Anthony Basile

If you’re looking for easily digestible and informative content about search engine optimization, you’ve probably come across Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series. By combining SEO marketing blog posts with these approachable videos, Moz has made the series a go-to resource, one that has been running for an impressively long time.

There’s a lot to learn from Whiteboard Friday — and that doesn’t just mean the lessons you can pick up from watching the content. By looking behind the curtain and thinking about how Moz has positioned the Whiteboard Friday series for success, you can take away a whole extra set of lessons to empower your own content marketing efforts.

What Is Whiteboard Friday, and Where Can You Watch It?

Before getting into the history, influence and lessons of Whiteboard Friday, it’s best to just state what it is. It’s a series of videos and accompanying blog posts created by the SEO marketing company Moz. The series has a long history, as you can tell from the fact that the hosts introduce the oldest videos as coming from “SEOmoz,” the company’s former name.

In the old days (2007 in this case), the series was produced by Moz’s Rand Fishkin and Scott Willoughby, and it has passed through a variety of creators’ hands in the intervening years. Today, a rotating cast of Moz SEO experts shares opinions through the series, with industry guests joining to offer outside perspectives.

In a true victory for continuity, the Whiteboard Friday blog on the Moz website goes back to the very early days of the series, though the earliest available post with a video references older entries, meaning it’s not truly the beginning. The sheer length of the series is astonishing, and taken as a whole, the hundreds of videos provide both a wealth of SEO tips and a time capsule of the search marketing industry.

Looking back at that long string of high-quality content and seeking to learn from it, you can take a few different approaches. First off, you can watch the videos and sift through them for tips and strategies that apply to your industry. Watch for long enough, however, and you’ll start to realize that there are also meta-lessons there to learn as you produce content for your own brand.

What Can Whiteboard Friday Teach You As a Marketer?

Breaking down the value of Whiteboard Friday as a teaching tool means separating the content and the form and learning from each. Don’t worry, this isn’t a bland academic exercise, no matter what it might sound like. It just means looking at the videos on a few different levels to see why and how the series has become what Moz calls “the longest-running and most popular SEO video series.”

The Text: Informative and Not-Too-Serious SEO Content

If you want to learn anything about a specific corner of the SEO world, just search through the 18-year archive of Whiteboard Friday videos. Chances are there’s a sub-ten-minute video about your chosen concept, with a friendly Moz expert giving you an overview of the latest SEO tips in a lighthearted and approachable style.

As an added bonus, the recent crop of videos has text and images accompanying the video, so if you’d rather get the point of the content by reading than watching, you’re all set. Those written posts are also a great way to put relevant search terms on the pages and make them easy to find via Google search, a fact which Moz’s SEO pros certainly appreciate when they’re putting them together.

By keeping the pace fast and the tone light, Moz’s pros can get their points across without boring their audience, but at the same time, they’re not skimping on the actionable information and useful takeaways. The titular whiteboard is filled with useful diagrams that split the difference between accessibility and detail.

The Subtext: A Winning Strategy for Influential Content Creation

While Whiteboard Friday videos are packed with valuable lessons about the latest SEO tips, there’s much more to learn lurking beneath the surface. The greatest source of insight from this series might be the meta-lesson about how to make a content series that will break through with a specific audience.

The Whiteboard Friday series does an especially good job showing off a few specific values, namely:

  • Continuity: What can you say about a series that has entries dating back to 2007? It’s easy for audience members to latch onto high-quality content when a brand repeatedly adds to the series, and the Moz team has been plugging away at this one so long that the whole company was called something different when it began. Children who were born during the run of Whiteboard Friday now have their driver’s licenses. Perhaps more relevantly, there are experienced digital marketing professionals who have turned to Whiteboard Friday as an educational resource for their whole careers.
  • Community: Whiteboard Friday started with a consistent cast of creators, but since its early days, it’s made room for guests and various voices within Moz to share their opinions. By reaching out to experts, the series not only gains their input and insights, but it also picks up outside viewers and potential customers when these industry figures promote their appearances in the videos. Content that welcomes such a varied group can have a widespread appeal and touch on all corners of its featured subject matter.
  • Accessibility: While it’s focused on the technical world of SEO, Whiteboard Friday never feels like a chore. Its visual style is bright, its presenters are conversational and the overall mood is light. Bite-sized videos accompanied by clear text and visuals can convey useful concepts without getting bogged down in minutiae. This tone should serve as a compelling example for marketers seeking to walk the fine line between too light and too heavy in their own content.

When looking for examples of great content by and for marketers, it’s good to have such a long-lasting beacon of consistent production.

Building Your Own Community-Focused Marketing Strategies

Of course, when taking lessons from Whiteboard Friday, it’s worth digging below the surface to find some actionable takeaways. Simply taking the ideal wholesale isn’t enough — imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s not an ideal strategy for content creation.

So, what can you learn from Whiteboard Friday that will translate into your next great B2B marketing series? A few actionable paths come to mind:

Welcome Your Community In

Feeling overwhelmed by the idea of starting a new series of posts? You don’t have to shoulder the whole burden yourself. Look at the rotating cast of the latest Whiteboard Friday posts, or even the all-hands-on-deck team approach from 2007, and you’ll see that there’s room for plenty of collaborators, as long as the series has a strong guiding identity.

Whether you’re collaborating with other teams within your company or inviting guest collaborators, you can liven up your digital marketing materials by opening them up to other voices. Of course, you may want to ramp up this process gradually so you can establish the mission and tone of your content before expanding its scope to incorporate others’ information.

Be Consistent, Be Varied

Producing a truly compelling content series can mean having it both ways — while it’s worth being very consistent (about creating and posting new entries), there’s also room to be very varied and willing to branch out (about the topics you cover).

Having a steady pulse of new content is valuable in that it sets expectations for your audience. They’ll start to learn that if they come back regularly, there will always be something new to check out. That’s a good hook. If that content is on a variety of topics, that’s all the better. Such an approach will help you answer many pertinent questions, bringing in curious searchers and potential customers, while preventing your creators from feeling like they’ve run out of things to say about a too-narrow topic.

Commit To Your Own Great Content Ideas

So, you’ve decided that you want to create the next great content series. Whiteboard Friday can be a very inspiring example — it’s the No. 1 SEO video series, after all. It can also be intimidating, however. Looking at an 18-year archive of content is enough to give you a headache if you’re just pressing “publish” on video No. 1 in your own series.

It’s best to ignore that imposing standard and remind yourself that the only thing you can really do is move at your own pace. If you’ve been running a weekly video series for two weeks, you should have two videos, not hundreds. Take care of one week at a time, put your all into it, and the next time you look up, you’ll be deep into your run.

Getting started means taking a serious look at examples such as Moz as well as your own company’s needs. Your content should be shaped by the former, but it will be defined by the latter. Producing something that fits your own industry perfectly is an idea that never gets old, and if you handle it well, our next article about an inspiring content series could be profiling you.