You already know that a solid SEO strategy is essential to growing your business or expanding internationally.
Maybe you’ve even seen the power of content marketing in action when a blog post outperformed your expectations.
But as you’re researching new topics to tackle on your blog, you keep coming back to the same questions:
Does everything need to be a blog post?
Is your blog the best place to attract potential customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey?
What other SEO content types should you be using?
Below, I’ll walk you through eight types of SEO content and map each to a specific stage of the buyer’s journey.
By the end of this article, you’ll know how to build a full-funnel SEO content strategy that allows you to connect with your customers at every touchpoint.
What is a full-funnel SEO strategy?
The buyer’s journey—the process your customers go through before purchasing your product or service—has three main stages.
- Awareness stage (top of the funnel): The customer becomes aware of a problem and starts looking for solutions. Your job in this stage is to build awareness and educate your audience about their problem and possible solutions.
- Consideration stage (middle of the funnel): The customer weighs up different solutions to their problem. Your job is to help your audience learn how to choose the best solution for them.
- Decision stage (bottom of the funnel): The customer picks the best solution for them and makes a purchase. Your task is to give buyers a reason to choose your solution over others.
A full-funnel SEO strategy involves creating content for your target audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
As your customers make their way down the conversion funnel, they have different goals at each stage. They want different types of information presented to them in different ways.
By knowing what types of SEO content work best for each stage of the buyer’s journey, you can create tailored content that resonates with your audience—whether they’re just looking to learn, comparing different solutions, or ready to buy.
This way, you can capture leads at each stage, and nurture and convert them as they move along their journeys.
8 types of SEO content to create for a full-funnel strategy
Here are eight SEO content types to cover all three stages of the buyer’s journey.
| ToFu (Top of the Funnel) Content Types | MoFu (Middle of the Funnel) Content Types | BoFu (Bottom of the Funnel) Content Types |
| Listicles | Comparison articles | Comparison articles |
| How-to guides | Glossary and FAQ pages | Landing pages |
| Thought leadership articles | Case studies | Case studies |
| Glossary and FAQ pages | Video content | |
| Interactive content | ||
| Whitepapers and research reports | ||
| Video content |
1. Blog content
Blog content is the most common form of long-from, editorial SEO.
It’s the most common top-of-the-funnel content type used to attract your target audience at the awareness stage.
When building a content calendar, I like to differentiate between different blog content formats. This helps writers and editors be clear on the format required to fulfill the searcher’s intent.
The three most common blog content formats are:
Listicles
A listicle is an article structured as a list, offering the best of both worlds: it’s easy to skim while providing comprehensive coverage of a topic.
Listicles can be more or less detailed. The subject matter usually determines the length and depth. For example, this listicle of 150 wedding songs for walking down the aisle has a short intro, a few paragraphs on choosing the right song, and a long list of songs with a link to YouTube for each. No further descriptions needed.
On the other hand, this listicle of employee retention software has a detailed comparison table and a section on the benefits of using employee retention software before getting into the list itself. Each list item comes with a description of the tool, its features, and pros and cons, turning the listicle into an in-depth resource for potential customers comparing solutions in the consideration stage.
Listicles are great for SEO because they allow you to cover a topic in-depth, create highly authoritative pages, and provide helpful, user-centric, high-quality content that ranks.
A super effective use of listicles is ego bait: “best of” lists that round up individuals, companies, or tools with the help of getting noticed by them and gaining valuable backlinks (one of the most important ranking factors) and reshares on social media.
Longshot’s listicle on the top 100 SEO experts is a good example.
Source: Longshot
How-to guides
A how-to guide is a piece of content that provides step-by-step instructions on how to perform a task, complete a process, or solve a specific problem. How-to articles are often accompanied by helpful videos, images, infographics, or screenshots.
Searchers who type a “how to” query into Google are actively looking to learn something new. Whether your company targets a B2C or B2B audience, offering genuinely helpful, educational content positions you as a credible resource and an authority in their eyes.
The key to choosing the right topic for a how-to guide is knowing your customers’ pain points and challenges. Rather than just using keyword research tools, go directly to your customers for topic ideas. Conduct customer interviews, send surveys, or explore forums for inspiration.
When paired with relevant downloadable content, like ebooks or templates, how-to guides can become super effective top-of-the-funnel lead-generation assets.
How-to guides typically include a numbered list of steps, which increases their chances of appearing in Google’s featured snippets—also known as ‘position zero’—a highly sought-after spot that can significantly boost click-through rates.
Here’s Hubspot’s how-to guide to writing how-to guides (I know, very meta) ranking on position zero:
Another great thing about how-to guides is that “how to” keywords often go hand-in-hand with “template” keywords. So if you add a copyable or downloadable template to your guide, you can rank for dozens or potentially hundreds more keyword variations.
For example, Moz’s SEO competitor analysis guide ranks for 71 variations of the keyword “how to do competitor analysis in seo”, plus 61 variations of the keyword “seo competitor analysis template”, among others.
Keywords rankings of Moz’s SEO competitor analysis guide. Source: Ahrefs
Thought leadership articles
Thought leadership articles are opinion pieces designed to position your brand as an industry leader and build trust and credibility by sharing unique insights from subject matter experts.
This can include anything from industry commentary to data storytelling. The point is to share something new or different—ideas that challenge the mainstream narrative and make you stand out from the crowd.
There’s an ongoing debate in the SEO community about whether SEO and thought leadership are mutually exclusive.
Some people say there’s no room for fresh takes and no benefit to going against the grain when we’re dealing with an algorithm that rewards sameness (e.g. the top ten results for the same keyword all essentially say the same thing, with slight variations).
I’m in the other camp. I strongly believe that thought leadership enhances SEO.
Sure, you may need to hit certain keywords and cover certain subtopics to rank for the topic you’re targeting. But adding an original take, putting a spin on a stale topic, or writing from a unique perspective that no one else can replicate gives you an advantage on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Searchers are tired of reading the same blog post over and over again. They’re sick of consuming content written by marketers with no experience in or knowledge of the subject matter. They want expert opinions, a strong point of view, and a demonstration of first-hand experience.
And since Google’s number one goal is to keep searchers happy, it’s now prioritizing content that demonstrates EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)—the very definition of thought leadership.
Brian Dean, the Founder of Backlinko is a master of mixing SEO and thought leadership. His entire content library consists of blog posts that showcase his unique point of view on all things digital marketing, and demonstrate his hands-on experience while being fully optimized for search. This strategy has enabled Backlinko to generate millions of organic visits per year.
2. Glossary and FAQ pages
Glossary and FAQ pages are pieces of informative, short-form content providing brief explanations of industry terms and answers to commonly asked questions, respectively.
Glossary pages allow you to rank for relevant industry keywords, attract backlinks, boost your internal linking, and build topical authority.
FAQ pages allow you to rank for question-based queries, which are becoming more and more common with voice search. Plus, they can help you rank in the featured snippet (as long as you’ve implemented proper FAQ schema markup).
Short-form content requires less effort and resources to create than long-form articles. In fact, glossaries and FAQs are a great use of programmatic SEO.
They’re fairly simple, straightforward pages that don’t require you to create thousands of words of original content—making them the perfect candidate for building at scale using AI. All you need are some good templates, smart prompts, and a human to do the quality control.
Glossary pages can be heavyweight top-of-the-funnel traffic drivers. For example, ProductPlan’s 300-page glossary generates nearly 370,000 monthly visits from organic search (which makes up 80% percent of ProductPlan’s total monthly traffic).
Organic traffic performance of ProductPlan’s Glossary section. Source: Ahrefs
FAQs can rank for highly relevant, long-tail keywords and can even be used to influence users weighing their options in the consideration stage.
For example, Klarna has a page whose only purpose is to answer the question “Does Klarna affect my credit score?”. The content is extremely thin: it’s three sentences plus a few links. And the page gets around 5,000 organic visits per month.
Organic traffic performance of Klarna’s “Does Klarna affect my credit score?” page. Source: Ahrefs.
3. Landing pages
Unlike blog articles meant to inform and educate, landing pages are designed to get users to take a specific action. This could be signing up for a newsletter, watching a demo, starting a free trial, or purchasing a product.
Effective landing pages are hyper-focused and have a single, clear call-to-action (CTA)—no distractions.
If done well, landing pages can help you rank for relevant, bottom-of-the-funnel keywords and capture leads, or convert leads into paying customers. This makes them essential to a full-funnel SEO strategy that aims to cover every stage of the buyer’s journey.
When creating a landing page, SEO isn’t the only concern. It’s also vital to get the structure, content, and CTAs right. Make sure to involve your web designers and copywriters or UX writers from the start. Otherwise, you may get traffic from search engines but your message will fall flat and you won’t get the results you were hoping for.
Loom’s free screen recorder landing page is a great example. It’s got a well-placed CTA above the fold, a sleek design that showcases the tool’s most important features (and their benefits!), customer testimonials, and an FAQ. Just what the doctor ordered!
Source: Loom
4. Comparison pages
Comparison pages are designed to analyze and highlight the differences between two products or services.
They’re a popular type of SEO content in the SaaS world, where a software company’s success hinges on being able to differentiate itself from competitors. The queries searchers use to find such comparisons often take the form of “software A vs software B” or “software A alternatives”.
Comparison articles allow you to attract high-intent leads in the consideration stage who are either already aware of your brand and weighing their options or looking for alternatives to a competitor’s product. As a result, these pages can become powerful, high-converting bottom-of-the-funnel assets.
Plus, comparison keywords are typically pretty easy to rank for because of how specific they are. They don’t drive nearly as much traffic as more competitive, higher-volume, top-of-the-funnel traffic, but the traffic they do drive is much more relevant.
Last but not least, publishing comparison pages allows you to control the narrative of where your product sits within the competitive landscape. You can choose to let potential customers get the information they need from user blogs, review aggregators, and your competitors. Or you can take the opportunity to build your reputation and share your point of view to convince them.
Monday.com has an entire section on its website dedicated to product comparisons. They even target keywords like “clickup vs asana”, and use the comparison of TWO of their main competitors as an excuse to introduce users to a third alternative: monday.com. Clever!
Source: monday.com
5. Interactive content
Once, searchers may have been content with being passive consumers of content. Now, they want to be actively engaged—even participate in it.
Enter interactive content.
Some examples of interactive content, like games or quizzes, are meant to be purely entertaining. Others, like free tools and calculators, provide added value that makes for memorable user experiences.
Offering tools that people can use for free on your website is a great way to rank for relevant keywords, expand your reach, and introduce your brand to new audiences.
Semrush offers a host of free tools, from an AI text generator to a word counter tool. The former ranks for nearly 531 keywords on the first page of Google, and generates nearly 50,000 monthly organic vists, according to Ahrefs.
Source: Semrush
Canva’s color palette generator is another excellent example of interactive content. The tool can be used on its own, but there are also cleverly placed CTAs inviting users to try Canva’s other (paid) features. According to Ahrefs’s estimation, this page ranks for 1,223 keywords on page one and generates more than 260,000 monthly clicks from organic search.
While it’s likely that a large portion of this traffic isn’t qualified, and most users who land on the page probably aren’t looking to make a purchase, Canva only knows how many of them do end up signing up. Plus, free tools like these are great for brand building.
Source: Canva
6. Case studies
A case study is a detailed analysis of how a company’s products or services helped a client solve a real-life business challenge.
While case studies aren’t commonly considered SEO content, they can be a very effective content type for your search engine optimization strategy.
The main purpose of case studies is to tell a customer success story in a compelling way so that other companies who desire a similar outcome are attracted to your product or service.
You can achieve that and drive traffic to your case study from search engines by optimizing it for relevant keywords.
For example, SurferSEO has a bunch of case studies that target relevant industry terms. Instead of focusing on their clients’ brand names in the title, URL slug, and other significant places, they strategically use keywords like “small business seo case study”, “b2b services seo case study”, and “saas seo case study”.
Ranking for these keywords allows SurferSEO to attract leads in the middle of the funnel who may be looking for similar services, and comparable outcomes. Plus, it helps them build topical authority and provides opportunities for internal linking.
Source: SurferSEO
7. Whitepapers and research reports
Whitepapers are educational documents that discuss a topic in a detailed, authoritative, and research-based way.
If there are topics within your niche that require more than a simple blog post to discuss and could benefit from extensive research and analysis, you can tackle them in whitepapers or research reports.
Such in-depth assets allow you to showcase your expertise, and position yourself as an authority on a given topic.
Whitepapers are resource and labor-intensive to create, so you likely won’t be publishing one every week. However, if they are high-quality and provide value, they tend to do well in Google search and earn lots of backlinks organically.
You can go the old-school route and publish your whitepaper as a PDF document. However, while PDFs can be optimized for organic search, crawled by Google, and appear in search results, they’re not great for SEO. They’re not mobile-friendly, lack navigational elements, and make tracking a nightmare.
You’re better off publishing your whitepaper as a website page. That way, the whitepaper blends smoothly into the rest of your website experience, and you have more control over things like mobile-friendliness and tracking.
Editorial Link’s State of Linkbuilding Report 2024 is a good example of a thoroughly researched report designed as a web page that ranks for relevant keywords and has the potential to attract valuable backlinks.
Source: Editorial Link
8. Video content
With all this talk about blog posts and landing pages, it’s easy to forget that not all SEO content needs to be written content—and that Google is not the only search engine out there.
Even though the popularity of short- and long-form video platforms (namely TikTok and YouTube) has exploded in recent years, video content remains unexplored territory for many businesses.
It makes sense: video production involves higher costs and requires specialist expertise that many content teams lack. However, in 2025, creating multimedia content will be vital to strengthening your online presence.
SERPs are getting extremely crowded. Next to the organic results, there are paid ads, featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, image and video packs, forum discussions, AI Overviews, and more.
As a result, businesses need to look at SERPs holistically and optimize for a variety of features instead of just focusing on the organic results.
Creating video content is one way to win that coveted SERP real estate. And the easiest way to get started with videos is to repurpose content created in other formats or for other purposes, such as podcasts or software tutorials.
How to choose the right content type for a topic
Let’s say you’ve identified a topic that’s relevant to your business, has some interesting traffic potential, and isn’t absurdly competitive (i.e. you have a realistic chance of ranking for it).
How do you know what type of content to create for this topic?
The answer is search intent analysis.
Search intent is the main goal a user has when they type in a search query. Google will only consider your page a good result for that query if it responds to the searcher’s intent.
Users can have an informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional intent. This determines the type of content they want to see when they click on a search result.
To identify the search intent of your primary keyword, go through the top ten results and write down what intent each of them fulfills, and what content types and formats they use to fulfill it.
The content type and format that most of the top-ranking pages use is the one you’re going to use, too. For example, if eight out of the top ten results are listicle-style blog posts, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to rank with a product page or even a how-to guide.
If there’s a mix of content types in the top ten, go by the top three results. If even those are mixed, use the content type that the number one result uses.
Build a full-funnel SEO strategy in 2025 with these SEO content types
While blog posts remain a cornerstone of SEO strategies, they are far from the only content type that can attract and engage your audience.
A full-funnel SEO approach uses a variety of content types—each tailored to meet the specific needs of your customers at different stages of their buyer’s journey.
Whether it’s educational blog posts at the top of the funnel, product comparison pages in the middle, or search-optimized case studies at the bottom, diversifying your website content allows you to guide prospects smoothly from awareness to decision.
As search trends evolve, a full-funnel marketing strategy will become essential to staying competitive in 2025 and beyond.
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