10x Content: Why Most Brands Are Producing at the Wrong Level

10x content is content that is meaningfully better than anything else ranking for a given topic, not marginally better, not differently formatted, but an order of magnitude more useful, more credible, or more complete. The concept was popularised by Rand Fishkin as a counterpoint to the idea that good enough content could win in competitive search. The argument is simple: if ten pieces of content already exist on a topic, yours needs to be worth ten of them combined, or it has no strategic reason to exist.

That framing is useful, but most marketers apply it too narrowly. They treat 10x as a content production brief rather than a strategic lens. The result is longer articles with more subheadings, not genuinely better thinking.

What Does 10x Content Actually Mean?

The phrase gets thrown around a lot. I have sat in agency briefings where a client asked for “10x content” and the team interpreted it as “write more than the competitor.” That is not what it means, and that misunderstanding is costing brands real money.

10x content is content that makes everything else on the same topic feel inadequate. Not because it is longer. Not because it has a cleaner layout. Because it answers the question more completely, with more authority, with better evidence, or with a perspective that no one else has articulated clearly. It earns its position in search results the same way a good product earns its market share: by being genuinely preferable to the alternatives.

The practical test I use is this: if a reader has already read three other articles on this topic and lands on yours, do they feel like they finally got the real answer? If the honest answer is no, the content is not 10x. It is just more content.

This matters commercially. Content that does not earn a position does not compound. It sits on the site, consumes CMS space, and contributes nothing to organic growth. I have audited content libraries at agencies and client-side marketing teams where 60 to 70 percent of published articles were generating fewer than ten organic sessions a month. That is not a content volume problem. That is a content quality problem dressed up as a publishing strategy.

Where the 10x Standard Comes From and Why It Still Holds

Rand Fishkin introduced the concept around 2015 as a response to the “good enough” mentality that had taken hold in content marketing. The argument was that Google’s ability to assess quality was improving, and that content which simply existed on a topic was not sufficient to earn rankings in competitive verticals. You had to be better, not just present.

A decade later, that argument has only strengthened. The volume of content published daily is enormous, and search engines have become considerably more sophisticated at distinguishing depth from length, authority from repetition. SEMrush’s data on content performance consistently shows that top-ranking pages in competitive categories share common traits: they are comprehensive, they earn external links from credible sources, and they hold their positions over time rather than spiking and fading.

The standard for what counts as 10x shifts by category maturity. In a crowded topic like email marketing or SEO basics, 10x means depth, original data, or a perspective that reframes the conventional wisdom. In an emerging category, 10x can mean simply being the first to explain something clearly and completely. The bar is relative to what exists, not absolute.

If you are thinking about how content strategy fits into a broader go-to-market approach, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial frameworks that make content investment decisions easier to justify and easier to execute.

Why Most Content Fails the 10x Test

I spent several years at an agency where we grew from around 20 people to over 100. In that period, we produced an enormous volume of content across dozens of client accounts. Some of it was excellent. A lot of it was not. Looking back, the failure pattern was consistent: we were optimising for the brief, not for the reader.

The brief would specify a target keyword, a word count, a tone, a set of headers derived from competitor analysis. The writer would produce something that ticked every box. It would pass an SEO audit. It would go live. And then it would perform modestly, peak early, and drift down the rankings within six months as something better came along.

The problem was that we were building content to match search signals rather than to genuinely serve the person searching. Those are different objectives, and they produce different content. One produces articles that look right. The other produces articles that feel right when you read them.

There are a few specific failure modes worth naming.

Recycled structure without original thinking. The majority of content on any given topic follows the same structure because writers use competitor content as a template. The result is articles that cover the same ground in the same order with slightly different phrasing. None of them are 10x because none of them add anything new.

Length mistaken for depth. A 4,000-word article is not automatically more valuable than a 1,500-word article. Depth comes from the quality of the thinking, not the word count. I have read 5,000-word pieces that said nothing a reader could not have inferred themselves, and 800-word pieces that reframed an entire category. Word count is a proxy for effort, not a measure of value.

Production value substituting for substance. Infographics, custom illustrations, interactive tools: these can genuinely enhance content. But I have seen teams spend more time on the visual treatment of a mediocre article than on making the underlying argument worth reading. Format amplifies quality. It does not create it.

Optimising for rankings rather than comprehension. Content built around keyword density and header structure can rank without being genuinely useful. But it tends not to hold those rankings, and it does not earn the secondary benefits of great content: inbound links, social sharing, and the kind of brand authority that makes future content easier to rank.

How to Build Content That Is Actually 10x Better

The process starts before you write a single word. It starts with an honest audit of what already exists.

Read the top five or ten pieces of content on your target topic. Not to extract their structure, but to identify their gaps. What questions do they leave unanswered? What assumptions do they make without justifying them? Where does the reader reach the end of the article and still not know what to do? Those gaps are your brief.

Then ask a harder question: what do you know about this topic that the existing content does not reflect? This is where original perspective becomes the differentiator. If you have run campaigns at scale, managed large budgets, seen patterns across multiple industries, that experience is a source of insight that no amount of competitor research can replicate. The content that consistently performs at the highest level is content where the author clearly knows more about the topic than anyone else writing about it.

When I judged the Effie Awards, one thing became clear very quickly: the work that won was not the work that followed the brief most precisely. It was the work where someone had thought harder about the actual problem and found an answer that the brief had not anticipated. The same principle applies to content. The brief tells you what to cover. Your expertise tells you what to say that no one else is saying.

Practically, 10x content tends to share several characteristics.

It answers the question completely. Not partially, not with caveats that require the reader to go elsewhere, but fully. If someone reads your article on a topic and still needs to read three other articles to feel confident, you have not produced 10x content.

It is written from a position of genuine expertise. This does not mean it has to be written by the most senior person in the organisation. It means the person writing it has either done the research to know the topic thoroughly, or has access to someone who has, and has translated that knowledge accurately.

It earns trust through specificity. Vague claims and general advice are the hallmarks of content produced to fill space. 10x content is specific: specific about what works, what does not, what the exceptions are, and why. Specificity is the fastest way to signal credibility.

It has a point of view. The safest content is often the least useful. When a piece of content refuses to take a position, it offers the reader nothing they could not have worked out themselves. 10x content makes a claim, defends it, and is willing to be wrong. That intellectual honesty is what makes it worth reading and worth sharing.

The Commercial Case for Doing Less, Better

There is a persistent tension in content marketing between volume and quality. Publishing teams face pressure to produce consistently, and the path of least resistance is to lower the bar per piece in order to hit a publishing cadence. I understand that pressure. I have been on both sides of it.

But the commercial case for quality over volume is not close. One piece of genuinely outstanding content can drive organic traffic for years. It earns links that improve domain authority. It gets cited, referenced, and shared in ways that extend its reach far beyond its initial distribution. It positions the brand as a credible source in its category, which makes every subsequent piece of content easier to rank and easier to trust.

I came to this from the performance marketing side of the industry, where I spent years focused on lower-funnel efficiency. It took me longer than I would like to admit to recognise that a lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who was already searching for your brand, already comparing your product, already in the final stages of a decision, was going to convert with or without the retargeting ad. The harder and more valuable work is reaching people before that point, building the kind of familiarity and credibility that shapes consideration long before someone types a query into a search engine. Great content does that. Average content does not.

The analogy I keep coming back to is from retail. Someone who tries on a piece of clothing is far more likely to buy it than someone who just walks past it on a rail. The physical engagement changes the relationship. Content works the same way: content that genuinely engages a reader, that makes them feel like they have learned something or had a question properly answered, creates a relationship with the brand that passive exposure cannot replicate. That relationship has commercial value, even if it is difficult to attribute precisely.

Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models makes a related point: sustainable growth comes from building genuine preference, not just capturing existing demand. 10x content is one of the most efficient mechanisms available for building that preference at scale.

10x Content in a Go-To-Market Context

Content strategy does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a go-to-market framework, and the decisions you make about what content to produce, at what depth, for which audiences, should be driven by that framework rather than by keyword opportunity alone.

The most effective content programmes I have seen are the ones where the content team understands the commercial priorities clearly enough to make independent decisions about where to invest. They know which segments the business is trying to grow, which objections are slowing deals, which topics the sales team keeps having to explain from scratch. That knowledge shapes a content brief in ways that keyword research alone cannot.

10x content in a go-to-market context means producing content that does real commercial work: content that shortens the sales cycle by answering questions before they are asked, content that builds credibility in segments where the brand is not yet known, content that positions the company’s perspective on a category in a way that shapes how buyers think about the problem before they start evaluating solutions.

Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder than it used to identifies buyer education as one of the key pressure points. Buyers are doing more research independently before engaging with sales, which means the content they encounter during that research phase has more influence over the outcome than it did five years ago. That is an argument for investing in content quality, not just content volume.

If you want to think about this more systematically, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks that connect content investment to commercial outcomes, including how to prioritise where to focus and how to measure what matters.

Common Objections to the 10x Approach

The most common pushback I hear is about resources. Producing genuinely outstanding content takes longer and costs more than producing average content. That is true. But the comparison is not between one 10x piece and one average piece. The comparison is between one 10x piece and the ten average pieces you would need to produce to generate equivalent long-term traffic. When you frame it that way, the economics look different.

The second objection is about speed. Businesses need content now, not in three weeks when the definitive piece on a topic is finally ready. This is a legitimate tension, but it is often used to justify a permanently low bar rather than to address a genuine short-term need. The answer is not to abandon quality standards. It is to be more selective about which topics warrant the 10x investment and to produce a smaller number of high-quality pieces rather than a large volume of mediocre ones.

The third objection is about measurement. How do you know if a piece of content is 10x before you publish it? You do not, with certainty. But you can make an informed judgement based on whether it genuinely answers the question better than what exists, whether it contains original insight or perspective, and whether someone who has already read the competitors’ content would find it worth their time. That is not a perfect test, but it is a better one than word count or keyword density.

Early in my career I was handed a whiteboard pen mid-brainstorm for a Guinness brief when the founder had to leave the room. The internal reaction was close to panic. But the discipline of having to produce something genuinely good, in real time, with no safety net, taught me something about the difference between thinking hard about a problem and performing the act of thinking hard about it. Most content production looks like the latter. 10x content requires the former.

How to Audit Your Existing Content Against the 10x Standard

If you have an established content library, the most useful exercise is not to produce more content. It is to audit what you have against a clear standard and decide what to improve, what to consolidate, and what to remove.

The audit process I recommend has three steps.

Step one: performance segmentation. Pull traffic data for every piece of content and segment it into three groups: content that is performing well and holding its position, content that is performing modestly and declining, and content that is generating almost no organic traffic. The third group is your immediate priority. Most of it should either be significantly improved or removed. Thin, low-quality content can suppress the overall authority of a domain, and removing it often improves performance across the rest of the site.

Step two: gap analysis. For the content in your middle group, read it against the current top-ranking pages for the same topic. Is it genuinely better, or just different? If it is not better, what would it take to make it better? Sometimes the answer is a substantial rewrite. Sometimes it is adding a section that addresses a question the existing content ignores. Sometimes the honest answer is that the topic is too competitive for your current domain authority and the resource is better deployed elsewhere.

Step three: prioritisation by commercial value. Not all topics are equally valuable to the business. A piece of content that ranks well for a topic with no commercial intent is less valuable than a piece that ranks modestly for a topic that directly supports purchase decisions. Prioritise improvement efforts based on the commercial value of the topic, not just the traffic opportunity.

BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy in B2B markets makes a useful point about resource allocation: the businesses that grow most consistently are those that concentrate investment in areas where they have a genuine advantage rather than spreading effort evenly across all opportunities. The same logic applies to content. Concentrate on the topics where you can genuinely be the best, and produce work that reflects that.

What 10x Content Looks Like in Practice

It is worth being concrete about what distinguishes 10x content from good content, because the difference is not always obvious from the outside.

10x content tends to have a clear thesis. It is not just a collection of information on a topic. It has a point of view that the reader can agree or disagree with. That thesis is what makes the content memorable and what makes it worth sharing.

It tends to address objections and edge cases that other content ignores. The standard treatment of most topics covers the straightforward case. 10x content engages with the complications: the situations where the standard advice does not apply, the reasons why something that works in theory does not always work in practice, the conditions under which a different approach is warranted.

It tends to be written by someone who has actually done the thing they are writing about, or who has done the research to understand it at the level of someone who has. The difference between first-hand and second-hand knowledge is usually detectable in the writing, even when the facts are the same.

And it tends to be honest about uncertainty. The most credible content acknowledges what is not known, what varies by context, and where the author’s perspective might be limited. That intellectual honesty builds more trust than false confidence, and trust is what converts a reader into someone who comes back.

The brands that have built durable content programmes, the ones that consistently appear in search results across competitive categories and that readers actively seek out rather than just stumble across, are almost always the ones that took the 10x standard seriously from the beginning. They published less, invested more per piece, and compounded the returns over time. That is not a complicated strategy. It is just a disciplined one.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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