great con­tent is to focus on pro­duc­ing some­thing not just bet­ter than what’s out there but also some­thing so much bet­ter that by the time a com­peti­tor devel­ops it the bat­tle is already over. After that the only crit­i­cal point is to have a strat­e­gy to quick­ly deploy that con­tent to the tar­get audi­ence.

In the con­text of this arti­cle that doesn’t just include your poten­tial clients but also those who would share your con­tent with oth­ers via social media or links. Remem­ber, even if some­one doesn’t pur­chase from you, they can do some­thing just as valu­able: strength­en your site by shar­ing or link­ing to your con­tent.

Again, make sure you have first formed a sol­id deploy­ment strat­e­gy, locat­ed a def­i­nite audi­ence, and cal­cu­lat­ed your invest­ment to reward expec­ta­tions. Amaz­ing con­tent is only amaz­ing if it has an audi­ence.

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Have you found suc­cess attract­ing and engag­ing peo­ple with these 11 types of con­tent? What’s worked best for you?