Tag: dallas social media

I’ve worked in SEO for just over 12 years.

In that time, I’ve built up a trusty vault of tried-and-tested SEO resources that I use, which I’ll share with you today. Hopefully, you’ll find them useful (…and maybe even bookmark this page).

WordPress is one of the most popular CMSs on the internet, So it makes sense if you’re working in SEO to know your way around some of the most popular SEO plugins.

These are the ones I use most regularly.

18. Yoast SEO – Yoast has been considered the number one SEO plugin for many years now. Its strength lies in its ability to simplify a lot of SEO optimization. 

19. RankMath – RankMath is another popular WordPress SEO plugin. Like Yoast, it simplifies SEO optimization.

20. Ahrefs WP Plugin – Our tool allows you to run a full content audit on your website and suggests different improvement actions. It integrates with GA and GSC to help provide you with better-targeted keywords and content recommendations.

21. TablePress – If you work with data, you’ll need to use a table in WordPress. One of the most SEO-friendly ways to do this is using a plugin like TablePress.

22. Google Search Central – Google Search Central is the newer version of Google Webmasters YouTube channel. If you work with clients, you need to stay on top of Google’s latest updates and responses, and this is one of the best places to do that.

23. Ahrefs – Video mastermind Sam Oh has been heading up the Ahrefs’ YouTube channel for as long as I can remember. I have watched his videos since day one, and they have always provided the highest-quality information with easy-to-digest SEO tips to help raise your SEO game.

24. Authority Hacker – Gael Breton and Mark Webster share actionable ways to get more traffic that converts.

Newsletters

As SEO constantly changes, it’s a good idea to sign up for some SEO newsletters. Here are the ones I recommend.

25. SEOFOMO – Aleyda Solis has been running SEOFOMO for a number of years now, and the newsletter has become one of my favorites to read recently. Aleyda has always had her finger on the pulse of the SEO industry since I started my career, so it’s no surprise that the newsletter is really insightful.

26. Ahrefs’ Digest – Every week, Si Quan sends out the Ahrefs’ Newsletter to 284k marketers. It’s packed to the brim with lots of marketing goodness. If you haven’t already, sign up here.

27. Detailed.com – SEO insights from tracking the rankings & revenue of 3,078 digital goliaths.

28. SEOMBA – Founded by Tom Critchlow the SEOMBA provides leadership, management and career advice to those working in the SEO industry.

29. Niche Pursuits – Founded by Spencer Haws, Niche Pursuits is a newsletter I signed up for a few years ago and linked to their YouTube channel. It has always had interesting guests, and Spencer is a great interviewer.

Browser Extensions

I am a bit of a browser extension junkie, so this list may be longer than you were expecting. If you are a beginner, I suggest you start with Ahrefs SEO Toolbar.

I’ve included some of the lesser-known plugins I’ve used over the years as well.

30. Hreflang Tag Checker – If you’re working with an international site, then this is a useful extension to help you check your hreflang tags are correct

31. Ahrefs SEO Toolbar – Our toolbar is now one of the most full-featured toolbars out there. When I joined Ahrefs, I had about 20 extensions that I would use. As the toolbar has improved over the last two years, I’ve deleted a lot of the other Chrome extensions I used to use—as the Ahrefs’ toolbar does it all.

32. Wappylyser – Useful for understanding the technology behind websites. Doing so is useful for technical SEO as it lets you understand what SEO issues you could encounter.

33. Linkclump is a great tool for copying links quickly. I use it to scrape the search results. (Don’t tell Google!)

34. SEO Render Insight Tool – This tool highlights server-side rendered (SSR) vs client-side rendered (CSR) content on websites, I find it useful for spot checks.

35. FatRank – A quick way to check the ranking for any keyword.

36. Detailed SEO – Created by Glen Allsopp, this extension has seven tabs on on-page factors you can use to analyze any website.

37. Robots Exclusion Checker – Checks the website’s robots.txt file to ensure specific pages are excluded from search engine indexing.

38. Word Counter Plus – A browser extension that counts words, characters, and sentences in text. If you write content, then this can be a useful way to check your word count quickly.

39. SEO Meta in 1 CLICK – With over 600k users, this is a popular extension for diagnosing on-page issues.

40. Scraper – A simple but fast way to get data out of websites and into your spreadsheets. I’ve found this useful for assisting with data studies.

41. Keywords Everywhere – A browser extension that provides keyword metrics such as search volume and CPC directly in search results, helping users identify valuable keywords for SEO strategies.

42. SEO Minion – Created by Keywords Everywhere, this extension can analyze on-page SEO, check broken links, compare differences between HTML and DOM (rendered HTML), analyze structured data, and more.

43. SEO Schema Visualizer – Allows you to visualize JSON-LD schema markup in a click.

Podcasts have seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years. They’re a great way to consume information while traveling or if you prefer listening to reading.

Here are the podcasts that I recommend you give a listen:

44. Ahrefs Podcast – Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo interviews high-profile guests in the marketing world. My favorite podcast episode so far was the Glen Allsopp episode. A must listen.

45. Search Off the Record – Hosted by the Google search relations team, they discuss trending topics in search, what they’re working on, and the decision-making behind launches.

46. Authority Hacker Podcast – Gael Breton and Mark Webster share actionable ways to get more traffic that converts.

47. Crawling Mondays – Aleyda Solis presents Crawling Mondays, which also has a YouTube channel. She has some high-profile guests and has got Google’s Danny Sullivan on the show.

48. Search with Candour – Presented by Jack Chambers-Ward and Mark Williams-Cook, this show always makes for an interesting listen. It has a wide variety of guests from the SEO world and thought-provoking discussions

49. SERPs Up – Weekly SEO insights with Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, along with a huge variety of high-profile guests.

50. The SEO Rant – Hosted by Mordy Oberstein. Each week, the SEO Rant provides unfiltered SEO insights from some of the world’s top industry experts.

Beginner’s Guides

If you want to learn SEO from scratch in my opinion there are only two choices. I used to recommend that new joiners to my team read the Moz beginners guide, but once Ahrefs added their guide, I found that people on my team preferred Ahrefs’ content more.

51. SEO: The Complete Guide For Beginners Guide – The Ahrefs’ Beginner’s Guide to SEO is the first place to start your SEO journey if you are new to SEO.

52. Moz Beginners Guide – Many older SEOs might have started learning SEO by reading this guide. It’s something that I used in the past to help train new SEOs.

It may sound old-fashioned in our online world, but sometimes, the best way to get an in-depth view of a particular topic is to pick up a book and read it.

Here are the books I recommend.

53. The Art of SEO – This is a very detailed guide to SEO. When I learned SEO, there weren’t many SEO books around, but this was one that I enjoyed reading.

54. Product-Led SEO – This must-read book by Eli Schwartz is for anyone interested in taking their SEO strategy to the next level.

55. Feck Perfuction – A book that helps you tackle communicating more complex SEO projects and shift your mindset to create marketing that resonates more with your audience.

56. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web – This book goes deep into the science behind structuring content on a site. It will most likely appear to enterprise SEOs or anyone working on a large website.

57. Data-Driven SEO With Python – This book is useful for SEOs who want to expand their knowledge further and incorporate tools like Python into their SEO and data research projects.

58. The Link Building Book – I think every SEO should read this book as it offers practical ways to build links that anyone can do.

59. Entity SEO – Written by Dixon Jones, it’s an interesting deep dive into Entity SEO. This will be of more interest to more experienced SEO professionals.

60. Ahrefs SEO Book For Beginners – Our beginner’s book to SEO is the perfect way to start learning about SEO in my opinion. It’s also useful if you are an SEO team lead and you want to quickly train new starters on the basics of SEO and how to use Ahrefs effectively.

In my SEO salary post, I was surprised that only 9% of SEOs learned SEO from a course. There are a lot of high quality courses out there at the moment, and we have a stack of them at Ahrefs.

61. Ahrefs Academy – We have no less than seven video tutorial courses that you can watch through the Ahrefs Academy. They cover everything from How to Use Ahrefs, to Blogging for Business and everything in between. Don’t sleep on this amazing SEO resource.

62. Ahrefs Certification – If you want to earn a certification for your Ahrefs skills then you can now get your very own certificate to say you’ve passed. I’ve taken the exam and it isn’t a walk in the park, so make sure you brush up your skills before taking the exam.

63. HubSpot SEO Certification – A free certification course that covers the basics of SEO, like keyword research, building backlinks, and understanding the SERPs.

64. Google Skillshop – The best place to get product training on Google’s products and get certified on them.

Over the past 10 or so years, outside of social media, three websites have been the main sources of information for SEO news and insights.

65. SERoundtable – Founded by Barry Schwartz in 2003, Search Engine Roundtable reports regularly on SEO, Google’s algorithm updates, SEO techniques, and more. It is the OG of SEO reporting.

66. Search Engine Journal – Search Engine Journal was founded by Loren Baker in 2003, it covers topics related to SEO, content marketing, and social media.

67. Search Engine Land – Founded by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman in 2006, SEL has been one of the first places I’ve checked to see what’s happening in SEO.

In between SEO news cycles, SEOs like to catch up on a couple of blogs to digest different opinions and do research on a particular topic. I am no different. I monitor many blogs.

Here are my favorites:

68. ImportSEM – Useful place to find Python SEO scripts and tutorials on how to incorporate Python into your digital marketing efforts.

69. JC Chouinard – One of the best places to start learning about Python for SEO. I’ve been reading this website for many years and have always come away with some useful takeaways.

70. Brodie Clark – If I want to know the latest developments in ecommerce SEO, I often visit Brodie’s blog or see his latest posts on social media.

71. Kevin Indig’s Growth Memo – Kevin Indig’s blog is one of the most popular blogs out there. I find it useful for developing strategies around SEO.

72. Ahrefs Blog – You’re reading this on Ahrefs blog, so you probably know a bit about us. We regularly blog on different marketing topics and produce our own unique data studies. In my opinion, Ahrefs blog is a must-read blog. And for me, it has been for many years now.

73. Moz Blog – The Moz blog has been established for a long time and was one of the first well-known SEO blogs. It still has a stack of interesting guests on there.

74. The SEO Sprint – Adam Gent’s SEO Sprint is a must read if you are interested in how to get your technical SEO recommendations approved by developers, product teams and other senior staff.

75. SEO By The Sea – Bill Slawski is no longer with us, but his work lives on and I, like many other SEOs, still read his blog from time to time as a useful SEO resource and treasure trove of SEO information.

At first glance, branded content may seem worlds apart from the actual brand. But that’s because it’s not really about them. It’s about the audience and their interests.

Take the famous Michelin guide

• At first you think: “What do restaurants have to do with Michelin tyres?”
• Then you think: “People drive all over America to visit unique restaurants? Oh, I get it.”
• And, finally, you think: “That new tapas restaurant 10 miles from me has just got a Michelin star? That’s pretty cool.”

It’s not about the product

It’s not the same as content marketing or product placement

Wikipedia defines branded content in relation to content marketing and product placement:

• Content marketing is created to naturally spark brand interest.
• Advertising is a direct attempt to get audiences to buy.
• Product placement is a form of subtle, subliminal marketing.
• Branded content is entertaining, educational, or emotional content. It’s not made to persuade, but to share the audience’s values.

When the persuasion is dialed down, and the entertainment is dialed up, audiences can even forget they’re consuming a form of marketing.

Branded content tends to increase brand awareness, since its entertainment value appeals to a wide audience.

Why is it worth creating branded content?

1. Stand out against other pick-me brands

Talking to The Washington Post, CEO of Storified and former founder of Marriott’s Content Studio, David Beebe said:

Content marketing is like a first date. If all you do is talk about yourself, there won’t be a second date.

He may have been talking about content marketing, but Beebe perfectly articulated why branded content works so well—it sidesteps the “me-me-me!” marketing of most brands, and instead makes everything about the audience.

When you create branded content, you stand out in a playing field of pick-me brands.

2. Build positive associations

Viewers are 62% more likely to react positively to branded content vs. 30-second TV ads.

When you make something fun, beautiful, educational, or entertaining, your audience thinks better of you for it.

3. Show your human side

It may be a well-worn phrase but it rings true: people don’t buy from brands, they buy from people.

Content that features even a single human is 81% more effective than content without any people, according to a study from Kantar, Meta, and CreativeX.

Branded content lets you show the human side of your brand.

4. Get in front of entirely new audiences

Branded content also improves brand recall by 81%—meaning it will linger longer in the minds of your new audiences.

And algorithms love your branded stories. Think about it. If your content causes an emotional response, it’ll reflect in user interactions—they’ll spend more time on the page, or click through to other relevant parts of the site.

Google processes that user interaction data to rank content. More positive interaction signals equals more traffic and new audience impressions.

5. Justify price increases

Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn carried out an anthropological study, Significant Objects, to prove the power of storytelling.

They took a bunch of thrift shop items selling for $1.25 on average, and sourced short, purpose-written stories for each object from 200+ esteemed writers—the likes of Meg Cabot, William Gibson, and Ben Greenman.

After the descriptions were added, the items sold for 6,400x their original value.

Patagonia uses storytelling in a similar way, to justify its pricing.

As part of their “Worn wear” program, they’ve created a range of branded content—from a full length film to a series of short documentaries.

The videos showcase the lifestyle of Patagonia’s customers as they take part in extreme sports and other rigorous activities—all while donning their well-loved Patagonia gear.

The campaign is about encouraging customers to repair, reuse, and recycle Patagonia clothing, while simultaneously emphasizing its durability.

Through clever storytelling, Patagonia doubles down on their commitment to conscious manufacturing and the environment—and in doing so justifies their premium price point.

Branded content needs to be thoughtful and authentic

Inauthenticity is one of the biggest risks when creating branded content. Audiences can see right through brands that don’t wear their values.

Branded content is also intentionally designed to evoke strong emotion. Any negative response you get will, by definition, be very emotional.

Another risk is creating ambiguity, and not properly conveying your brand or product message.

Apple, for instance, got it all wrong earlier this year when they released an ad showing creative objects and art being crushed by an industrial press, only to reveal their latest iPad.

People were outraged. Many read the ad as Apple dismissing traditional media—not celebrating the creative possibilities of the new iPad, as Apple had intended.

How do you measure the success of branded content?

Content marketing goals are ultimately tied to sales and the marketing funnel—e.g.

• Traffic (e.g. # of monthly organic sessions)
• Lead generation (e.g. # of MQLs)

Branded content goals, on the other hand, tend to be measures of audience perception—e.g.

• Brand awareness: How much your audience recognizes your brand name, logo, or products.
• Brand recall: You audiences’ ability to spontaneously remember your brand.
• Brand sentiment: How your brand makes your audience feel.
• Brand loyalty: How likely consumers are to repeatedly purchase your brand over alternatives.

For that reason, branded content is a little trickier to track—but it can still be done.

Track mentions

When branded content is released into the wild, it can lead to a high volume of mentions.

To analyze this coverage, head to Ahrefs Content Explorer:

1. Search your brand + the name of your branded content
2. Hit the “News” filter to zero-in on mainstream media mentions
3. Check the pages mentioning your branded content

Branded content also has the ability to bump up your topical authority. Here’s an example of what I mean.

Patagonia’s branded content is largely about proving their commitment to sustainability.

If they wanted to know how closely tied they are to this topic, they could look for co-mentions of the word “sustainability” in their brand mentions.

They’d just need to head to Ahrefs Content Explorer:

1. Do a search for their brand name
2. Check their total brand mentions

Then

1. Do a boolean search for their brand name AND sustainability
2. Check the number of topic mentions

In doing so, they’d be able to work out topic mentions as a percentage of their overall brand mentions.

On this occasion, 3.2% of Patagonia’s brand mentions also mention the keyword sustainability.

Monitoring these figures can give you a solid sense of your overall topical authority, and help you stay on top of any growth.

Making a conscious effort to align yourself with audience topics will help you claim more visibility in search engines—and even AI answers.

Monitor traffic uplift

You can track the organic traffic of your owned branded content in Site Explorer. Just search the campaign page or subdomain for a performance overview.

Or track specific topics and keywords related to your branded content in Ahrefs Rank Tracker.

Check keyword growth

Branded content can drive some serious search volume interest. Use this data to prove the value of your creativity, and justify budgets for future branded content.

1. Search relevant branded content topics in Keywords Explorer
2. Check top-level data at the head of the report
3. Check individual keyword volumes

Keep a note of links

You can check the links your branded content has attracted simply by filtering for mentions of your campaign name in Ahrefs Backlinks Report.

1. Search your domain in Ahrefs Site Explorer and head to the Backlinks report
2. Enter your branded content campaign name in the filter “Anchor with surrounding text”
3. See how many links you’ve picked up
4. Check how your branded content is being spoken about in the anchor excerpt

7 branded content examples

If branded content does its job, audiences will go out of their way to consume it–just as do with everyday entertainment.

Here are some great examples of branded content from brands in B2C, B2B, and even SaaS.

1. Thoropass: Scam Hunters

What business does an infosec company have creating a “business thriller” podcast? Well, they know a lot about scammers, and their audience enjoys a bit of crime fiction, of course!

Voiced by award-winning actors Erin Moriarty (The Boys, Jessica Jones) and Greg Kinnear (Little Miss Sunshine, You’ve Got Mail), the podcast is a story about a disgraced Chief Information Security Officer (Kinnear) and a journalist (Moriarty) investigating a spate of scams targeting terminally ill patients.

The creator, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios is behind some other great examples of branded content—namely podcast dramas like Murder in HR (in collaboration with wellness service provider Wellhub) and The Hacker Chronicles (alongside Tenable Cloud Security).

The problem with a B2B topic like compliance is that people often don’t know what it is or why they need help with it.

Scam Hunters takes the fairly unsexy, obscure topic of infosec, and uses dramatic storytelling to make it a whole lot more interesting and accessible—all while quietly educating the audience of its importance.

Plus, the narrative sets up the “problem” that Thoropass solves, making for a nice subliminal sales pitch.

2. Loewe: Decades of Confusion

Starring actors Aubrey Plaza (The White Lotus, Parks and Recreation) and Daniel Levy (Schitt’s Creek, Good Grief), Decades of Confusion is a surreal short film from fashion brand Loewe.

We see spelling-bee contestants across the decades trying and failing to spell the brand name Loewe, to hilarious effect. 

Every contestant is played by Plaza, who sports an iconic Loewe outfit in each era—a nod to the evolution of the brand’s designs throughout the ages.

While this could be seen as advertising, I’d argue that it’s also a great example of branded content. At two and a half minutes, it’s the length of a short, and—like all branded content— is largely narrative-driven. The fact that Loewe defer creative control to Levy and Director Ally Pankiw (The Great, Shrill, Feel Good) also signals that this project is about entertaining the audience, rather than just selling to them.

Fans will seek out this content specifically to see Plaza and Levy—two actors loved for their sardonic personas and quirky style. By featuring them, Loewe clearly communicate the brand’s cultural identity and values, align themselves with their audience, and build that emotional connection.

3. Hallmark + NFL

Hallmark and NFL have joined teams to develop some NFL-branded hallmark holiday content.

You know, those movies where the high powered business woman heads home for the holidays, and, in a series of inexplicable events (hint: Christmas magic), meets her soul mate and decides to pack it all in to live happily-ever-after in her quaint little hometown village, where Christmas is a 365 day a year event, and the neighbors are friendly and everyone gets along and it all sort of feels like a Black Mirror episode?

Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!

Since the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce romance blossomed, female audiences have taken more of an interest in football.

In fact, 64% of Gen Z and millennial women now hold a favorable view of the NFL

Hallmark is making the most of this uptick in audience sentiment by partnering with NFL to create original movies like Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.

This branded content will help Hallmark expand its audience to NFL fans—old and new— keeping them culturally relevant.

But the branded content collab doesn’t just make sense for Hallmark. The NFL will also benefit by:

• Diversifying their fan base; connecting with Hallmark’s family-oriented audience.
• Building more emotional engagement between their audience and their brand.
• Aligning their brand image with values of connection and family.

4. Paddle: Paddle Studios

Paddle is a global payment infrastructure provider for SaaS companies, and they’re using branded content in a big way.

The Paddle marketing team have set up their own Netflix-style studio, creating everything from documentaries like We Sign Tomorrow—the insider story of a tech acquisition— to web series like Born Global, which follows the personal and professional stories of entrepreneurs from around the world.

This is very much long-game marketing. It won’t deliver immediate leads, demos, or sales, but it is definitely absorbing and will engage their core audience.

B2B/SaaS brands are hard to understand and even harder to connect with. You could argue that there’s an even greater need for them to be creating this kind of branded content.

Paddle could just as easily be a faceless SaaS brand, but instead they decided to focus on being human and relatable.

5. Tide: #TideTackles

Tide’s “#TideTackles” campaign features NFL legends visiting tailgates across the U.S.

It celebrates the messiness of game-day foods and fan traditions through unscripted, authentic storytelling.

NFL fans can relate to and connect with the Tide brand on a local level, because the content spotlights regional food.

Distribution is also a key part of Tide’s branded campaigns. It shares content across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to engage audiences via. the platforms they’re most active on.

6. Sky and Dogs Trust: Bonfire Night pop-up TV channel

Dogs Trust collaborated with Sky, Now, and Magic Classical to create a dedicated pop-up TV channel, to calm dogs down during bonfire night.

The branded content campaign included a schedule of feel-good movies—like Bridget Jones and Shrek—and a playlist of classical music to soothe anxious dogs and their owners.

Both brands focused on the emotional challenge of keeping dogs calm during fireworks, to align themselves with an audience of dog owners who identify as compassionate and committed to animal welfare.

7. Ahrefs: White Haired SEO book and SEO The Board Game™️

You may have heard about our children’s book. SQ just mentioned it in his awesome article: Why Great Marketing Is Risky As Hell.

Speaking from experience—having given away literally hundreds of copies at events—this piece of branded content has been a huge hit.

While reading, our target audience gets to:

1. Bond with their child over a cute kids story
2. Teach their child about their career
3. Enjoy one or two SEO in-jokes along the way

It has very little to do with the content marketing we put out day-to-day, but this book really seems to have struck an emotional chord with our audience.

It’s also been a great ice breaker, drawing new audiences in at events and helping with brand recall.

For that reason, we’re not done with branded content.

We’ve just sponsored SEO The Board Game™️, where players can play as SEO experts, purchase and optimize websites, build their digital empires, and compete for the title of SEO kingpin.

Having worked in SEO and content for nearly 10 years, I can confidently state: when you draw a venn diagram of SEOs and board game enthusiasts, there’s a big ol’ overlap.

We want our audience to enjoy what we enjoy, and hope that these fun, quirky experiences help us to stand out as being relatable, against other cookie-cutter SaaS brands.

Final thoughts

If you want to start consciously creating branded content, focus on getting to know your audience better.

Mine customer conversations, use audience research tools, and track trending topics to inspire your branded content ideas.

Something I’ve only briefly mentioned—but will make branded content indispensable—is AI.

Creating content that elicits a gut feeling or an emotional response in your audience will be one of only a few ways to cut through in a world where “information is dirt cheap” and anyone with a ChatGPT account can become a content creator.

The brands sitting pretty in search and LLMs will be the ones that have closely aligned themselves with their audience’s interests. You’ll see it in their mentions, links, traffic, and search volumes.

The faceless, emotionless brands? Yeah. They’re not going to do so well in this next bit.

We analyzed ~2.3 million keywords with ~4.99 million top ads to see how frequently businesses advertise on keywords where they already have an organic ranking in the top 10 positions.

Here are some of the key statistics:

37.9% of advertised websites already rank in the top 10 organically for the same keyword. This indicates that a significant portion of businesses are paying for ads when they already have visibility for that term.

When looking at specific pages rather than entire websites, 15.7% of advertised URLs have an organic ranking in the top 10. This shows that, even at the page level, ads are often run on already high-ranking content.

Shockingly, 40.66% of pages that are advertised rank #1 organically. Essentially, these businesses are paying for the top ad placement on Google when they already rank in the number one organic position.

Another surprising insight from our research is that in 51.09% of cases, businesses advertise a page that ranks in the top 10, even when there are no competing ads present.

This suggests that many businesses might be running ads needlessly, generating costs without competing against other advertisers.

We found answers to these questions and a few others among the comments received on LinkedIn (here and here). Here’s our attempt to summarize the discussion:

• Use PPC selectively: PPC campaigns should only complement organic rankings for highly competitive keywords or those pushed below the fold by ads. Avoid redundant spending where organic visibility is already strong.
• Measure impact on revenue, not vanity metrics: move beyond clicks and CTR. The true measure of success is incremental revenue.
• Rethink PPC for branded keywords: PPC for branded terms often adds little value if you already rank well organically. Shift that budget to something else unless facing direct competition.
• Eliminate siloed strategies: PPC and SEO should work together, not against each other. For example, you can use PPC to test different types of content on the keyword you already rank (thanks for the idea, Olli!), or use it to rank for volatile keywords (like HubSpot does).

In one of the comments Nikolas Garfinkel shared research done in a similar field. Blake, Nosko, and Tadelis conducted a series of large-scale experiments to evaluate the impact of paid search advertising for both branded and non-branded keywords at eBay in 2014.

Their conclusion was that for established brands, running ads on brand terms was largely redundant. The results for non-branded keywords were similar: most clicks attributed to ads would have occurred organically anyway, meaning the return on investment (ROI) from these ads was negative. This aligns with our findings that businesses often compete against themselves by paying for clicks they could have received for free through strong organic rankings.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed with their comments!

If you want to run similar research on your site, you can use our Site Explorer. Enter your domain, go to the Organic keywords report, and use the SERP features filter (set it to Where target ranks and Top ads).

Final thoughts

Got questions or comments? Share them in this thread or let Tim (the author of the study) or me know.

If you’re a founder who knows that SEO matters, but doesn’t know where to start, check out this one-page primer.

Thanks to the following founders for sharing feedback on this guide:

1. Editorial content: long-term, educational blogging

Editorial content refers to the process of publishing high-quality, educational resources targeted at relevant keywords. By systematizing content creation and publishing SEO content every week, many companies generate hundreds of thousands of monthly visits from blogging alone.

Editorial content is great for building brand awareness and educating visitors, but—even in the era of ChatGPT—it’s an expensive strategy.

Blogging is also very competitive today. Most high-volume keywords are already contested by big, well-known brands (with even bigger budgets). There are plenty of opportunities to become one of these brands, but it’s harder than ever before.

Check out these examples of editorial content:

2. Programmatic content: semi-automated landing page creation

Programmatic content describes the creation of keyword-targeted pages in an automatic (or near automatic) way.

It provides a way for companies to create thousands of website pages targeted at thousands of keywords—without having to design, write, and publish pages manually. Programmatic pages are usually created from data like product prices, weather, or location information. Companies like Zapier, Zillow, and G2 use programmatic SEO to generate millions of pageviews each year.

This strategy often appeals to technical founders, but it’s not without risk. Programmatic content that is deemed thin or spammy will struggle to rank, or may even be dropped from search. For this reason, it’s a great counterpart to a “safer” SEO strategy, like editorial content or free tools. Put another way: only consider programmatic SEO if you can afford to lose all of the traffic it creates.

Check out these examples of programmatic content:

Further reading

3. UGC: curating content created by your users

User-generated content is the process of curating and search-optimizing content created by your users: like product templates, portfolios, or even articles.

UGC allows you to outsource the effort of content creation, allowing you to generate potentially millions of pages of content with relatively little cost. But UGC also runs the risk of abuse (like your content being highjacked by spammers—see this example from Contently) and high moderation costs.

Check out these examples:

4. Free tools: free versions of your product functionality

Free tools involve offering a simplified version of your product, or tools tailored to solving specific problems.

There are many high-traffic keywords that can only be targeted using free tools. Here’s the search results page for “free backlink checker”. The first 19 results are all free tools, without an article in sight:

Free tools can provide a good opportunity to naturally introduce your paid product to free users. The added complexity of creating these tools also means that this strategy is harder for your competitors to immediately copy.

As an obvious downside, these tools take development resources to build and can generate sizeable operating costs.

See these examples of free tool strategies:

Is SEO dying?

The best practices of SEO remain the same, but it’s worth exploring topics like LLM optimization and learning about AI Overviews.

How should I make content?

Should we hire an SEO agency?

A great SEO agency can have a huge positive impact on your growth. The hard part is finding the great ones. I’ve had positive experiences with the following agencies: Organic Growth Marketing, Growth Plays, Graphite, Siege Media,and Animalz (I used to work at Animalz).

How do I know it’s working?

How often should I publish?

Does AI content work?

For more context, read our article about AI content strategies: AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy

Does black hat SEO work?

Black hat SEO is the process of taking advantage of temporary loopholes in Google’s ranking systems.

The key word is temporary. Black hat SEO has a short shelf-life, and can often end in websites being completely demoted or deindexed from Google’s search results. If you’re building a company for the long-term, it’s probably not worth the risk.

Final thoughts

Affiliate publications have seen a sharp drop in SERP visibility over the last few days.

The news came after Glenn Gabe shared a “stop-the-presses” post, revealing that Google had penalized various affiliate directories through a spate of manual actions.

Parasite SEO usually occurs when users post self-referential links on someone else’s site, to take advantage of its authority. Google’s site reputation abuse guidelines originally focused on this kind of third-party spam.

But Google recently updated its policy to make it clear that site reputation abuse is still possible even when first-party players are involved. This was the first sign that things were about to get tricky for affiliate publications.

As Angela Petulla points out, this blow comes just in time for Black Friday, when these publishers would expect to make the majority of the year’s revenue.

In the last few days, the affiliate directories of many well known publications have seen significant drops in traffic.

Here’s that same view minus Forbes Advisor, so you can see the traffic dips of other publications more clearly.

But not every affiliate authority has been hit. Some still have steady visibility, and others—like New York Times, have actually benefitted.

SEOs have been doing Google site: searches, looking high and low for evidence of big brand affiliates—but they’re not finding a lot.

In fact, Chris Long (VP of Marketing at GoFish Digital) discovered that some aren’t even ranking for their own brand names. Woof.

As publications exit stage left, they leave huge amounts of traffic and revenue on the table.

Despina had the great idea of digging into the data, to find out which sites had claimed it. So, that’s exactly what we did.

1. https://www.wsj.com/buyside/
2. https://reviewed.usatoday.com/
3. www.independent.co.uk/advisor
4. www.thesun.co.uk/shopping/
5. www.forbes.com/advisor/
6. www.newsweek.com/vault/
7. www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/

In all, we analyzed the rankings of 6,179 keywords that had either declined or been completely lost between November 18th and November 25th.

For those same keywords, we ran a traffic analysis in Ahrefs Traffic Share By Domain report within Keywords Explorer.

There’s a real mixed bag of sites winning across different industries; from UGC, to personal finance, ecommerce, and news media.

But Reddit is the one cleaning up, earning 6% of that lost traffic share, followed closely by Bankrate and Amazon.

While the publisher drops may seem like a win for independent affiliates, niche sites, and small businesses, it remains to be seen whether it will actually benefit them.

The top 20 sites reaping the biggest rewards right now are still the “big names”, boasting an average Domain Rating of 92.

Organic traffic value has dropped by $4M on average

Most keywords impacted were financial in nature

Looking at Ahrefs’ Parent Topics report, it’s clear to see that the majority of lost keywords were financial.

I also asked ChatGPT to categorize the impacted keywords by industry. Here’s the breakdown:

Of those ChatGPT successfully classified, the biggest category was—once again—finance, followed by legal and insurance, and transportation.

Here are some examples of those lost finance terms:

• corporate credit card
• online accounting for small business
• business bank account with no minimum balance
• home loan for renovation

Organic traffic dipped most for ecommerce queries

I was able to find out a bit more about the kinds of keywords impacted by the affiliate publisher drops, using Ahrefs’ keyword presets in Keywords Explorer…

I looked at the organic traffic drops of each publication, for every single keyword in our analysis (i.e. 6K+ keywords).

The table below shows average dips in organic traffic, sorted from highest to lowest, based on the category presets we are able to apply in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.

	# of keywords	% of dataset	Avg organic traffic change 👇
Ecommerce	1026	17.0%	-236
Seasonal	228	4.0%	-154
News	498	8.0%	-141
Comparisons	2555	41.0%	-103
Reviews	140	2.0%	-84
Forums	2396	39.0%	-69
Local	83	1.0%	-64
Benefits	39	0.6%	-56
Features	133	2.0%	-49
Price	528	9.0%	-47
Trends	19	0.3%	-23

Comparison keywords such as “best savings rate” or “ipad vs macbook” appeared most in the dataset, but ecommerce keywords were the ones that saw the most significant drops—followed by seasonal keywords, and news based queries.

We define ecommerce keywords by the appearance of shopping based SERP Features.

Here are some ecommerce queries that dipped the most:

• advent calendar 2024
• airpod max
• apple headphones max
• apple airpod max
• hexclad
• jolie shower head
• gabb phone
• best refrigerator 2024
• canada goose black friday
• unbrush

Affected keywords received nearly 2K searches per month

The keywords affiliate directories have lost visibility for are pretty popular. Average search volumes equated to 1,985 searches per month.

At 25, the average difficulty for each keyword was medium-low, including keywords like “best simple printer”.

This presents an opportunity for independents and other less authoritative sites to gain a foothold.

Affected keywords had an average CPC of $2.21

A third of the keywords lost were branded

Most lost traffic was informational—but over a third was commercial

Traffic dips occurred at both ends of the funnel.

At 91.2%, the majority of declining or lost traffic was informational in intent, but a significant amount (39.7%) was also commercial.

Sidenote.

Bear in mind that the numbers don’t add up to 100% because many keywords display multiple intents.

The highest value commercial keywords lost included:

Commercial keywords lost	CPCs
truck crash attorney	$129.15
best car accident lawyer in houston	$81.54
austin auto accident lawyer	$68.25
mesothelioma lawyer directory	$67.88
car crash attorneys	$60

Affiliate publications were ranking for some of the most competitive law queries out there, but now that they’re out of the picture, these terms are back on the table.

Affiliate publications lost out on Top Stories features

From the outset, the publications struggled to rank for most SERP features, with 89.4% of their keywords failing to generate any. Among the few that did, the most common feature was Top Stories, representing 7.4% of all lost positions.

A quick look at Top Stories generating keywords suggests they centered mostly around mortgage rates and similar, financially-geared queries.

Wrapping up

Let me know your thoughts and findings on LinkedIn!

I’m going to type the lamest thing I’ve ever typed and make 90% of you close the page right now. Are you ready?

I am a thought leader.

I feel gross for typing those words. But here’s something that feels less gross to type: over the past decade, I have been lucky to find a small-but-important group of people who give a damn about my ideas. This has been beneficial for my career, and beneficial for the companies I join.

I’ve seen my ideas referenced on stage, linked to in industry publications, debated on social media. I get invited to apply for amazing jobs, to speak at conferences and appear on podcasts. Yada yada yada, you get the idea.

So why am I sharing this? To tell you how amazing I am?

No—the opposite.

I have an inside view of just how unremarkable I am. I have sat at my desk writing blog posts for fourteen years. I have saved no lives, climbed no mountains. 

This is great news. If someone as unremarkable as me can do this, so can you. Whatever I have done to confer these benefits, I guarantee that you can do too.

So let’s explore how you can become a thought leader.

Publishing tons is the necessary first condition for becoming a thought leader.

You can’t change anyone’s perspective with clever ideas that never leave your head. Many of the smartest, most innovative people I know self-limit because of a reticence to actually publish, and put stuff out into the world.

Sit and wait for the perfect idea to emerge before publishing, and you’ll wait forever. It’s almost impossible to tell which ideas are useful, interesting, or resonant, without just putting a ton of stuff out there and learning from the response.

The first step towards becoming a thought leader is to make a bunch of stuff. The goal is to develop tons of rapid feedback loops, gradually transforming bad ideas into better ones into good ones through continued iteration and real-world feedback.

Thought leadership is, ironically, less about clever intellectual thought and more about the continued action of publishing, refining, and publishing again. Post on social, send that weekly Substack, blog wherever people will let you blog, publish a daily YouTube short. Ship, ship, ship.

My former colleague Katie Parrott called these ideas “earned secrets”, and I love this definition. As the phrase’s originator, Ben Horowitz, explains:

 

“You did something in your past to solve a hard problem and learned something about the world that not a lot of other people know.” 

To repeat a lesson from above, thought leadership is less about thinking and more about doing. Work hard, tackle difficult problems, and share the lessons you learn on the way. You can’t wrest your way into thought leadership through a sheer act of intellectual will. It is not a problem to be solved by writing; you have to do hard things.

Many of the smartest, most innovative people I’ve known are also the most reluctant to be pigeonholed and commit to a single topic.

But the more diffuse the focus of your ideas and content creation, the harder it is for other people to intuitively understand what you’re about, and why they should care about you.

People know me for one thing: content marketing. I dip into and out of related topics—writing, research, SEO, marketing—but the body of my work has always been on the sole topic of content marketing.

This has two huge benefits. It’s very easy for people to understand my value proposition in a heartbeat: I share ideas about content marketing. If you care about content marketing, I might be worth engaging with.

More importantly, every single thing I’ve published, recorded, said or done in the past fourteen years has compounded. All of my old ideas, articles, talks, and podcasts are still relevant to people who care about my current ideas. I can call upon a decade of thought, experience, and research every time I want to share something new.

The more specific your topic of choice, the easier it is to become a thought leader. It’s easier to share novel ideas about programmatic search than it is about the broader topic of content marketing, or marketing, or business.

The bigger the topic, the more established ideas and noise you’ll encounter, and the harder it is to be original.

I borrowed the credibility of Animalz and Jimmy Daly when I first started writing. Jimmy was already known for sharing smart, original ideas about content marketing; when I published on his blog, or appeared on his podcast, I became more credible by proxy (thanks Jimmy).

Now, I work at Ahrefs, alongside many, many people smarter and better known than me (Tim, Patrick, Sam…). I borrow their credibility every time I publish, every time I share my byline.

A post by “Ryan from Ahrefs” carries significance because of the hard work put into building Ahrefs the brand for the past decade. I stand on the shoulders of giants. Ahrefs is well-regarded; I inherent some small portion of those good vibes when I’m implicitly or explicitly associated with the brand.

(Or put another way—this borrowed credibility allows me to escape the default blocklist.)

There is a real benefit to joining companies that are already well-regarded in your industry. If that’s not possible, you can publish in well-known publications, seek feedback or quotes from well-known people in your content, or build a network of similarly aspiring thought leaders and allow your slow, incremental gains in credibility to rub off on each other.

Thought leaders have a knack for distilling their ideas into their smallest, most memorable form: a single catchphrase that encapsulates the key points. The skyscraper technique. Invisible asymptotes. Zero-click content. Goog enough. Spiky point of view.

I call these neologisms “coined concepts”. These phrases are vivid and easy to remember, but more importantly, they’re easy to share with others, communicating their core ideas in a few short words.

They pique the reader’s interest, turn your nascent ideas into some that feels concrete, and make people look good when they reference these clever, professional-sounding frameworks in their own work. They create distribution incentives for your ideas.

90% of your attempts to coin a concept won’t stick, but the 10% that do, really do. The goal is to get your reps in and give everything a name: gonzo content, copycat content, the default blocklist, the era of information abundance, content arbitrage, the search singularity…

Amanda Natividad from SparkToro wrote a killer post about zero-click content. But perhaps more important than the initial idea was her ability to take that great idea on tour, creating dozens of opportunities to reference and build on the idea for months afterward.

This is what happens when you run a site: search on SparkToro for “zero-click content”:

Three blog posts, one data study, one video—all anchored in the idea of “zero-click content”. And this is just on-site content, not including social media posts, podcast and webinar appearances, SparkToro’s own events, references in guest posts…

Final thoughts

Here comes the final, most important step to becoming a thought leader: you need to write “thought leader” in your LinkedIn bio.

Obviously, I’m joking, and you would never do that (right?). But this belies a serious point.

“Thought leadership” is a cringe-inducing topic with a serious branding problem. I found it genuinely difficult to start this article with a claim of being a thought leader. To claim you have “leading thoughts” is the highest order of narcissism. Even if the epithet was accurate, who would I be to claim it for myself?

Being a “thought leader” is a status that is conferred by other people. It describes things we all want. When you say something, people listen. When you ask for something, people help. When you sell something, people buy.

But to try and become a thought leader is to become the ouroboros eating its own tail. You can’t confer the status upon yourself, and you can’t earn the status by trying to get the status.

Thought leaders are people who immerse themselves in the hardest problems of their industry, and then spend lots of energy sharing the results with other people. They do hard things because they enjoy them, and they share their experiences because it makes them happy to talk about them. In most cases, “becoming a thought leader” is the furthest thing from their minds.

Thought leaders—at least, the ones worth following—are big nerds who can’t help but share the nerdy stuff they’re working on. That provides a clear path for us all to follow: to become a thought leader, you need to spend less time thinking, more time doing.

AI is eating the world, and it’s only been two years since the “ChatGPT moment.” Just a year ago, many were questioning whether AI was even worth the hype. Today, marketers who embrace AI in their workflows are leaving others behind, and no one can afford to sit out of this race, regardless of their personal views on AI. The question has shifted from “Is AI worth it?” to “Which AI tool should I use?”

To answer this, I went on a quest to find SEO tools that got AI right. Tools that don’t overpromise but offer tried-and-tested ways to make you work smarter, not harder. Tools that are not overly optimistic about AI just two years into the tech but still put the human at the center of the process.

If you need a quick answer to that, here are my top picks:

• ChatGPT. Great for virtually any SEO job as long as you feed it the right SEO data. In many cases, you’ll be way more effective with a ChatGPT + good AI tool combo.
• Writesonic This AI writing tool gives you plenty of control over AI’s work and packs all of the features you’d expect from a tool in this category.
• Ahrefs. AI working on top of Ahrefs’ industry-leading data is a match made in heaven. It helps a ton with keyword research, content creation, and optimization. AI Content Helper is the ideal writing assistant for those who value high-quality, original content. It’s also a tool you can confidently provide to your content team to enhance their workflow and boost efficiency without compromising on standards.
• I’ve also listed some notable tools which I think you should know about.

I have much more to share about these tools, so keep reading, and I’ll make a compelling case for why you should use them to increase output and reduce effort with AI. I’ll also explain why I’m focusing on just three key recommendations instead of a dozen.

Remember, we’re only 2 years after the ChatGPT moment. This means we are somewhere at the “peak of inflated expectations”.

That means most of us are more optimistic about AI than realistic. We haven’t yet experienced on a larger scale the limitations or true practicality of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. We just want AI, that’s it.

The truth is, the idealized version of AI that comes to mind when we hear the term isn’t here yet. We’re often making decisions based on emotion, which makes it easy to sell anything labeled as ‘AI’ right now.

Unfortunately, in many cases, AI-everything tools will do you more harm than good. SEO is a great example of that.

It’s true that Google will come after a site that tries to automate their content with little or no thought about added value like it did with the famous “SEO heist”.

And it’s true that everyone wants to create AI content, but no one wants to read it — ask yourself, ask your friends.

Finally, in many cases, generative AI tends to overproduce without adequate self-criticism, leading to hallucinations, irrelevant content, copycat material, or pseudo-optimizations that an intern could handle more effectively. So as I looked at some of the options on the market, I couldn’t help to think I’d be better off with the conventional ways of doing things.

Sorry, AI still won’t do all the SEO work for you.

Given all of this, a good AI SEO tool should empower the user, providing ample options to guide the AI effectively and minimize common AI errors by design. The three tools on this list meet these criteria perfectly.

ChatGPT isn’t specifically designed for SEO, but the truth is you’ll always need an AI copilot, regardless of which tool you choose. LLMs are simply too powerful to ignore, and they’re far more capable than the stripped-down versions embedded in most ‘AI-powered SEO’ tools.

Here’s how ChatGPT will let you work smarter, not harder:

• Generates and improves any type of text for your website or Google Business Profile.
• Writes code for your website to help you fix site speed and schema.
• Can code small SEO apps whenever you need them. For instance, it helped me create a small app to check all kinds of redirects on a website.
• Takes care of meta tags like meta description and hreflang.
• Brainstorms seed keywords.
• Organizes keywords into semantic clusters.
• Analyzes and visualizes data exported from tools like Ahrefs.
• Generates regex you can use in other tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog.
• Can help you research content ideas and find sources to cite using live web search.
• Create custom bots to make your content follow brand guidelines or check for specific common errors.
• Explores the bot market for specific use cases such as creating content for ecommerce.
• Create small Python apps for your SEO tasks. For instance, it helped me create a small app to check all kinds of redirects on a website.
• Check facts in content generated by AI.
• Can create buyer personas for your content strategy. Just make sure to feed it quality data, otherwise it might hallucinate.

Here’s what ChatGPT can’t do: use its own SEO data because it simply doesn’t have any. So don’t throw away your favorite SEO tool subscription just yet.

You can use ChatGPT for free in limited functionality but the fun starts on the Plus plan at $20/mo (pricing). The company also offers paid API that can be used in other SEO tools (such as GPT Workspace).

I’ve been using ChatGPT ever since it became available to the public, and I still rely on it. Out of curiosity, I explored other tools briefly, but I always returned. Recently, I tried Poe to access different LLMs and compare their results. That experience turned out to be more confusing than enlightening (small context windows, and not much difference between LLMs), though I did notice some merits in Gemini and Claude.

I tried both Gemini and Claude in the standalone version for a bit but started to miss ChatGPT quickly. It was great to have access to the web through Gemini and the content writing part was impressive but I got frustrated with constant problems with data analysis.

Claude excelled at content generation (arguably the best) and data analysis, but it lacks the web search feature, which I find quite useful. However, if your focus is on content creation/optimization and data analysis, and you don’t need web search, I’d recommend giving Claude a try.

The standout feature of ChatGPT is its versatility. It’s a fundamental feature because once you choose an LLM to subscribe to, you don’t really want to look for other options to cover that one feature you’re missing out on.

Before ChatGPT added the Search feature, web search was the reason I had to use other options. But now, ChatGPT is the best-equipped LLM on the market.

Let me give you an example.

I can easily hop from preliminary research for a subject such as the correlation between stock market and SEO data.

To analyzing stock market and SEO data.

To writing and editing. Now with the new Canvas feature designed especially for writing and code.

And I can even create my own bots. For instance, a bot I can talk to whenever I want to lookup something in Google’s search engine patents.

Writesonic is an AI writing tool designed to take you from keyword research to SEO-optimized, factually accurate, and cited human-grade text.

Its purpose is to automate the most time-consuming part of SEO content creation and helping teams generate consistent output aligned with the brand voice.

Writesonic uses three of the best LLMs: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and promises to keep all your data safe.

Here are writesonic’s AI features that will make your work smarter, not harder:

• Writing assistant. By inputting a topic or keyword, the tool generates articles, complete with introductions, outlines, and conclusions, tailored to your specifications. You can use your own materials as the starting point of each article and set up your brand voice.
• Topic clustering. Groups topics and keywords into content hub blueprints.
• Content editor. A robust platform for drafting, editing, and refining content. It provides real-time suggestions for grammar, style, and structure. It has the broadest selection of AI prompts I’ve seen in an editor so far.
• SEO Checker. Compares your content to the top-ranking competition and suggests keywords you can add to the text to make your content more relevant and changes in article structure.
• Content rewriter. Rephrase existing text while preserving its original meaning. This is particularly useful for updating outdated content, avoiding duplication, or tailoring material to different audiences without starting from scratch.
• Content humanizer. Transforms AI-generated text into more natural, human-like writing. It adjusts tone, style, and phrasing.

You can try Writesonic for free today. Paid plans start at $16/mo.

To be honest, I’m not a fan of automated AI content generation. Perhaps with the exception of programmatic SEO. But if I was, I’d use Writesonic. Maybe not for completely automated content creation, which I’d strongly advise against, but go 70-80% of the way.

I haven’t seen a more capable AI writing tool that actually gets working with AI right. It impressed me with the number of options you can use to configure your output and fine-tune content later on. I’ll show you a quick overview of their writing editor in a bit.

The product experience feels like it was designed by someone who extensively used ChatGPT for content creation and then wanted a more efficient, repeatable workflow without needing to instruct AI repeatedly.

So if automated AI writing is what you’re after, you’re probably going to get better results with Writesonic than “naked” LLM. But if you need AI just for a portion of your writing occasionally, choose ChatGPT or Claude.

Writesonic has a 10-step article creation wizard, and I think it’s the best approach to generative AI on the market.

That’s right. Before AI starts to write, you will need to go through 10 set-up steps manually.

They do have a 4-step and “instant” option, but personally, I’d always go for the 10-step one. The more input on your side, the more context you feed AI, the better.

Right off the gate, Writesonic shows it takes your writing tasks seriously. Rather than merely rehashing information, it can build on your research. This helps create content that stands out from the competition and avoids the typical pitfalls of AI-generated material that can feel repetitive or generic.

Next, you can select primary and secondary keywords, choose the content you want to outrank, set the article length, design the content structure, decide on an outline, title, add FAQs, and even include a CTA in the article. There’s also automated internal linking. No surprise there but let me tell you about some things that stood out to me in the content generation process.

Typically, you’d need to come prepared with the keyword you want to rank for, but Writesonic only needs the topic you want to write about. It analyzes top-ranking pages on Google for that topic, providing keywords and relevant SEO data, making it a beginner-friendly approach to SEO content creation.

I like how Writesonic guides users through each step of the process. Beginners on your team will find this tool easy to use. It provides tips on why each step matters and offers guidance on selecting options, such as identifying competitors.

The AI even highlights the best choices for you. In the screenshot below, you can see how it explains the importance of selecting competitors and which ones the AI recommends.

You can even add additional instructions for the AI and make it write in a specific brand voice. By the way, that brand voice is something that AI also takes care of, all you need to do is to give it some writing samples.

Next, there’s the new trend: humanizing content. While we’re not entirely on board with this idea at Ahrefs, I have to admit that the humanized version reads much more naturally, as you’ll see in the samples below.

Finally, the editor stands out as the best in terms of AI capabilities. It offers premade prompts for everything I’d typically use in LLMs to improve my writing, all available with a single click: expand, rephrase, change tone, make more concise, and more.

I’ll leave judging content quality to you. Here are the samples of original AI content and the same piece “humanized”.

Just one piece of advice before we finish with this tool, always make sure to thoroughly check stuff generated by AI. I know it might sound like defying the purpose of speeding up work but even a quick review ensures the final output meets your standards and reflects your expertise.

If you’ve been in SEO for a while, you probably know Ahrefs. But you might have missed some of our AI tools. We were late to the party with our AI writing assistant, but for a good reason — we’ve developed a tool with a unique approach to AI-assisted content creation.

Here are Ahrefs’ AI features to make you work smarter, not harder:

• AI Content Helper. Helps you write more comprehensive, more relevant content by uncovering the topics you should talk about in your content and scoring your text in real-time.
• AI Content Grader. Compares your topic coverage to top-performing pages for any keyword and gives suggestions on how you can improve.
• AI keyword translator. Uses AI to find the most accurate translations for a list of keywords so you can find the right keyword for content in different languages.
• Search intent identification. Quickly determines the dominant intent for any SERP by calculating the traffic going into each intent bucket. Ahrefs also analyzes each keyword in their database, showing which intent category keywords belong to during keyword research.
• AI keyword suggestions. Helps you brainstorm seed keywords and find long tail/niche keywords related to any topic.
• AI overviews tracking. You can see which keywords trigger an AI overview in Google and which pages on your site have been featured in AI overviews.
• AI-boosted patches (soon). Designed to empower non-developers to fix technical SEO issues on their website independently, without needing assistance from a development team. You will be able to directly address and publish fixes identified in SEO audits with the help of AI.

Ahrefs starts from $29/mo. AI Content Helper is included with all paid subscriptions without any limits while in beta. After the beta, it will be offered as a paid add-on.

Ahrefs won’t write your articles for you. In our opinion and that of many SEO pros in the space, that’s not the best use of AI.

If you want a tool that promises to do all the SEO work for you, much a like an SEO agency for a fraction of the cost, I think the kind of tools you might be looking for are Scalenut, Diib, Alli AI or Frases, and Jaspers of the world.

But if I were you, I’d closely examine the quality of work produced by fully automated tools before using the “I’m feeling lucky’ button” (an actual feature in one of these tools) that claims to handle all SEO issues on your site.

If you want to maintain full control of the process and leverage your hard-earned SEO expertise, or if you’re working towards that expertise, I strongly recommend Ahrefs. It doesn’t automate everything and let you switch off; instead, it provides valuable boosts to sharpen your competitive edge.

I recently listened to a podcast where J.H. Scherck provided an insightful explanation of the philosophy behind Ahrefs’ AI Content Helper. On the Optimize podcast (Oct 11 2024 episode), he explained how Ahrefs takes a completely different approach compared to typical “buzzword bingo machines” — AI writer tools that encourage blindly following keyword counts in the hope that Google will rank your content higher simply due to keyword frequency.

I really respect what Ahrefs has done. I think it’s very smart because they are abstracting the raw topics and making it “plug these in and your writing will be better”. They’re trying to lean more on concepts and ideas rather than subtopics which is essentially another way of saying keywords to mash in. If you can instruct the writer to reference it and not run the show it can be very helpful. 

These “buzzword bingo machines” foster bad habits. Focusing solely on hitting keyword counts can make you lose sight of the bigger goal — creating unique, people-first content that adds real value. This is something only dedicated human writers can truly achieve.

By the way, content scores are not an exact science. According to the podcast host, tools like Surfer and Clearscope performed better a few years ago when the search environment was different. But now:

You can get a really high content score in a content optimization tool but that doesn’t mean your content’s any good”. Actually, the content can be really bad and you still can get an A. 

I couldn’t agree more. My colleague Josh Hardwick even studied the correlation between content scores and rankings. The result: very weak correlations. You can read the full study here.

Ahrefs’ AI Content Helper stands apart, which is why it arrived later. It helps you identify the topics needed to make your content relevant to Google — focusing on topics rather than keywords. It’s a major shift away from the keyword-counting approach that typical ‘buzzword bingo machines’ encourage.

You can use the tool for both existing and new content. When optimizing existing content, it identifies topical gaps and suggests areas to expand. For new content, the Content Helper recommends topics to include in your outline.

Technically, AI Content Helper works on top of Ahrefs’ vast SEO database. It reads the top-ranking pages for a given keyword to report back the topics that you should probably include in your content.

But here’s the twist. Ahrefs is the only tool on the market that groups top-ranking pages by search intent. So while you choose which content we should base the analysis on, you can be sure you’re optimizing for the right intent.

At any time of writing you can take a peak at your competitors and their scores.

On top of that, the tool will help you with titles and meta descriptions.

A few words about the results of using Ahrefs. I was one of the early testers of both AI Content Helper and Content Grader. To test whether improved topic coverage could lead to higher keyword relevance and better rankings, I used these tools on several of my articles.

The most interesting results came from an article about finding a website’s keywords. It was an ambiguous topic with several distinct methods that could meet user intent. My hypothesis was that by using AI Content Helper, I could ‘pivot’ the article to make it relevant to a different keyword that I hadn’t originally targeted.

The tool suggested the topic gap I needed to address to rank higher, and the results came within a few days. As you can see below, the rankings were very choppy before the experiment, but they stabilized, keeping me in the top 10 after using the AI helper.

The same happened with AI Content Grader, which is based on the same principle — focusing on topic coverage rather than keyword count. In the screenshot below, you can see how the top ranking was regained after addressing the topic gap suggested by the tool.

• Zapier. Zapier integrates with ChatGPT so you can use them both to make time-saving content automations like the ones you can find in my guide. For example, you can use it to orchestrate work with content writers.
• Google’s NLP API. This tool can extract the entities (or in plain English, distinctive things) from any text. According to some SEOs, you can use it to analyze top-ranking pages and see which entities you could add to your content to achieve information gain.
• Shopify Magic. A tool within Shopify’s suite that uses AI to create product descriptions. Available to all Shopify merchants.
• Wordlift’s free AI product description generator. Generates product descriptions based on product photos. ChatGPT and its ecommerce user bots can do the same thing equally well, but what I liked about this tool is that it goes with a number of premade prompts (like Amazon optimized, clearance sale, kid-friendly) to make the whole experience pretty much two clicks.
• Originality.ai. Originality provides a tool for fact-checking. It could be a good idea to compare results with ChatGPT and Gemini.
• LinkBERT by DEJAN. Internal linking can be tedious, but this tool suggests where to place links on a page. It won’t do everything for you, but it will help you catch all the opportunities.
• Ahrefs’ free AI writing tools. Forty-two different writing aids you can use 100% free.

How SEOs use AI tools?

According to a study by Flying Cat, the most common use of AI is generating outlines (92%), followed by idea generation and keyword research (88%). Only 15% use it to generate entire blog posts lightly proofread by humans.

Is Google against AI content?

Google isn’t against AI content as long as it’s high-quality, original, and helpful to users. Their focus is on rewarding content that demonstrates E-E-A-T: Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

If AI helps create content that meets these criteria, Google welcomes it. However, using AI to churn out low-quality, spammy, or manipulative content is against their guidelines and can result in penalties.

Can Google detect AI content?

Can AI tools completely replace human expertise in SEO?

Are there any privacy or data security concerns with using AI tools?

Is data provided by AI SEO tools accurate?

Got questions or comments? Drop me a line on LinkedIn.

The holidays are coming up. What can you do to ensure you’re getting the most out of the season?

Here are some holiday marketing strategies you can use:

When I asked for the best marketing strategies for 2024’s holiday season on LinkedIn, Kaj Kandler told me to make preparations for next year instead.

That’s because I asked too late: Black Friday/Cyber Monday was only two weeks away.

I understand his perspective because holiday campaigns take time:

• Pages need time to rank in Google, around three to six months.
• You need time to create and assemble relevant digital assets, like images, photos, videos, emails, etc.
• If you’re working with influencers and partners, you need time and energy to coordinate, not to mention creating assets.
• If you have plans for a bigger campaign, then the effort required doubles or triples.

So, if you want to have a profitable holiday season, start your prep early.

But don’t worry if you’re reading this post slightly later. It’s not all over yet. You can still apply most of the tactics below, even if it’s just a simpler version. Every effort you make today is also an effort for next year’s holiday season.

For example, Michaela Park of Holafly (a travel eSIM) creates content targeting keywords related to Christmas markets, and Christmas and New Year’s travel destinations.

Here’s how to find these holiday-specific keywords:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
2. Enter one or a few relevant keywords
3. Go to the Matching terms report
4. Use the Include filter to look for relevant holidays (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas)

For example, if I’m a store selling golf equipment, I might consider targeting keywords like “black friday golf deals” and “golf clubs black friday”.

Sometimes, people don’t search directly for a holiday. Instead, they search for the person whom they’re buying for. For example, instead of “Christmas”, they might search for a broader term like “gifts for husband”, “gifts for wife”, or “gifts for family”.

To find these keywords, use the Include filter and search for “for dad”, “for mom”, “for wife”, and “for husband”.

Instead of creating new pages every year, make an evergreen page that you can update one or two months before the holiday. That way, you’ll retain the link equity, continue to build authority to that one page, and hopefully, appear at the top of Google for your target query every year.

For example, that’s what TechRadar does every year for its “Black Friday deals” page. It consistently maintains top rankings yearly:

Even though it doesn’t get much traffic during the off-season, traffic shoots up when holidays come:

If you’ve already created seasonal pages for previous years, consider redirecting them to your evergreen page.

1. Make a list of all your important holiday pages
2. Sign up for our free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)
3. Run a crawl on your site
4. When the crawl is done, go to Site Audit
5. Click the Internal link opportunities report

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities on your site.

To find relevant internal link opportunities, set the filter to Target page and search for your holiday pages.

Look at the suggested opportunities and add internal links where relevant.

Local newspapers will link to anything. I mean, look at this news:

I’m a millennial, but what are my needs?

You can take advantage of this fact by using the Tabloid Technique:

1. Find a newsworthy topic
2. Pull local data about it
3. Send it to local journalists

The hardest part of this tactic is coming up with newsworthy ideas. Fortunately, seasonal topics tend to get attention.

For example, if we search for a topic like “food” in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer in the UK, set the growth period to the last three months, and sort from highest to lowest, we’ll see that searches related to Christmas food in various UK supermarkets are trending:

Here are some potential campaign ideas, courtesy of my colleague Joshua Hardwick:

• Compare how much the average family will spend on Christmas food in different parts of the UK
• Compare the most popular Christmas foods in different parts of the UK.
• Compare how many families will be relying on food banks for Christmas dinner in different parts of the UK.

When you’ve settled on an idea, you want to pull interesting data. There are many places you can use, including government databases (e.g. usa.gov for the US, UK Data Service for the UK), international organizations (e.g., World Bank Open Data), and research databases (e.g., Pew Research Center).

Then, you’d want to organize them into a post and pitch it to local journalists. How? I highly recommend reading Joshua’s guide on the Tabloid Technique, as he goes into deep detail on how to execute it from start to finish.

Later on, you’d want to add internal links from this post to your important holiday pages, via what we call the Middleman Method:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=433XlvMl508

Hristo Rusev, CEO of ScalaHosting, offered an interesting idea: Add a social responsibility element to your holiday promotions.

Yes, the holiday season is about deals. Everyone’s greed is filled to the brim, and your customers are gunning for flash sales, big discounts, and generous offers.

But the holiday season is also about giving, love, and warmth. Coupled with the fact that consumers today are more socially responsible, appealing to their ethical beliefs could help your offers stand out amongst the hundred other “buy now” emails in their inbox.

For example, Wild, which sells bathroom products, ran a Black Friday campaign in 2022 that not only gave a 25% discount but also promised to plant 100,000 trees over 10 days.

Don’t pay lip service to social responsibility. Your customers can see through bluewashing. Make sure you offer to do something your target customers care about. Don’t plant trees if you sell pet products; potentially donate to an animal shelter instead.

For example, Drypers, a baby diapers brand, collaborated with Singaporean influencer Mongabong (IG: 312K followers) to promote their Singles’ Day sale:

I asked Raúl Galera, Growth Lead at ReferralCandy, for his influencer marketing tips:

“Here are my recommendations for successfully working with influencers without repeating the same mistakes other brands have made: 

1. Target smaller, more relevant influencers: This might seem obvious, but many brands still chase bigger names who may not align with their brand values or audience, simply due to their size. Instead, focus on niche or even micro-influencers who could genuinely be your customers—those who are popular but, more importantly, have an engaged and authentic community.
2. Work on a performance basis: Offer influencers a deal where their payment is based (entirely or primarily) on the revenue they generate. Many influencers might not agree to this because their audience might not be as engaged as they claim. If they do agree, encourage them to see your brand as a team they’re part of rather than just another campaign.
3. Be generous: A 10% commission won’t cut it. If possible, offer 20-25% or create a tiered commission structure. You could also consider giving commissions on the lifetime revenue generated by the customers they bring in, not just their first purchase. This keeps them motivated to consistently talk about your brand over the long term. How much are you spending on Meta ads? Use that as a benchmark—chances are influencer marketing will cost you far less.”

Here’s what Mykolas Bartkus says:

However, playing this game can lead to an arms race. We might end up at a point where the next Black Friday offer starts when the current Black Friday ends. That’s why Elanor Parker cautions:

But besides starting earlier than your competitors, how else can you stand out with emails? Here are some ideas, courtesy of fellow marketers Elanor Parker and Diksha Sharma:

“You can use your marketing channels to signal your deal in advance — through teaser campaigns or VIP early access emails — so customers know what’s coming and can plan accordingly. While you may lose some full-price sales, this approach can prevent them from spending all their budget with your competitors. Consider a rolling calendar of targeted deals, changing weekly or daily. These can be targeted using segmentation based on past purchases, personas, or interests, and help you keep the offer window open throughout the holiday period, whilst keeping excitement high.

Black Friday campaigns are also growing in popularity for B2B audiences, particularly for those with a self-service product. However, decision-making in this space often requires stakeholder approvals, which can be tricky if you’re only running your offer over a short holiday weekend. Extend your deals beyond the Black Friday weekend or provide exclusive discounts with a clear deadline to give your audience time to act – and check in with their boss!”

“Use games like spin-to-win or digital scratch cards to engage customers, like “Tap to Reveal Your Holiday Discount or Make holidays better and more merrier!

Secondly, you can create urgency and FOMO among the readers. Launch last-minute deals or emphasize gift cards as instant solutions. Send an email 2-3 days before Christmas with the subject line, “Running Late? We’ve Got You or Last 24 hours to grab the best deals.

Use catchy yet amazingly written email subject lines. You can even mention about teasing a “mystery offer”. Use a subject line like, What’s Your Holiday Surprise? Or Tis the season to spoil yourself.”

Here are some examples of lottery-based emails from Diksha:

Depending on where they are on the buyer’s journey, you can convince them to take the next step.

For example, if they’ve only checked out your deals page and haven’t added any items to the cart, you’d want to set your retargeting ad to get them to come back to your deals page again.

On the other hand, if they already have a full cart, you’d want to create an ad to remind them to check out.

Final thoughts

Kapil Ochani reminds us of one of the most important things you should do during the holiday season: Never run out of stock.

Ultimately, no matter how fancy or well-prepared your holiday marketing campaigns are, no marketing can save you if you cannot deliver product.

Did I miss out on any important holiday marketing strategies? Let me know on LinkedIn.

Low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities can help you:

• Get your content indexed by Google ASAP
• Achieve maximum results with minimum effort
• Show clients fast progress to prevent churn
• Get buy-in for more SEO resources

Here are 12 SEO quick wins you can implement today.

1. Optimize for low-hanging fruit keywords 

It’s always easier to move something that’s already in motion.

Shifting something from position 4 to 1 will bring in more traffic and have a more significant impact than going from position 100 to 15.

That’s why low-hanging fruit keywords are the ones you’re already ranking for in positions 4-15 and that you can improve reasonably easily.

You can access a pre-filtered list showing your site’s low-hanging fruit keywords in the Opportunities report:

Get even more quick wins with high-volume, low-competition keywords

If you have a long list of low-hanging fruit keywords, knowing where to start optimizing can be hard.

Try adding these additional filters to uncover high-search volume, low-competition keywords:

• High search volume: Set a minimum monthly search volume. I like to start with 100.
• Low competition: Set a maximum keyword difficulty value. I like to start with 10.

You can adjust these filters according to your data set until you have a more manageable list of keywords.

For example, NerdWallet has almost 900,000 low-hanging fruit keywords.

By adjusting the search volume and keyword difficulty filters, we can reduce the list to under 27,000 to find the ones that can lead to some quick traffic wins:

If this list of keywords is still too large for you, try increasing the volume filter to a value over 100 and/or decreasing the difficulty filter to a value lower than 10.

2. Snagging more featured snippet mentions 

If your site already ranks on the first page of Google results, an easy way to get more traffic is to snag featured snippet mentions.

Featured snippets appear at the top of many informational queries and share a direct answer to the query, like so:

Ranking in featured snippets will improve both your share of voice and traffic to your website.

Using the Opportunities report, you can access a pre-filtered report of keywords where:

• You rank in positions 2 to 8
• There is a featured snippet in the SERP
• You don’t already show up in the featured snippet

You can use this list of keywords to improve your topic coverage and optimization with snippet-friendly content in each post.

The easiest thing to try for SEO quick wins is adding a new section in your content that directly addresses each keyword and its intent. Immediately underneath the section’s heading:

• Answer the question directly
• Fulfill the searcher’s intent
• Remove excess or filler content

For example, let’s look at the keyword “50 30 20 rule”. Currently, Investopedia is ranking in the featured snippet with the following text:

It is a direct yet succinct paragraph fulfilling the searcher’s intent of understanding what the rule is about and how to apply it.

Compare that to NerdWallet’s content, which is ranking in position 3 for the same keyword:

It has a similar amount of content. And, on the surface seems to address the question directly since it begins with “The 50/30/20 rule is…”.

However, it doesn’t quite meet search intent because it doesn’t give enough detail for someone to understand the rule enough to apply it. For instance, it mentions there are three main categories that apply to the rule but does not list them.

A simple tweak to directly answer a question or better fulfill searcher intent is often all that’s needed to help rank in more featured snippets.

3. Stealing competitor’s traffic by closing content gaps 

SEO can often be likened to a race between you and your competitors.

Competitors who have been doing it longer are often much further ahead than you and it can be difficult to know where to direct your efforts to catch up.

A great place to start for some quick SEO results is by looking for keywords where your competitors rank in the top 10 positions, but you’re not showing up at all.

These keywords indicate traffic potential for your industry. If they deliver traffic to your competitors, chances are high that closing these content gaps will also boost your traffic.

By clicking on this opportunity in the Opportunities report, you’ll get a pre-filtered report that has:

• Automatically loaded your top 10 competitors
• Filtered out keywords where you already rank
• Filtered keywords to only show the ones where competitors rank in the top 10

You’ll also be able to see which competitors you have the biggest gaps with. For example, NerdWallet has the biggest gaps with Bankrate and Chase:

Not all gaps need to be closed. There are many times when competitors will cover topics that do not relate to your business at all. In such cases, skip the topic and move to the next one.

For a complete process you can follow, check out my post How to Do a Content Gap Analysis [With Template].

4. Updating content with declining traffic in the last 6 months 

Reclaiming lost traffic is one of my favorite low-hanging fruit SEO tactics. Preventing content decay is a crucial part of growing a website.

From the Opportunities report, you can access a pre-filtered report in Top Pages that displays all pages with declining traffic in the last 6 months.

For these pages, you can do a page-level analysis to assess and fix things like:

• Poor keyword optimization
• Shallow topical coverage
• Intent misalignment

You don’t need to completely rewrite content in order to get performance gains. For example, one of my past clients was steadily losing traffic on many of their top-performing blog posts.

Within three weeks after my team made some strategic content updates, we saw:

• 184% boost in organic traffic
• 460% boost in keyword breadth
• 1220% boost in conversions

Here’s an example of one of the posts we updated.

You can see how two updates lead to unprecedented growth that has been sustained for years afterwards. We more than doubled this post’s traffic compared to its peak prior to the first update.

Neither update was a total rewrite.

Rather, I tasked my team to insert some new sections and reword a couple of existing sections so we could better target a broader variety of related keywords.

5. Rewrite old pages with low-traffic performance 

While content updates are a great quick win for pages that ranked well and started declining, it’s not an effective action for pages that have always had consistently low traffic.

At Ahrefs, we often publish the MVP version of content to see if it takes. It’s how we balance our content’s quality standards with maintaining a consistent publishing schedule.

The reality is that not all of these pieces perform as we hoped.

In these cases, we rewrite the pages that didn’t work out. The Opportunities report provides an easy way to find pages you could consider rewriting quickly. It takes you to a pre-filtered version of Content Explorer:

This report shows pages that have fewer than 50 estimated visits a month and have only been published once.

These are often the best candidates to rewrite.

For example, Mateusz recently rewrote our article on competitor analysis tools. He changed the angle and added new tools to the list. You can see an immediate spike in performance after he published the new post:

6. Consolidate pages cannibalizing each other 

Keyword cannibalization is when multiple pages on your website rank for the same keyword and compete with each other. It is often the case that they compete because they fulfill the same intent.

There are many cases where having multiple pages ranking is not in itself an issue.

For instance, in the case of keyword diversification, you can have multiple pages ranking for the same keyword but without competing with one another.

In this case, you have greater visibility on the SERP and can earn more traffic.

The Opportunities report will take you to a pre-filtered view of keywords you rank for with multiple URLs.

I recommend checking out each keyword to assess if the ranking pages are competing with each other or not.

If you see them constantly swapping positions, consolidating into one article may be the best move forward:

However, if you see them all ranking simultaneously for a decent amount of time, then that’s an example of keyword diversification and likely won’t need additional action from you:

In this report you can also check out your competitor’s websites to see which keywords offer them great diversification opportunities and more SERP coverage.

Doing so could help you identify new angles or intents that your current content doesn’t cover.

In such cases, you could try creating a new piece of content targeting the same keyword but fulfilling a different intent.

For instance, if you already have a definition post, try creating a how-to guide. The content your competitors have will be a good indication as to which angles and search intents will work best for the topic.

7. Redirect high-value links pointing to broken pages 

Links going to broken pages leak authority.

An easy way to preserve that authority is to point those links to high-value pages instead. Through the Opportunities report, you can access a pre-filtered report that shows you 404 pages on your website with high-value links pointing to them:

For large sites with many broken pages, this report will give you a targeted list of redirects to prioritize so that you can stop leaking authority.

8. Build internal links for new content 

Adding internal links between content on your website is one of the quickest and easiest ways to show search engines what pages you want to prioritize.

But, it can be challenging to stay on top of internal links as you add new content to your site.

For example, looking at my portfolio of content on Ahrefs, I noticed some of my latest articles didn’t have many links pointing to them. Or there were unlinked mentions of the topic in other posts.

Using the Opportunities report, I checked out the potential internal links that could be built. This is a handy view when working on a new client’s site when you want to make improvements across the whole site:

For my project, I wanted to prioritize only links to my articles, so I searched for the specific URLs I cared about:

Adding the suggested internal links led to very quick wins with traffic and ranking improvements in under 7 days for some posts:

9. Tidy up generic or over-optimized anchor text 

If you already have internal links on your site, you can also gain some quick wins by checking their anchor texts are optimized well.

Anchor text is the word or phrase that you make clickable when you add a link, like “click here.” For SEO, it’s best to use a mix of anchor text, including keywords, instead of only generic phrases.

From the Opportunities report, you can see a pre-filtered view of all the internal links that have generic anchor text like “learn more”, “see more” and so on:

You can get a detailed page view for each anchor:

Unless it’s a core section that’s part of your page’s UX design, you could consider modifying the anchor text to optimize it better.

Find opportunities to modify the text to include a keyword or close variation.

Just be careful you don’t overdo it. The idea is to diversify your anchor text, not to stuff keywords in there.

10. Close link gaps with competitors 

Closing link gaps is similar to (and just as important as) closing content gaps.

Links are often connected to how authoritative a brand is online. More high-quality links and brand mentions generally lead to more online authority and visibility.

In the Opportunities report, you can access a pre-filtered report with your top 10 competitors and all the sites they get links from that you don’t.

You’ll also get a birds eye view of which competitors are getting the most links:

Unlike the Content Gap report, however, there are two views you can choose from:

• Domains: You’ll get the list of domains that competitors have links from that you don’t. I recommend starting here as it’s a shorter list to work from to build a decent outreach list.
• Pages: You’ll get a list of specific pages linking to your competitors, but not you. If you want to include specific pages in your outreach messaging, like listicle posts that mention competitors but not you, this view is a better fit.

11. Convert unlinked brand mentions into high-quality links 

Traditional PR focuses on getting brand mentions in high-tier publications.

While these are great for general brand awareness, if there’s no link with those mentions, they’re not great for user experience or SEO. Here’s an example of an unlinked brand mention:

If a reader wants to learn more about your brand, where they would normally be able to click, now they have to interrupt their journey to run a separate Google search to find your website instead.

You also miss out on the authority that flows from the brand mentioning your website since links pass authority from one site to another. No link, no flow of online authority.

Within the Opportunities report, you can quickly find all the publications that mention your brand and don’t link to you:

It’s worth reaching out to the authors of the articles in this list to see if they’ll include a link to your site. Not all websites allow external links, but it’s still a low-effort task that can lead to some quick performance boosts.

12. Fix any critical technical issues 

Technical fixes are the foundation of a healthy website and good SEO. There’s always something that needs fixing.

Technology gets upgraded, integrations break, or web performance best practices change.

Luckily, the Opportunities report offers a quick and easy way for you to monitor the technical health of your website and to prioritize critical issues worth fixing.

It’ll take you to a your latest website audit, pre-filtered to show the most important errors. That way, you won’t run the risk of wasting resources on fixing anything that’s low-impact.

In this report, you’ll be able to identify issues related to pages, links, content, performance, sitemaps, and more. You’ll also get helpful advice and tips on how to fix each issue:

Final thoughts

There is a whole lot more you can do when optimizing a website for search engines.

But starting with these low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities will help you achieve results that will appease your clients or bosses reasonably quickly.

You can check all of these in under 30 seconds in the Ahrefs Opportunities report:

Want to see any other quick-win SEO opportunities here? Send me your suggestions on LinkedIn anytime 🙂

We analyzed the branded search growth of 3,000 software companies to discover the fastest-growing AI companies around.

When we published our list of 50