Longer-term, most companies with serious SEO traffic acquire it in one of four ways:
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.
performance
Organic traffic and referring domain growth for the Ahrefs blog.
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 veterinary email list 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:
The Ahrefs blog
The Intercom blog
The Ramp blog
The Buffer blog
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.
referring domains
Organic traffic and referring domain growth to Zapier’s apps directory.
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:
Zapier’s app directory
Wise’s currency conversion pages
Ahrefs’ top websites list
Further reading
Programmatic SEO, Explained for Beginners
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.
organic traffic
Organic traffic and referring domain growth to Canva’s design templates.
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:
Canva’s design templates
Reforge’s product marketing artifacts
Webflow’s website templates
Perplexity’s user-curated articles
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.
Organic traffic and referring domain growth to VEED’s free tools
Organic traffic and referring domain growth to VEED’s free tools.
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 backlink checker
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:
VEED’s free video editing tools
Ahrefs’ free SEO tools
Shopify’s free small business tools
FAQs
Is SEO dying?
SEO isn’t dying, but it is changing. ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and other LLMs offer an alternate way for users to access information online. AI Overviews have the potential to reduce the number of people visiting websites from search results. AI-generated content is increasing the competition in many search results.
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?
There are four main ways to create, each with pros and cons:
In-house: Creating content yourself offers the greatest control over quality, but necessitates a ton of time and knowledge to create.
Freelancers: Relatively affordable but require lots of sourcing writers, management, quality control, and editing.
Agencies: Offer a done-for-you service that often benefits from experience working across dozens of similar companies, but can be very expensive.
AI content generation: Extremely cheap to create but still requires marketing and SEO expertise to get good results. Publishing bad AI content can have a negative impact on your SEO.