SEO
What Is a Lead Generation Website? (And How to Build One)
A lead generation website captures information from potential customers (i.e., leads).
This often includes their name, email address, and phone number—but it can also include things like how much money they make, where they live, and more.
While an entire website can be dedicated to this purpose, a single page (aka a landing page) within a broader website can also serve as an effective lead generation tool.
I’ve built dozens of websites for clients and created sites for my own businesses. I’ve captured tens of thousands of leads over the years, and here’s what I’ve learned.
A good lead generation website:
- Gives the visitor one main option: to enter their information.
- Includes trust signals (testimonials, ratings, etc.) that put the user at ease.
- Has a clean layout that minimizes distractions.
- Uses visual cues to draw the eye to the next step.
- Has great copy that makes the visitor want to give their info.
In addition to the design elements, a good lead generation website should also be technically sound. It should load fast, be mobile-friendly, be easy to use, and include an SSL certificate.
Let’s look at some examples.
Here are three websites that are excellent at turning visitors into leads:
1. Adobe
Adobe has some free tools that work great as lead generation pages on its website.
In fact, the landing page for its image background removal tool is done so well it could be a standalone website.
It has a clear and simple call to action (CTA): upload your photo.
And if you scroll down the page, that CTA button follows you all the way down, making it easy to know what to do.
Once you upload the photo, you have to sign up for an account before you can download it. This is where the site captures you as a lead. (And yes, that is a photo of me riding a donkey.)
Besides the overall quality of its lead generation page, Adobe also does SEO really well. This lead generation page receives an estimated 5.9 million monthly organic search traffic. (Data taken from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.)
With just a 5% conversion rate, it would be getting almost 300,000 leads per month just from this one landing page. That’s the power of combining SEO with lead generation.
Note
To follow this strategy on your own website, always do keyword research before you build a lead page. I’ll talk about how to do this in the “how to make a lead generation website” section below.
2. The Tonic
The Tonic is more of a traditional lead generation website, built solely to generate leads for its email newsletter business. It is almost a single-page site, with nothing but an email opt-in:
The layout is simple with minimum distraction—just an opt-in and a bunch of five-star reviews from readers. And it makes total sense. After all, when it comes to such a thing as a newsletter you can join for free, people just want to get a sample of it as soon as possible.
Can such a minimalistic site be effective? According to the founder, this site helped them bring over 17,000 subscribers and $5,000 in monthly revenue in less than a year of launching.
It also has a strong paid ads strategy to generate traffic to its lead pages, which I break down in my “content strategy examples” article.
3. West Excavation
West Excavation is a land excavation company in the Pacific Northwest. Once you land on its website, you already know you’re in the right place. It starts off with a nice piece of copywriting that tells what you can expect and how it’s like to hire its people for the job.
As you scroll down the site, you’re presented with multiple CTAs: calling the company or filling out a form to give staff more info about what you’re looking for.
Allowing people to call you instead of leaving their contact information is a good choice for businesses offering services. Sometimes, it’s just easier for the potential customer to explain things on the phone. Oftentimes, it’s the quickest way for them and you to see if there’s a fit.
However, keep in mind that this can be difficult to scale for a business without a dedicated phone line. I’d only recommend this option if you’re a smaller business or can hire a dedicated phone sales/support person.
Here are five steps to build your new lead generation website:
Step 1. Do keyword research to tap into search demand
Search engine optimization is often an afterthought for websites and landing pages. This is a mistake because:
- SEO works best if you create content that serves the intent of the searcher from the start.
- Keyword research can give you ideas for what kind of lead page to create in the first place. As you saw in the Adobe example, you can get a lot of free traffic from search.
For example, if you’re trying to find insurance leads, you can search for the keyword “insurance,” go to the Matching terms report, and filter the keywords to include the word “calculator.”
You can also include a filter for a maximum KD (Keyword Difficulty) of 30 to see keywords that are a bit easier to rank on page #1 for.
So before doing anything else, see if you can get passive, consistent traffic from Google that you won’t need to pay for and check out our beginner’s guide to keyword research.
Step 2. Choose a website platform
I am personally a big advocate for WordPress because it is relatively easy to use, customizable, and free. I wrote a full guide to using WordPress if you want to take this route.
But if you want something simpler and don’t mind paying a bit more, a website builder like Wix or Squarespace can work too. Just keep in mind that they are more limited compared to WordPress.
I wrote a guide to Wix SEO you can follow as well.
Step 3. Pick a theme/template and make it your own
Regardless of which platform you choose, you’ll need to pick a theme for your website.
A theme is like a customizable template you can use as a model for what you want your site to look like. Once you choose one, you can edit things like colors, fonts, and text to fit your business.
The default theme in WordPress is Twenty Twenty-Three, and it’s a decent theme. But for a lead generation website, you may want something simpler, such as Sydney or Astra.
Once you choose a theme, you can customize it by going to Appearance > Customize in WordPress. It’s also straightforward in Wix and Squarespace.
Check out the “themes” section in my WordPress user guide for more info on how to do that.
As you’re designing your site, there are some important things to add:
- A lead generation capture form that shows analytics upon completion. One option is WPForms.
- Website analytics to see how many people have visited your site, which channels are sending you traffic, and your conversion rate. The popular choice is Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
- If you want more data for your organic keywords and to make sure your site is in good SEO health, sign up for the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
Step 4. Create your landing page content
Once your site is set up, you still need to fill it out with content.
The main purpose of your content will be to convince your visitors to leave their contact information. Most importantly, this will require:
- Trust signals (such as reviews, good website design, contact info, etc.).
- Clear and convincing copywriting.
- High-quality photos and possibly videos.
- Limited distractions.
Let’s look at the Adobe lead generation page again as an example.
As soon as you land on the page, it has big, bold text telling you exactly what it’s offering. Next to that, there’s a GIF of its tool in action.
You may also notice that it eases your concerns with the “No credit card required” text. This is a way of stopping objections before it even starts.
As we scroll down the page, we’re greeted with instructions and use cases for the tool, an introduction to the mobile app, and a 4.4-star review rating.
The second purpose is ranking on Google. You should pursue it if you’ve found valuable keywords you can rank for through keyword research. Then, what you want to do is create content that’s both for users and search engines. We explain how to do that in our beginner’s guide to SEO copywriting.
Step 5. Optimize it
In order to generate the most leads possible, it’s necessary to optimize your website.
For starters, make sure that:
- You have an SSL – Many options to get one: a free one from a site like Let’s Encrypt or one from your hosting provider.
- Your website loads fast – Use a tool like GTmetrix to test your site for speed.
- You create a mobile-optimized website – Whatever template you’re using, make sure it’s mobile-friendly (most of them are). You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. And if you’re using Google Search Console, you can get a more detailed report there.
After the launch, wait a few months to see what’s the ratio of people who visit your website to people who become leads (your lead conversion rate). Then, set up small, iterative experiments to try to improve that. You can:
- Get a tool like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity to see how people interact with your website.
- Try to improve things in small experiments, one thing at a time. For starters, you can find some ready-made test ideas like these.
- Relaunch your site with the changes and compare results. You can also get an A/B testing tool like Visual Website Optimizer to run different variations simultaneously.
Last but not least, SEO is a continuous process of fine-tuning your content and building links to rank higher and get more organic traffic. It’s beyond this article’s scope, but we explain it in our post on the 12 SEO Best Practices to Improve Rankings in 2023.
Having a website is worthless without traffic to capture leads. Here are some tactics you can use to start driving leads.
Link from your high-traffic pages
If you already have a website that gets traffic, don’t forget to include internal links from those pages to your lead capture page. This sounds obvious but can easily be overlooked.
For example, in our articles, we often link to our free SEO tools. This then leads people to see keyword data and an option to purchase our full product to see more data.
Promote on social media
You can promote your lead generation website on social media, but you can’t just share the URL and expect to gain leads. You need to capture people’s interest and make them want to click on your links.
Some ways you can do that include:
- Sharing user-generated content: customer testimonials and photos or videos showing the product or service.
- Posting short videos and photos showing a sneak peek of the product or service.
- Posting content that may answer your audience’s questions.
- Promoting your best content that leads to your lead generation page.
- Running ads to a well-targeted audience.
For example, Afternerd uses his YouTube channel to establish himself as an authority in Python and promote his course. Some of those videos are really popular.
And each video has a link for people who are willing to learn Python.
The great thing about this kind of promotion is that you don’t need any marketing skills. You can just talk about what you know best or show some samples of your work (especially if you’re running a service).
Another thing you can do is set the lead generation page as the button on your Facebook page and put it in your Instagram bio.
Optimize your Google Business Profile
Are you a local business? Then, you probably already have a Google Business Profile. You can optimize your profile to get discovered more often on Google when people look for products and services nearby.
As you can see below, a link to a website can’t be missed when your profile ranks on Google.
Optimizing a Google Business Profile is something that doesn’t need special skills. Here’s how to do it in less than 30 minutes.
Run Google Ads
Finally, you can use Google Ads as a fast, easily scalable way to get visitors.
Google ads show up in places like Google Search and Google Maps, and you probably know them from displaying on top of all other search results.
You set them up by choosing the keywords you want your ad to be shown for, specifying the languages and locations and, finally, indicating your budget. Then Google runs an auction to choose which advertiser’s ad to show, and you pay only when your ad gets clicked.
Here is such an ad spotted in the wild—a law firm that uses Google Ads to get leads interested in a free consultation.
You can set up your first campaign quite fast, even if you haven’t done that before. But before you do, check out our best practices and tips for beginners.
Final thoughts
Building a lead generation website is just the first step. Once you’ve created the site, you need to focus on getting traffic and optimizing the site to convert that traffic into leads.
Want even more leads? You don’t need to confine yourself to just one place to capture contact information. You can set lead magnets—as many as you want.
Questions? Comments? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
OpenAI Claims New “o1” Model Can Reason Like A Human
OpenAI has unveiled its latest language model, “o1,” touting advancements in complex reasoning capabilities.
In an announcement, the company claimed its new o1 model can match human performance on math, programming, and scientific knowledge tests.
However, the true impact remains speculative.
Extraordinary Claims
According to OpenAI, o1 can score in the 89th percentile on competitive programming challenges hosted by Codeforces.
The company insists its model can perform at a level that would place it among the top 500 students nationally on the elite American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME).
Further, OpenAI states that o1 exceeds the average performance of human subject matter experts holding PhD credentials on a combined physics, chemistry, and biology benchmark exam.
These are extraordinary claims, and it’s important to remain skeptical until we see open scrutiny and real-world testing.
Reinforcement Learning
The purported breakthrough is o1’s reinforcement learning process, designed to teach the model to break down complex problems using an approach called the “chain of thought.”
By simulating human-like step-by-step logic, correcting mistakes, and adjusting strategies before outputting a final answer, OpenAI contends that o1 has developed superior reasoning skills compared to standard language models.
Implications
It’s unclear how o1’s claimed reasoning could enhance understanding of queries—or generation of responses—across math, coding, science, and other technical topics.
From an SEO perspective, anything that improves content interpretation and the ability to answer queries directly could be impactful. However, it’s wise to be cautious until we see objective third-party testing.
OpenAI must move beyond benchmark browbeating and provide objective, reproducible evidence to support its claims. Adding o1’s capabilities to ChatGPT in planned real-world pilots should help showcase realistic use cases.
Featured Image: JarTee/Shutterstock
SEO
How to Build a Fandom by Talent-Scouting Great Content
At a time when anyone can create content, the real challenge—and opportunity—is in saying something new.
I think content curation can help with that.
Curation is all about finding undiscovered stories and repackaging ideas in ways your audience really respond to.
In this article, you’ll learn why content curation is great for growth, and how to talent scout quality underground or left-field content.
Gathering and sharing content is a popular social media tactic, but content curation extends to mediums and channels far beyond social.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
| Example | Type | What is it? |
|---|---|---|
| The Pudding | Article | A data journalism publication that curates a range of rich media (e.g. social comments, headline snippets, literature reviews) to tell compelling visual stories – like this one. |
| Ahrefs’ digest | Newsletter | Our Senior Content Marketing Manager, Si Quan Ong (SQ), curates key SEO/marketing news, accompanied by snappy annotations. |
| Near Media Memo | Podcast | Conversations at the intersection of search, social, and commerce. Hosts curate and discuss the latest industry content. |
| KFC’s “Bucket Bangers” Spotify Playlist | Playlist | A playlist curated by KFC as part of a PR campaign, containing 46 tracks that name drop the brand. |
| Campaign Inspiration | Image carousel | This LinkedIn page curates visual examples of existing PR campaigns to inspire marketers. |
Newsletters, in particular, have become the go-to platform for curation, since they’re fairly cheap to run and easy to set up.
The numbers back this up. A quick look at Site Explorer shows newsletter platform Substack experiencing a 373% leap in organic traffic from September 5th, 2023 to September 5th, 2024.
You can see some great examples of curated SEO newsletters here: I Subscribed to 72 SEO Newsletters. Here Are My 11 Favorites.
Now you know about content curation in all its forms and guises, let me tell you what’s so great about it…
From saving money, to building traffic, and cementing your authority, content curation comes with plenty of benefits.
1. Content curation saves time and money
At Ahrefs, we follow The Pareto Principle: the idea that 80% of the reward comes from 20% of the effort.
If you want to improve your effort:reward ratio, curation is a great option.
I asked SQ about the benefits of content curation, and he had this to say:
“One benefit is that I don’t have to write an essay from scratch each week (which is what most newsletters are).”
While content curation has the potential to save you time, resources, and money, I do want to add two important caveats:
- Curating niche, underground content examples can still take time – especially when you’re first finding your sources.
- If you’re doing deep-dive investigations into those examples, you may spend just as long curating as you would creating.
2. Curation helps you build links, traffic, and engagement
Marketing Examples is a goldmine of curated marketing snippets.
Founder, Harry Dry, doesn’t just gather content — he dissects real-world marketing copy, name drops the creator, and breaks down their winning formulas, making it easy for readers to replicate that success.
As a result, his site has earned fairly consistent links and traffic over time, growing organically by 88% in the last two years.
Curating content is an example of what I call “awareness you prepared earlier”. Your chances of driving traction are vastly improved when you crowdsource ideas.
Not only do your audience consume your curated content, they publicize it to their own network via social posts or reciprocal links when they get featured.
Some refer to this as “ego bait”. Obviously there’s an element of flattery involved, but in my experience, the top curators prioritize content that genuinely helped or inspired them, rather than chasing big names with the widest reach.
3. Curating content is great for EEAT
Few people have direct experience with every topic they’ve ever written about.
But, since 2022, first-hand experience has become a prerequisite for ranking in Google.
Curating others’ lived experiences and knowledge in your content is a powerful way to build your EEAT and improve your rankings.
4. You become credible by association
We tend to categorize people according to their social group memberships – this is known as social categorization.
If you’re regularly associating yourself with respected thought leaders, your audience is more likely to group you with them, and hold you in higher regard as a result.
Mixing in your own content and opinion is important for building credibility, but be careful not to overdo the self-promotion.
Back to SQ:
“I don’t tend to include all of the blog posts we publish on our blog.“
5. You get closer to your customers and community
When you curate, you consume content holistically –like your customers– and stop being so introspective.
If you’re only consuming content from your brand or brand “friends”, there’s a limit to the value you can bring to your audience.
Content curators turn to their community to source content, so curating bridges the gap in two ways: by helping them consume like their customers, and by giving them a reason to connect.
6. When you curate, your content gets better
To create is to curate. All ideas are shaped and borrowed from somewhere – that’s how knowledge is acquired.
If I don’t curate, I tend to find my own content stagnates.
Curation introduces me to new ideas, reminds me of the things I have forgotten, allows me to build deeper, more informed arguments, and ultimately helps me produce better content – with a lot more in the way of information gain.
For instance, this blog started out as a simple list of content curation benefits, thunk up by yours truly.
But as I came across cool examples of novel content curation, it evolved into a more comprehensive (and hopefully, more interesting) guide.
“Another benefit of content curation is that I get to keep abreast of anything new in SEO and marketing, which informs my own work”
7. You build your personal “brand”
Curation gives you the chance to platform your own expertise and assert yourself as a thought leader.
Take a look at the search volume for one of the most prolific curators in SEO: Aleyda Solis.
Aleyda curates SEO news and insights across her newsletter, SEOFOMO, her podcast, Crawling Mondays, her owned social media channels, and industry talks.
As a result, her name now drives ~600 monthly organic searches, according to Site Explorer.
And over 19K “in content” mentions, according to Content Explorer.
Curation is about piecing together unrelated content to reveal new ideas and information.
You’re giving someone else’s content another shot at engagement – sometimes after a “failure” to launch.
“The same core information can be made more or less valuable by changing its format. Great ideas are sometimes locked away in places that render them inaccessible to people that would benefit from them.”
Here are 9 ways you can “talent scout” novel content, and carve out your own curation USP.
1. Pay attention to lesser-known voices
In every industry there are sources that audiences defer to for information and ideas.
Look beyond them.
Scout for “rising stars” and underground sources to give your curation exclusivity.
Mark Williams-Cook, Director at Candour and Founder of AlsoAsked, does just this when curating his newsletter: Core Updates.
“I’ve made a conscious effort not just to follow the ‘big names’, as there are some truly excellent SEOs that are very quiet on social media. I’d always recommend following someone if you see them putting out solid advice, even if you’ve never heard of them. I’ve made some good friends and excellent connections that way!”
This is probably something you’ll have to do manually at first.
I try to pay close attention to people leaving savvy comments on social media posts and industry communities.
2. Build an X list of “ones to watch”
Once you’ve found the right “ones to watch”, you can start building a list to refer back to whenever it’s time to curate.
SQ uses X lists and subscribes to others’ Substacks:
“I have my own Twitter list of marketers (getting poorer these days sadly) and follow other people’s substacks/newsletters and see if there are any links they recommend.”
3. Mine niche and atypical sources of information
Nicole DeLeon, Ed Zitron, Marie Haynes and other tech curators recently mined Google’s DoJ trial documentation to investigate “buried” information on how the search engine ranks content.
Search Engine Roundtable founder, Barry Schwartz, is always extracting content from Google rep social comments, Google developer docs, and Google’s Office Hours video series to curate hot-off-the-press news.
Techemails mines leaked tech company emails from court filings and curates them across social media and their website (p.s. they are preeetty eye-opening).
Finding and teasing out obscure information is a great skill to have when it comes to content curation.
Here are some more ways you can do that:
- Track updates in company documentation (e.g. brand Ts & Cs, Google Developer Docs, Anthropic Release Notes)
- Mine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request databases
- Monitor government data via fact finding bodies (e.g. Indeed curates content from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to inform content in their Hiring Lab)
- Study public datasets released by research institutions (e.g. Harvard Dataverse)
- Mine “hidden” or ephemeral content (e.g. podcasts, webinars, industry talks, seminars etc.) to curate quotes and promote relatively unheard information
- Monitor public announcements and press releases from organizations
4. Track down new and trending content
Be the first to break and curate news in your industry. Start by searching for industry-specific keywords in Content Explorer.
Then add filters to make sure you’re seeing the freshest and highest quality content.
In my experience, I find that:
- Adding a minimum Referring Domain of “30”
- Adding a minimum word count of “300”
- Sorting by “Date: newest first”
…shows me the newest and best SEO related content, but you should play around until you find what works in your industry.
Tip
When it comes to filtering, don’t get too prescriptive about it – remember, you want to find novel content that usually flies under the radar, so avoid being overly strict with minimum thresholds.
This next part is really important. Once you’re happy with your configuration, hit “Save filters” so that you can repeat this analysis for the next instalment of your newsletter, podcast, social post, article, or whatever else you might be curating.
With the Content Explorer, you’re searching for instances of a keyword in the title, content, URL or all of the above.
But relevant content won’t always contain the exact keywords or topics you’re searching for.
In which case, try searching for keywords in the anchor text linking to that content.
There’s a preconfigured search for this in Ahrefs’ Web Explorer. Just hit the “examples” tab, and select “Most quoted newly published pages about ChatGPT”:
This will load a full report of the most linked to pages about the topic “ChatGPT” over the last week. Then all you need to do is update the report with your chosen topic, and adjust any filters.
And hit “Save report”.
Another tip for breaking news was recently disclosed by SEO expert and founder of SEO blog Detailed, Glen Allsopp, on the Ahrefs Podcast (it’s a great episode – I highly recommend a full listen!)
He spoke about a technique that he refers to as the “iPhone Link Building” method.
“The reason I call it this, because it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter how old your website is, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been around. If you have a photo of the iPhone 16 before anyone else and you put that on [your site], the whole tech world is going to talk about it, right? You’re going to get links from every tech website on the planet. Doesn’t matter that [your site] has nothing to do with tech and gadgets. You’ve got the first iPhone link. People are going to talk about it. So I refer to it as the iPhone link building.“
To carry out “iPhone link building”, Glen sets up an alert using Visual Ping. This sends him a notification as soon as there’s an update on one of the webpages he’s tracking. If something new or interesting has changed, he’ll work this into his next piece of content.
5. Ask your network
Turning to your social network for examples of existing content is a great way to curate.
Here’s Chris Haines, Ahrefs’ Senior SEO Specialist, doing just this on LinkedIn…
And here I am posting in Women In Tech SEO (my #1 community) for contributions to my article: So You’ve Been Asked To Humanize AI Content
Often, Slack communities will dedicate a channel to self-promotion. This is another handy way to find new content to curate.
“In the Women in Tech SEO Slack group, we have a hashtag channel (#wts-amplify-me) that serves as a space for members to promote their work, and it’s wholesome to see lots of our members use it to highlight the work of others! This channel helps me curate content for our weekly WTSNewsletter. As newsletter creators, we are responsible for amplifying diverse voices, which was the driving force behind starting WTSNewsletter. The lack of diversity in industry newsletters motivated me to create our very own weekly newsletter that showcases the brilliant work of underrepresented individuals.”
Community content sourcing doesn’t begin and end with LinkedIn or Slack. Check out other pockets of the internet, including niche forums, Subreddits, Facebook groups, and Mastodon instances.
6. Bookmark everything
Some of my best articles have been inspired by the posts I’ve bookmarked.
Here are my top tips for bookmarking curated content:
Use web highlighters
Use a web highlighter plugin to bookmark interesting content for future curation.
Organize examples in a note taking app
Use a note taking app like Notion or Obsidian to organize your content examples.
Bookmark your saved social media content
You’ll undoubtedly have banked some great content on social media over the years, but navigating back to those archives can be a bit of a faff.
I bookmark mine to my browser so I can easily jump back in (e.g. LinkedIn “Saved”, X bookmarks, X advanced searches, TikTok saved, Instagram saved etc.)
7. Set up author notifications
Follow creators and journalists that inspire you. Subscribe to their channel, turn on notification bells on LinkedIn and X, and set up RSS feeds to get alerted whenever they push out new content.
Tip
When you’re searching for new content in the Content Explorer, check out the Authors tab for ideas on which thought leaders to follow in your industry.
8. Set up keyword alerts
Get notified as soon as on-topic content is published, with Ahrefs “Mention” alerts.
9. Use AI to extract and annotate content
AI broadly summarizes outdated content, and has a habit of forgoing (or entirely fabricating) references. In other words, it’s pretty terrible for curating unique content.
Instead, use it to extract, summarize, and investigate the content you’ve selectively curated.
Extract nuggets from “hidden” content
I used AI to extract quotes and insights from webinars, interviews, and YouTube videos. The post I wrote for SpinSucks was inspired by content mined from interview transcripts and bookmarked social media content, using Claude AI.
Reverse-engineer successful content formulas
I fed ChatGPT examples of top-performing blogs to understand patterns of success, and inform my opinion of what “good” content looks like, while updating the post: 6 Simple Blog Post Templates (Download & Edit Along.
We’ve covered a lot of ground, but there are a few extra details worth mentioning before you jump into curation.
Make sure you have a clear theme
Curation isn’t just about sourcing and presenting the most unique content you can find.
Value also comes from carefully selecting content that fits a central concept or theme.
“[Content curation] helps build my taste, which in my opinion, is the hardest part of curation, because most people don’t seem to understand the concept of “curation”, i.e. selecting the best, or what fits a theme. They just seem to shoehorn every article on the internet.”
Build your exclude list
Be discerning about the content you create. Set out rules as to the content or people you will/won’t include, using your brand guidelines for inspiration.
Repurpose your knowledge
Content curation is usually cheaper and easier to produce, but don’t treat it as a “one and done” activity. Repurpose the things you learn both internally and externally.
“We actually use the news – that Jack (Chambers-Ward) and I curate for the Core Updates newsletter – internally at Candour during one of our weekly meetings when we are discussing changes in the industry. So it’s been a helpful task to make sure the agency is always up to date!”
Final thoughts
Content curation isn’t a “set it and forget it” tactic. It’s an ongoing process that demands a reasonable amount of effort, but the payoff is worth it. That’s because:
- It’s a traffic magnet: Curated content can outperform original content in terms of organic traffic, because you’re cherry-picking the best ideas.
- It builds your E-E-A-T: By sharing valuable experiences, you’re signaling to users and search engines that you know your stuff. This can boost your rankings across the board.
- It’s a networking opportunity: When you share others’ content, they notice. We’ve built relationships with industry giants simply by featuring their work on our blog or weekly digest.
Great curation is about adding value. You can just reshare content verbatim, but you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to add your own insight, and explain why the content you’ve painstakingly curated matters to your audience.
In a world where 70 million blog posts are published every month, skilled curators stand out. They don’t just share content – they build communities, spark discussions, and become go-to resources in their niches.
If you’re giving content curation a try, experiment with different formats and track what resonates (our Content Explorer can help with that too), then watch your influence grow.
SEO
Stop Overcomplicating Things. Entity SEO is Just SEO
“Entity SEO”.
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Not only does the word “entity” sound foreign, it feels like yet another thing to add to your never-ending SEO to-do list. You’re barely afloat when it comes to SEO, but ohgawd here comes one more new thing to dedicate your scarce resources.
I have good news for you though: You don’t have to do entity SEO.
Why? Because you’re probably already doing it.
Let’s start from the beginning.
In 2012, Google announced the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base of entities and the relationships between them.
An entity is any object or concept that can be distinctly identified. This includes tangibles like people, places, and organizations, and intangibles like colors, concepts, and feelings.
For example, the footballer Federico Chiesa is an entity:
So is the famous British-Indian restaurant Dishoom:
Entities are connected by edges, which describe the relationships between them.
Introducing the Knowledge Graph helped improve Google’s search results because:
- Google could better understand search intent — People search for the same thing but describe it in different ways. Google can now understand this and serve the same results.
- It reduced reliance on keyword matching — Matching the number of keywords on a page doesn’t guarantee relevance; also it prevents crafty SEOs from keyword stuffing.
- It reduced Google’s computational load — The Internet is virtually infinite and Google simply cannot understand the meaning of every word, paragraph, webpage, and website. Entities provide a structure where Google can improve understanding while minimizing load.
For example, even though we didn’t mention the actor’s name, Google can understand we’re looking for Harrison Ford and therefore shows his filmography:
That’s because Hans Solo and Harrison Ford are closely connected entities in the Knowledge Graph. Google shows Knowledge Graph data in SERP features like Knowledge Panels and Knowledge Cards.
With this knowledge, we can then define entity SEO as optimizing your website or webpages for such entities.
If Google has moved to entity-oriented search, then entity SEO is just SEO. As my colleague Patrick Stox says, “The entity identification part is more on Google’s end than on our end.”
I mean, if you look at the ‘entity SEO’ tactics you find in blog posts, you’ll discover that they’re mostly just SEO tactics:
- Earn a Wikipedia page
- Create a Google Business Profile
- Add internal links
- Create all digital assets Google is representing on the page (e.g., videos, images, Twitter)
- Develop topical authority
- Include semantically related words on a page
- Add schema markup
Let’s be honest. If you’re serious about SEO and are investing in it, then it’s likely you’re already doing most of the above.
Regardless of entities, wouldn’t you want a Wikipedia page? After all, it confers benefits beyond “entity SEO”. Brand recognition, backlinks from one of the world’s most authoritative sites (albeit nofollow)—any company would want that.
If you’re a local business, you’ve probably created a Google Business Profile. Adding internal links is just SEO 101.
And billions of blistering barnacles, creating all digital assets Google wants to see, like images and videos, is practically marketing 101. If you’re a Korean recipe site and want to be associated with the kimchi jjigae entity, wouldn’t you already know you need to make a video and have photos of the cooking process?
When I started my breakdance site years ago, I knew nothing about SEO and content marketing but I still knew I needed to make YouTube videos. Because guess what? It’s hard to learn breakdancing from words. I don’t think I needed an entity SEO to tell me that.
Topical authority is an SEO concept where a website aims to become the go-to authority on one or more topics. Call me crazy, but it feels like blogging 101. Read most guides on how to start a blog and I’m sure you’ll find a subheading called “niche down”. And once you niche down, it’s inevitable you’ll create content surrounding that one topic.
If I start a breakdance site, what are the chances I’ll write about contemporary dance or pop art? Pretty low.
In fact, topical authority is similar to the Wiki Strategy, which Nat Eliason wrote about in 2017. There wasn’t a single mention of entities. It was just the right way to make content for the Internet.
I think the biggest problem here isn’t entities versus keywords or that topical authority is a brand-new strategy. It’s simply that many SEOs are driven by short-sightedness or the wrong incentives.
You can target a whole bunch of unrelated keywords that have high search volume, gain incredible amounts of search traffic, and brag about how successful you are as an SEO.
Some of the pages sending HubSpot the most search traffic has barely anything to do with their core product. A page on how to type the shrug emoji? The most famous quotes?
This is not to single out HubSpot—I’m sure they have their reasons, as explored by Ryan here—but to illustrate that many companies do the exact same thing. And when Google stops rewarding this behavior, all of a sudden companies realise they do need to write about their core competencies. They need to “build topical authority”.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater because I do see value in the last two ‘entity SEO tactics’. But again, if you’re doing something similar to the Wiki Strategy for your site, chances are you would have naturally included entities or semantically relevant words without thinking too much about it. It’s difficult to create content about kimchi jjigae without mentioning kimchi, pork, or gochujang.
However, to prevent the curse of knowledge or simply to avoid blindspots, checking for important subtopics you might have missed is useful. At Ahrefs, we run a page-level content gap analysis and look out for subtopics:
For example, if we ran a content gap analysis on “inbound marketing” for the top three ranking pages, we see that we might need to include these subtopics:
- What is inbound marketing
- Inbound marketing strategy
- Inbound marketing examples
- Inbound marketing tools
Finally, adding schema markup makes the most sense because it’s how Google recognizes entities and better understands the content of web pages. But if it’s just one new tactic—which I believe is already part of ‘standard’ SEO and you might already be doing it—then there’s no need to create a category to define the “new era” (voice SEO, where art thou?)
Final thoughts
Two years ago, someone on Reddit asked for an SEO workflow that utilized super advanced SEO methodologies:
The top answer: None of the above.
When our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Soulo tweeted about this Reddit thread, he got similar replies too:
And even though I don’t know him, this is a person after my own heart:
You don’t have to worry about entity SEO. If you have passion for a topic and are creating high-quality content that fulfills what people are looking for, then you’re likely already doing “entity SEO”.
Just follow this meme: Make stuff people like.
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