Welcome to another edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

If you missed it, we’re organizing a conference from 24 to 25 October this year in Singapore! Early bird tickets are on sale now, so grab them before prices go up. 

If you’re curious about what the conference venue looks like, here’s our CMO Tim Soulo giving you a tour. It’s an absolute stunner of a venue. (“Cyberpunk vibes”, someone said on LinkedIn.)

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the venue and our conference.

Alright, let’s kickstart this week’s newsletter. Memes first, of course.

Meme of the week

Is Google Search Console next to be “killed by Google”? Stay tuned.

Important SEO news

• The June 2024 Google spam update is done.

• Google Search Console’s Performance report has a bug and is delayed. They say they’re fixing it though. 

Best of the week

7 Content Automations Used by Real Content Pros: Mateusz asked three “in-the-trenches” marketers to share their automation workflows. And they did. I’m not even joking—Eric Doty, the content lead at Dock, shared five actual screen-share videos on how he runs his automations. (Also, it seems like all three use Airtable as their central base of operations.)

2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For every 1,000 US Google Searches, only 374 clicks go to the Open Web. In the EU, it’s 360: What it says on the tin. Check out this chart:

How Mid-funnel Content Can Be Your Secret SEO Weapon: There are now fewer top-of-the-funnel searches (see above). There are also fewer clicks for bottom-of-funnel keywords as Google inserts itself in the conversion process. For SEOs, the murky in-between—MOFU—is where opportunities still lie. Despina shares six MOFU content ideas that will spice up your strategy.

9 Surprising Takeaways From Analyzing HubSpot’s SEO Strategy: I like that HubSpot HubSpot’s Email Signature Template Generator gets around 134K monthly organic visits. Most content teams don’t think of free tools as ‘content’, but if done well (and targeted at a keyword), you can get so much search traffic and even backlinks. (We’ve done the same too at Ahrefs.) Speaking of free tools:

Luggage Losers: This page shows a live ranking of airlines by how much luggage they are losing right now. It was done out of spite by levelsio, an indie hacker, but you can see how this could be a project done by a travel site like Skyscanner. Imagine the number of backlinks and search traffic they would have gotten. It could be pitched to media as part of digital PR too.

Lazy Work, Good Work: This quote encapsulates the post: “The point is that productive work today does not look like productive work did for most of history. If your job was to pull a lever, you were only productive if you were pulling the lever. But if your job is to create a marketing campaign, you might be productive sitting quietly with your eyes closed, thinking about design. The problem is that too many workplaces expect their knowledge workers to pull the proverbial lever – today in Microsoft Office form – 40+ hours a week when they’d be better off doing things that look lazy but are actually productive. The result is that most people have thought jobs without being given much time to think, which is the equivalent of making a ditch-digger work without a shovel.”

Till next time ;)
Cheers,