My SEO Journey: Liam Curtis from Kapwing.com – Improving Our Authority Score from 65 to 69 with a Small Content Team
My SEO Journey is a series where entrepreneurs and Indie makers share their honest SEO Journey filled with failure and success, and most importantly, proven results. Episode #168 features Liam Curtis from Kapwing.
Hi, I’m Liam Curtis, Head of Content at Kapwing, an online video editor used by millions of creators, marketers, and teams worldwide.
Over the past 10 months, I headed the relaunch of our content strategy, building a lean team of three employees (myself included) and improving our Semrush Authority Score from 65 to 69. This growth aligned with a rise in organic traffic from 5.2 million to over 7 million views per quarter, alongside record-breaking Google Search impressions.
SEO growth is essential to any business, but with a small team, it’s a grind. How do you consistently publish new blog content, optimize landing pages, write newsletters, manage social media, and execute marketing campaigns? Without programmatically producing everything through ChatGPT, that is.
We’ve all seen Canva’s remarkable 670% Search growth over the past five years, leading to monthly views around the 1 billion mark. But with 5,000+ employees, few of their SEO strategies are directly applicable to a scrappy content team navigating the trade-off between AI-driven scale and the time-consuming work of high-quality content creation.
That’s why I’m sharing what actually worked for us at Kapwing: real-world SEO strategies that meaningfully increased our traffic and authority, executed by a content team of just three.
Optimizing Metadata Tags with Intent
It’s safe to say that metadata tags alone won’t make or break your SEO, but they’re far from irrelevant. I learned this firsthand at GRV Media, where I worked across a network of 50+ high-traffic news sites.
When your business depends on the revenue brought in by article views, every small element that goes into the SEO of those articles is under the microscope. And metatags, I learned, were often a key topical authority signal to Google, yet an underutilized element on many websites.
At Kapwing, we tackled a similar issue by auditing and restructuring over 100 scattered tags into just 12 focused, keyword-driven categories. For example, tags like “audio editing,” “volume,” and “sound design” were grouped under a single, unified “audio production” tag. This not only made our site’s topical structure clearer to Google, but also gave our writers a shared taxonomy that aligned with search intent.
We didn’t stop there; we also optimized each tag landing page with keyword-rich titles, custom descriptions, and curated content that reflected the articles indexed beneath them. This improved our site’s topical cohesion and gave our Resources library a stronger internal framework for future content. Ultimately, it wasn’t just a technical fix; it created a content ecosystem where SEO strategy and editorial focus worked in tandem.
Doubling Down on Landing Page Updates
Unlike metatag updates, optimizing your landing pages can yield significantly greater gains in SEO performance, impacting crawlability, internal linking structure, and keyword relevance across your site.
In 2025, we prioritized updating and optimizing existing landing pages. This shift from creating new landing pages stemmed from a clear insight: our landing pages are our #1 traffic driver, yet many had lost visibility post-Google updates.
With 200+ pages, we built a prioritization model by evaluating all pages with a formula that combined:
- Clicks decrease (Search Console)
- Average position drops (Search Console)
- Position opportunities (Search Console)
- Conversion data (Amplitude)
Here’s why this strategy worked:
Existing Authority: Older pages had already accrued some authority (backlinks, age, user engagement history), meaning that a quality update could drive quick wins. Instead of starting at position #100 with a new page, we could take a landing page already ranking on page 2 or 3 and push it to page 1 with a thorough update..
Content Freshness: Google rewards content that stays up-to-date. By updating timestamps and adding current information, we tapped into “Query Deserves Freshness” ranking boosts for relevant topics. Users appreciated seeing current info in 2025, and while we rarely saw “immediate” lift on pages, there was movement within a few months.
User Intent Matching: Over time, search intent can shift or expand. Many of our landing pages, while once great, needed tweaks to fully satisfy what 2025 searchers were looking for. By adding new sections (e.g.expanding our FAQ section, giving more related use case examples), we made the content more comprehensive and user-friendly, which improved dwell time and lowered bounce rates.
In one quarter, we published only five new landing pages but focused our efforts on optimizing 58 existing ones with keyword-driven updates. This included a handful of strategic redirects where we merged pages to resolve keyword cannibalization. As a result, our domain authority improved from 66 to 67, and our views increased from 5.3 million to 6 million. That outcome validated the approach, and optimizing existing content became a core focus in the quarters that followed. Other SEO tasks, like metadata improvements, were prioritized only when bandwidth allowed.
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Making Internal Linking Intentional
Before we revised our strategy, internal links were often added haphazardly, without clear purpose or consistency. This not only confused users but also made it harder for Google to understand our site’s topical structure. Drawing from Google’s E-E-A-T framework, specifically the “T” for Trust, we decided to overhaul our approach with a more deliberate system.
To me, the “Trust” in E-E-A-T had become diluted over the years through the misuse of internal links, padding articles with a sea of deep-blue text under the misconception that more links automatically meant better SEO. Personally, I find the experience of tiptoeing through a link-ridden article (like many on sites like the Daily Mail) frustrating. Clicking the wrong phrase often takes you to a page that barely relates to the original content. That’s not just poor UX, it’s untrustworthy and unreliable!
We shifted from quantity to quality. Instead of linking on the basis that it was “good for SEO,” we emphasized adding links only when they provided clear value to the reader. We challenged writers to ask: Would a reader find this link genuinely helpful? Does it naturally support the main topic? Does it improve navigation, or is it just SEO filler?
One example: our article on ChatGPT image generation. Instead of sprinkling links to unrelated blog posts, we tied in relevant guides, tool pages, and our “ChatGPT” tag page, creating a clear topical hub. Similarly, we standardized anchor text: “TikTok” always links to our /tag/tiktok page, while phrases like “online video editor” consistently point to our homepage or relevant tool pages.
To support this at scale, we created an Internal Linking Guide for Writers, with rules and examples. This included a set list of core pages to link to and specific anchor text to use. We also emphasized Improved Anchor Text Placement, encouraging writers to use descriptive phrases that signal contextual relevance and reinforce the site’s content architecture.
Given that Google’s John Mueller has called internal linking “super critical for SEO… one of the biggest things you can do on a website,” we saw this as low-hanging fruit. The result? Stronger topical clusters, more helpful navigation paths, and a clearer, more trustworthy site structure.
Creative Backlink Campaigns
Getting high-quality backlinks is notoriously one of the hardest parts of SEO, especially for small teams. At Kapwing, we leaned into what we called “backlink stunts”: creative, time-sensitive campaigns or data-driven experiments designed specifically to earn press coverage and links.
This wasn’t a new idea at Kapwing. In the company’s early years, our founders launched a series of offbeat, high-appeal projects, like a wildfire map, a “Museum of Websites,” and even a Rick Astley prank generator — all hosted on our main domain. These simple but timely ideas attracted wide media coverage and earned hundreds of backlinks. That ethos stuck with us: make something newsworthy, even if it’s adjacent to the core product.
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“This is such a simple idea but very well executed. I’ve been powering through this giant list of backlinks for a few hours and already have loads pointing to my site. Link Chest is an essential tool for early stage link building.”
In 2024–2025, we carried that mindset forward with three standout backlink campaigns:
Spotify Wrapped Template
Each December, we publish a customizable “Spotify Wrapped” meme template. Since Spotify doesn’t announce its launch date in advance, success hinges on Google Trends monitoring and reaction speed. We track Wrapped-related search traffic across time zones (with team members in the UK and two U.S. regions), giving us a coverage advantage.
Thanks to smart timing, strong on-page SEO, and consistent updates, this page ranks well every year and earns links organically as Wrapped chatter spikes.If you’re a small team trying to ride cultural waves, focus on fewer high-impact projects so you have the bandwidth to track and jump on the right trends at the right time.
Netflix Wrapped
One of our most successful link-building campaigns came from a reactive PR strategy tied to Spotify Wrapped. At Kapwing, we’ve offered a free tool for users to create a Netflix Wrapped-style summary of their viewing habits for several years. It regularly earns traffic around year-end and supports our SEO through seasonal optimization.
In 2024, however, we spotted a rare opportunity: Spotify Wrapped was late, dropping a full week after the media’s expected launch window. Rather than wait, we pivoted quickly. Our team emailed over 50 publishers, pitching our Netflix Wrapped tool as a timely, audience-relevant feature to run while waiting for Spotify’s release.
Having worked as a journalist myself, I always advise Kapwing’s team to avoid generic phrases like “this is relatable to your audience” in their outreach. Editors know their audience better than you do; this isn’t a specific value point for them. Instead, focus on a value you offer them that is more actionable, be it timing, insight gaps, viral potential, or SEO lift. In our case, we positioned the tool as a way to extend their Wrapped coverage window, cluster around related topics, and provide internal links to existing Spotify content.
That small editorial reframing made a big difference. The result was 31 backlinks with an average Domain Authority of 72 (Ahrefs), including from TechCrunch. Even more valuable was the syndication effect, as TechCrunch’s coverage led to secondary pickups by sites like Android News, which likely found the story during their daily content scan.
Deepfake Search Report
Another strategy that worked well was building original, media-usable datasets. We compiled search volume data for over 100 “deepfake”-related keywords, analyzing results by country, U.S. state, and major city. We adjusted for internet penetration and Google market share, then visualized the findings in simple, press-ready graphics.
This gave journalists localized and global story angles, from “Deepfake interest rising fastest in Florida” to “Which country googles deepfakes the most?” The stunt earned 14 backlinks, including from Newsweek and The Mirror.
Of course, not every stunt was a hit, and a few ideas we were sure would go viral fell flat. But that’s part of the process.
Backlink success is often dismissed as luck, but in reality, I’ve found it usually hinges on four things:
- Timing
- A unique angle or dataset
- A clear value proposition to editors
- Outreach that treats journalists like collaborators, not favors
When executed with intention, even small teams can punch above their weight in link-building.
A Scoring System for SEO Prioritization
Perhaps one of the less glamorous yet vital parts of our SEO journey has been prioritization. Kapwing’s content/SEO team is small and very high-output – we’re expected to deliver big results with limited hands.
This means we can’t do everything, and choosing the right projects to focus on is critical. Over the past year, we developed a simple but effective prioritization framework to decide which SEO initiatives to pursue, ensuring that our effort always goes toward the highest-impact tasks.
- Impact: We estimate the potential upside of a project in terms of SEO —will it drive meaningful traffic, rankings, conversions, or backlinks if successful?
- Cost: We gauge how much time and resources it would take. A project that requires weeks of engineering work might score low on ease, whereas updating a blog post is relatively easy.
- Relevance/Alignment: We consider how aligned the project is with our broader business goals and whether it leverages our strengths. An idea might be cool for SEO, but if it’s off-brand or not helping our users, it would score low here.
Using these criteria, we actually score each idea on a simple scale and calculate a composite score. We then only commit to the top priorities, and consciously deprioritize the low-scoring ones.
The benefit of having a prioritization framework is that it keeps our small team aligned and efficient. We avoid chasing shiny objects or getting overwhelmed by the endless list of SEO to-dos.
Instead, we execute on what matters most, in a logical order. It also makes it easier to say “no” or “not now” to suggestions that don’t make the cut, with data to back up those decisions.
Final Thoughts
Scaling organic growth with a lean content team is hard, but not impossible. At Kapwing, we succeeded not by outproducing larger teams, but by prioritizing ruthlessly, staying technically sound, and being creatively resourceful.
If your team is in a similar position, I hope this behind-the-scenes playbook helps you shortcut some of the trial-and-error. SEO isn’t about gaming the algorithm; it’s about serving users better than your competitors, with consistency and care.
Content Strategist at Kapwing
