Which types of blog posts are worth writing, and which ones will never get read?
I’ve built 160+ websites for coaches and experts since 2018, so I’ve been inside a lot of business blogs. A lot of them are written the way social media is written, one post at a time, each hoping to be the one that takes off. That’s how you spend a year writing and end up with nothing ranking.
I run my own blog, and it books consults for my business. Below are eight kinds of posts winning real search traffic for small sites right now, each with a real website and its numbers to back it up.
Quick Summary
Here are the eight blog post types you might consider writing:
- Best-of listicles: these rank the options your clients are comparing, i.e. “best business coach”
- Examples posts: here, you collect real examples of a thing, without picking a winner, i.e. “storybrand website examples”
- Template posts: put a usable contract or checklist right on the page without gating it, i.e. “informational interview questions”
- Question posts: answer a question someone might ask before they hire you, i.e. “should I hire a coach?”
- Comparison posts: the two terms your clients mix up constantly, i.e. “adultery vs infidelity”
- Cost posts: the hire-framed version of “how much does this cost.”
- Service-adjacent clusters: a few related posts all pointing at one sales page (this one got me a consult within a week!)
- Brandjacking: borrow a famous name, capped at one or two posts in ten since it doesn’t exactly build your authority
What makes a blog post get traffic?
A blog post gets traffic when it matches a search people are already making, either on Google or on AS search. The eight types below work because each one lines up with a specific moment in a buyer’s decision journey, which allows you to insert yourself as a way to help.
Keep in mind that Google ranks posts one at a time, but it also reads everything on your site together and decides whether you’re an authority worth sending people to. AI search works the same way.
So what you want to do for great SEO is build is a body of work that adds up to you as an authority in your niche.
That’s a different game than short-form social media, where one piece going viral is the whole point and last month’s posts might as well not exist. On your website, the post you wrote in March is still working in November, and it’s making the November post easier to rank.
One definition to know: most SEO tools score a website’s overall strength from 0 to 100. That rating is called Domain Rating, or DR. Forbes is in the 90s. Most small business sites are between 5 and 15. Watch that number on every example below, because it’s possible to beat even the high DR authority sites if you play your cards right.
1. Best-of listicles
A best-of listicle gathers the top options in your niche, ranks them, and says why. “The best business coaches for coaches.” “The best somatic coaches to follow.” I have one of these myself on the best coaching websites.
These work because of who searches for them. Someone typing “best business coach” is comparing options, and people comparing options are close to spending money. You’re writing for buyers doing their homework.
The way to do it well is to be a genuine evaluator. Pick something your clients compare, research the real options, and weave in your own experience with each one. A best-of post where your opinion shows will beat a list of names every time.
Here’s the proof. Greg Faxon is a coach for coaches, and he wrote a best-of post ranking the best business coaches for coaches. He built it the honest way. He surveyed 34 coaches, and only the ones who earned a perfect ten out of ten from someone made the list. He’s on it too, and he put his own competitors above himself.
When I interviewed Greg on my channel, he told me that post booked him a lead within the first two months, and the lead came from AI citing the post. That’s the part worth catching. The post barely registers in SEO tools, and it didn’t matter, because AI reads everything, not just page one. A genuinely useful best-of post can start sending you clients before Google has even decided where to rank it.
Here’s a tip for checking your own: if your list would read the same no matter who wrote it, keep researching until it wouldn’t.
2. Examples and showcase posts
An examples post collects real examples of something and shows them, without ranking anything. “9 real examples of coaching packages.” “12 group program welcome emails.” My post on StoryBrand website examples is this type.
The intent is the same as a best-of. Someone searching for examples is trying to build their own version of the thing, which usually means they’re in motion on their business. It’s a lower bar to write, and you get the same quality of visitor.
The key with thise type is to stay niche-specific. “Sales page examples” has a difficulty of 56, and page one is Pinterest, Shopify, and a wall of DR85-plus giants. “Coaching packages examples” is the same idea one level down, and it’s wide open with way less competition.
Here’s what wide open looks like. Stephanie Fiteni is a coach who teaches marketing to other coaches, and her site is a DR37. Her post on coaching package examples ranks position 3 for “coaching packages examples” and shows up for 17 keywords, pulling around 42 visitors a month.
Before you shrug at 42, think about who those 42 people are. Coaches figuring out how to package their offers, landing on the site of someone who helps coaches market themselves. That’s a small number of exactly the right people, which is what you want your blog doing.
So before you write this one, look at who’s on page one. If it’s all giants, take the same idea one level deeper into your niche and look again.
3. Template and swipe-file posts
A template post gives your reader something they can take and use today, sitting right there on the page. It might be a contract or a checklist, a worksheet, or a set of questions.
This type works because the big sites almost always gate their templates. They make you hand over your email, or they sell them. When you publish yours directly on the page, free, search engines notice. This is the category where the size of your website matters least.
Shawn Lipton is a career and leadership coach, about fifteen years in, running his own practice. His site is a DR20. He wrote a post on how to run an informational interview and put twenty questions to ask right on the page, all twenty of them, nothing held back.
That post sits at position 4 for “informational interview questions,” a keyword with two thousand searches a month. Look at who’s underneath him. Berkeley’s career center sits at DR92, Indeed at DR92, USC at DR90, and Reddit at DR95. A one-person coaching practice ranking above four of the biggest domains on the internet.
That happens because he didn’t write about informational interviews and tease a few sample questions. He gave you all twenty, free, no email required. His page is simply the more useful answer, and useful is what wins.
To find yours, think about what clients ask you for a starting point on. Maybe it’s the intake form you wish they’d fill out, or the prep doc you send before a first session. You already have these sitting in your business, so publishing one is a blog post you don’t have to write from scratch.
4. Question posts
A question post puts a real decision-stage question in the title. I don’t mean “what is coaching.” I mean the question someone asks themselves right before they hire you. “Should I hire a life coach?” “Do I need a business coach or a mentor?”
What makes this type work is that one good question post catches a whole cluster of related searches. Google understands that “should I hire a life coach,” “who needs a life coach,” and “why hire a life coach” are the same person with the same doubt, so a single post answering that doubt can rank for all of them.
Teal Horizon Coaching is an individual life coach, and her website is a DR7. That’s the smallest site in this whole post. Her piece “7 Signs It’s Time to Hire a Life Coach” ranks position 4 for “who needs a life coach,” and that one post shows up for twelve different keywords. Sixteen doors into her website, all of them opened by people mid-decision.
There’s a bonus with this type too. These decision questions are exactly what people type into ChatGPT, word for word. A post that plainly answers “should I hire a coach like you” is teaching AI how to recommend you.
Picking the type is the easy half. Structuring the post is where people often struggle. If you’re collecting ideas as you read this, grab my Content Creation Framework. It’s a free one-page guide with the five steps I use to structure any piece of content, including the video above.
5. Comparison posts
A comparison post captures people choosing between two options, which is about as close to a buying decision as search traffic gets.
The rule, again, is stay niche. Forget “Kajabi versus Squarespace,” where every software company on earth is competing. Write the comparison your specific clients are confused about. Coach versus consultant. Coach versus therapist. Whichever two terms your people mix up.
Luke Shillings is an infidelity recovery coach in my community, and his site is a DR19. His post comparing infidelity and adultery targets two keyword variants that together get 750 searches a month at a difficulty of zero. He’s at position 11, just off page one and climbing.
I’ll set expectations honestly here. Comparison posts climb slower than the types above. Luke’s keyword has a difficulty score of zero and he’s still had to wait his way up the page, which is normal for this one. The good news is the floor is low. The lowest-DR page-one result I found anywhere in this research was a tiny counseling practice at DR4, holding position 6 for “life coach versus therapist,” a keyword with 1,000 searches a month.
So write the two terms your clients mix up, and give it time. This type tends to start at the bottom of page one and work upward.
6. Cost and pricing posts
The cost post comes with the sharpest do-this-not-that of the eight, and it turns on a single word in your title.
The generic version is a wall. “How much does website design cost” sounds like an easy target, but page one is Forbes, GoDaddy, and Fiverr, all DR85 and up. I’ll never crack it, and neither will you.
The version that works is hire-framed. “How much does it cost to hire a web designer” is the same topic with different phrasing, and the difficulty drops to 3 out of 100 with normal-sized websites sitting on page one. When the searcher includes the word “hire,” the giant platforms mostly aren’t competing, and the person searching is planning to pay somebody. My own post on the cost to hire a web designer targets that version on purpose.
When a small site gets this framing right, it can dominate. Kathy Washburn is an individual life coach with a DR15 website. She wrote one post about life coach rates, and that single post holds position 1 for sixteen different keywords at the same time, including “life coaching packages” and “how much do life coaches charge.”
So write the hire-framed cost question for your niche and answer it with real ranges. Yes, publicly. The people scared off by your prices were never going to buy, and the ones who stay have just skipped a whole awkward first call.
Before you write yours, run one test on the title. Make sure the word “hire,” or your niche’s version of it, is in there. If your title is something Forbes could have written, Forbes will outrank you.
7. Service-adjacent clusters
Instead of one post about a topic near your paid offer, this types has you publish a small cluster of related posts and point them at the sales page for that offer. The posts answer the questions people search. The sales page catches the ones who are ready.
I did exactly this recently. I sell website care plans, so over ten days I published three posts around website care. A maintenance guide on the 14th of the month. A post on website maintenance cost on the 17th. And on the 24th, a post on what a care plan includes, targeting a keyword with 350 searches a month at a difficulty of zero.
Notice what that cluster is made of. A cost post from type six and a question post from type four, which means the types above are exactly what a cluster gets built from.
At the same time, I revamped the website maintenance services page those posts point to, and the page revamp mattered as much as the posts did. Google isn’t the only reader either. Three related posts on one topic is how AI search gets to know me, so when somebody asks ChatGPT about website care, I’m the name it has the most reason to bring up.
A few days after that third post went live, I watched something happen in my analytics. A prospect found the care plan post through search, read it, clicked from the post straight to my maintenance services page, and booked a consult. I could see the whole path.
If you asked me which of the three posts earned that consult, I couldn’t tell you. It was the cluster. Google read three related posts plus an aligned sales page and decided my site was an authority on website care.
8. Brandjacking posts
Brandjacking is where you borrow attention from a name people already search, like a famous book or a well-known person, and deliver your own take on it. The clearest version is the book summary post.
Dianne Glavas is a personal brand coach with a DR16 website, and she runs seven separate book review posts. Her top one covers The Pivot Year, a title searched 600 times a month, and that post is now one of the biggest pages on her website at position 8 and climbing. Seven of them is what made it obvious she’d built a repeatable engine, and none of it depends on her own name being famous yet. People search the book and land on her website.
There’s a news version of this too. Take a trending story in your world and write the niche angle the big outlets won’t bother with, or come back 30 days later with the retrospective once the noise has died down.
Keep in mind where the boundary is. Brandjacking builds awareness borrowed from someone else’s audience, and it doesn’t build your authority on your own topic. So cap it at one or two posts out of every ten. A little dessert makes the plan easier to stick to, as long as you let the other seven types do the real work.
Which of these types of blog posts should you write first?
Start with a service-adjacent cluster around the offer you most want to sell, because it’s the only type that moves traffic and sales at the same time. If that feels like too much at once, write a single question post instead. It’s the fastest to write, and one of them can rank for a dozen searches.
What I’d avoid is picking the type first and hunting for a topic to fit it. Start from the offer you want to fill, list the questions people ask you before they buy it, and the right type will be obvious from the question.
The other thing worth knowing is that writing blog posts isn’t typically a short-term lead game. These are search plays, and search can take months to pay off. If your site is brand new and you need visitors this quarter, the post types here aren’t where I’d start, and I wrote a separate guide on getting traffic to a brand new site for exactly that situation.
Frequently Asked Questions About Types of Blog Posts
What types of blog posts get the most traffic?
For small sites, the highest-traffic types are the ones tied to a buying decision: best-of lists, examples posts, cost posts, and question posts. They have lower search volume than general how-to content, but far less competition from large publishers, so a small site can realistically reach page one.
How do you come up with blog post ideas?
Start with the questions clients ask you before they hire you, then check each one in a keyword tool to see whether people search it and whether sites your size rank for it. That combination, a real question plus a winnable keyword, is what separates a post that gets found from one that doesn’t.
How many blog posts before you see traffic?
Expect three to six months before a new post settles into its ranking, and a handful of posts on one topic before Google treats you as an authority there. A single post rarely does it. Clusters of three or four related posts move the needle faster than the same effort spread across unrelated topics.
Do blog posts still work now that everyone uses AI search?
They work differently. AI tools read your whole site and cite the sources they find most useful, so a body of related posts matters more than any single hit. I wrote a longer answer on whether blogs are still worth writing, and the short version is yes, with the strategy adjusted.
Pick one and start
Eight types of blog posts, every one of them proven on a small website by someone doing the work themselves. You don’t need all eight. You need the two or three that fit the questions your clients ask, written well enough that someone comparing options picks you.
Start with one, give it a few months, and let the next one build on it.
If you’re looking to partner with an expert to build or redesign the site all of this lives on, learn more about my web design services for coaches. And if you’re just getting started and want a DIY option to keep costs low, take a look at the Website Kit for Coaches.
Read more: Are Blog Posts Still Relevant in 2026?
