  We present a simple holographic QCD model that provides a unified description
of vector mesons and nucleons in a confining background based on
Einstein-dilaton gravity. For the confining background we consider analytical
solutions of the Einstein-dilaton equations where the dilaton is a quadratic
function of the radial coordinate far from the boundary. We build actions for
the 5d gauge field and the 5d Dirac field dual to the 4d flavor current and the
4d nucleon interpolator respectively. In order to obtain asymptotically linear
Regge trajectories we impose for each sector the condition that the effective
Schr\"odinger equation has a potential that grows quadratically in the radial
coordinate far from the boundary. For the vector mesons we show that this
condition is automatically satisfied by a 5d Yang-Mills action minimally
coupled to the metric and the dilaton. For the nucleons we find that the mass
term of the 5d Dirac action needs to be generalised to include couplings to the
metric and the dilaton. Using Sturm-Liouville theory we obtain a spectral
decomposition for the hadronic correlators consistent with large $N_c$ QCD. Our
setup contains only three parameters: the mass scale associated with
confinement, the 5d gauge coupling and the 5d Dirac coupling. The last two are
completely fixed by matching the correlators at high energies to perturbative
QCD. We calculate masses and decay constants and compare our results against
available experimental data. Our model can be thought of as a consistent
embedding of soft wall models in Einstein-dilaton gravity.
