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The 9 Best Speech-to-Text Apps in 2023 (Tried & Tested)

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The 9 Best Speech-to-Text Apps in 2023 (Tried & Tested)

Most speech recognition apps have no trouble transcribing a native speaker being recorded with a pro microphone in a quiet room. This isn’t a challenge.

So to test them more thoroughly, I created a “nightmare” recording of two non-native speakers with loud city background noise.

How did they fare?

Let’s find out.

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Otter.ai homepage

Otter was one of the most frequently mentioned solutions when we asked for suggestions on Twitter and in the Ahrefs community. And for good reason. It is easy to set up, has an intuitive interface, and offers clear pricing.

Unique features

What stands out from the rest is the app’s ability to record online meetings and transcribe them—simply by pasting the meeting URL. But you can also import a video/audio file or record audio right in the app.

Besides, you can connect your calendar to never miss a meeting.

Transcript quality

I got decent results, but there was a lot to edit too.

It didn’t get some names right. But I can’t blame any tool for not picking up “Ahrefs” or “Tim Soulo” 100% of the time.

Otter.ai transcription results

One thing I found is that after it notified the transcriptions were ready, it might still do something in the background (adjust time stamps, tag speakers, etc.). Like a student still scribbling on a test paper while passing it to the teacher.

Pricing

You can start for free and upgrade to a paid plan later. You can import up to three files and record 290 minutes of meetings before you need to upgrade (as of April 2023).

Rev.com homepage

Setting up an account was a no-brainer. I found the interface easy to navigate as well. One personal remark is that it felt a little too “cold” to use since I saw things like “Place Order,” “Billing,” and “Invoice” way too often. 

You might get an impression that it was designed by an accounting team (as opposed to Descript that comes next in this roundup).

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Unique features

Besides auto-generated transcripts, Rev offers live captions for Zoom meetings. You also have the option to place an order for human transcriptions.

Transcript quality

Poor audio with city noise was a bit too much for Rev. Some words were missing, while others were misrecognized. As a result, some paragraphs didn’t make much sense, while others were fine.

Rev.com transcription results

Pricing

You can transcribe the first audio file (up to 45 minutes) for free. I got a bill for $1.25 with a discount that resulted in a total of $0.00. Thanks, accounting team. 😉

Rev also has a 14-day trial of its paid plan. But that was tricky to find. To locate it, you need to go to the footer of the homepage and look for it under “Services.”

Footer of the homepage, via rev.com
Descript's homepage

Descript welcomed me by name (which was a nice coincidence). The main thing you have to know is that it is a standalone software rather than a web service. It is much more than a speech-to-text converter. It’s basically a video editing tool. And there’s definitely a learning curve. But thankfully, onboarding is extremely funny and engaging.

Descript's onboarding is interactive and engaging

Unique features

As I mentioned, Descript is more of a video editing tool that is good with transcribing. I’d call it “Canva for video/captions.” You can add B-rolls, effects, animations, and more.

You can easily drag and drop and basically produce a complete video with its help. But if you just need a transcript or captions of a video or audio, you can do that too.

Transcript quality

My sample audio had quite muddy results. At times, it had difficulty recognizing abbreviations (e.g., SEO). I also had a problem with removing filler words like “uh” and “um.”

I found that if I didn’t choose an option to remove them, they, um, just stayed there even though I didn’t need them most of the time. But if I did choose to remove them, it occasionally ate up parts of other words, causing even more trouble.

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Also, it couldn’t recognize parts that a human being would have no problem understanding just from context, e.g., “Jack of all trades” became ‘“jackal, trades.”

On the bright side, I believe you can still understand what the text is about.

Descript transcription results

Pricing

You can start with basic functions for free and upgrade if needed.

MacWhisper app on gumroad.com

MacWhisper is a transcription tool powered by Whisper. It’s an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system developed by OpenAI, the same company that brought us ChatGPT.

As OpenAI states on its website:

Whisper is trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.

Whisper is not something you can simply “run” as is. What’s more, it is pretty complicated to set up if you do want to run it yourself. Github, Python—you get the gist.

Luckily, there are tools like MacWhisper that take this off your shoulders and let you use the power of AI in a simple user interface.

Unique features

Just plain speech-to-text recognition with time stamps. Unfortunately, it doesn’t auto-tag the speakers.

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Transcript quality

When you run the tool, you have to choose a “model” to work with. Basically, the lighter the model, the quicker it will run. But larger models will produce better results. Also, in MacWhisper, those larger (better but slower) models are only available in the paid version.

I decided to start with the free “small” model, which was stated to have “normal speed with good accuracy.”

It was OK, but no better than the competitors. I assumed it would work fine with high-quality audio, but not with the horrible examples I fed to it.

“AI is overrated,” I thought. But before closing the Mac and switching back to my dear Windows PC, I decided to give the “large” model a try.

And you know what, AI is not overrated. I found the results to be much better than anything else.

The transcript was really, really good. It even got things like “Ahrefs” and “SaaS” right! Though still not 100% of the time.

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MacWhisper transcription results

Pricing

You can run smaller models for free. For a large model, you’ll need to purchase a license.

AI Transcriptions by Riverside homepage

This tool is the easiest to use. Simply drag and drop your file—then it’s ready. It takes some time to process, though.

Unique features

Nothing besides downloading a transcription.

Transcript quality

My first impression was that the results were perfect because, visually, it delivered a confident-looking text:

AI Transcriptions by Riverside transcription results

But after proofreading, I realized that it simply did not include the parts it failed to recognize—sometimes several words in a row.

Pricing

It’s free to use.

Adobe Premiere Pro homepage

Premiere Pro is not exactly a “transcription tool” but rather a video editing software. I’m including it because I assume that some companies may already have it in their arsenal (like we do).

To get to the transcription feature in Premiere Pro, just go to the “Captions and graphics” workspace and click “Create transcription.”

Premiere Pro interface—you can generate transcriptions in the "Captions and graphics" workspace

Unique features

If we take only speech recognition into account here, what it does well is creating precise time stamps, auto-tagging the speakers and, if needed, automatically adding an editable captions track to a video project.

Transcript quality

Let’s be straightforward: I found the noisy audio transcript to be a failure. I couldn’t comprehend what people were talking about in the first place.

Adobe Premiere Pro transcription results

Still, I think this feature can be really helpful if you are creating captions from high-quality audio. I used it myself several times and had nothing to complain about when the recording quality was good.

Pricing

You need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to use Premiere Pro.

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Happyscribe.com homepage

While signing up and uploading files is rather straightforward, you have to spend some time answering questions about you and your company before you can finally get to the tool itself. And no, you can’t skip typing in your company name, your role, and your company size.

But once you get through this, the interface is clean and intuitive.

Unique features

You can generate a transcript or captions for video or audio. There is also an option to request a manual review of the transcript. Alternatively, you can generate subtitles in a different language, so you have transcription and translation in one click.

Happy Scribe features include transcription, subtitles, and foreign language subtitles

Transcript quality

Happy Scribe did a really good job transcribing the audio. It had no problem with words like “SEO” and “SaaS” (obviously the weakest point for many tools). It could also auto-tag the speakers, which might be helpful in certain situations.

Happy Scribe transcription results

Pricing

I could test one file for free. After that, I would need to buy credits to be used for each minute of video or audio transcribed.

Sonix.ai homepage

Sonix is a tool for automatic transcriptions, translations, and integration with meeting apps.

Unique features

Besides meetings integration, which is almost a given for most tools, AI summary generation is an interesting feature (in beta as of April 2023.) But I already got impressive results from it.

AI summary from Sonix

You also get some extra tools to work with video captions—a timeline view and an option to split captions into several lines. You can also import an existing transcript, and Sonix will sync it with the audio.

Transcript quality

Sonix has a custom vocabulary feature. I found that helped a bit with names like “Tim Soulo” and “Ahrefs,” but it didn’t work 100% of the time. It mostly did well. But at times, it mistook SEO for CEO and returned the word “Excel” seemingly out of nowhere.

The transcript made sense in general but required quite a lot of edits if it needed to be perfect.

Sonix.ai transcription results

Pricing

Sonix has a free trial for 25 minutes of transcriptions. After that, you need to purchase pay-as-you-go credits or get a subscription.

Notta.ai homepage

Notta is yet another transcription service that works for both real-time meetings and existing recordings.

Unique features

Besides transcription, Notta focuses on streamlining certain workflows and offers features such as calendar sync and scheduler (in beta as of April 2023).

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Transcript quality

Background noise and poor audio quality were not deal breakers for Notta. The transcription results turned out mostly OK but still had some problems.

Notta.ai transcription results

Sentence structure was sometimes a bit weird, certain words went missing, and my favorite “Jack of all trades” part wasn’t that neat this time.

Inconsistency in Notta's transcription

Another thing worth noting is that, for some reason, it failed to recognize two speakers, and the whole interview was tagged as “Speaker 1.”

Pricing

You can start with a free basic subscription and try a three-day trial of the paid plan, Notta Pro.

Final thoughts

As you can see, there are plenty of tools to choose from. Still, it seems that OpenAI stirred things up a bit by releasing a free ASR (automatic speech recognition) system, which I found to be considerably more capable than others.

But pure speech recognition quality is just one factor. Maybe you do need to record your Zoom meetings (Otter), work with captions in a large video project (Premiere Pro), or quickly create a Canva-style video (Descript).

Also, I need to stress that I was trying to push these tools to the edge by giving them the worst-case scenario recording. For more natural uses, the differences in the outcome might be much less noticeable.

It’s great to see that there are so many options out there, and I hope this review will help a bit in finding the one that is perfect for you.

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Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.



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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?

In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.

Price: Free

Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.

Most common reporting use case

GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.

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As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:

  • Total Impressions
  • Average CTR
  • Average Position
gsc-performance-overviewgsc-performance-overview

Tip

If you’ve signed up for AWT using Google Search Console, you can view your GSC performance data in Ahrefs by clicking “GSC Performance” from the main dashboard.

But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.

organic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-yearorganic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-year

Favorite feature

One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.

google-search-console-indexed-pages-reportgoogle-search-console-indexed-pages-report

If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.

Price: Free

Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.

Most common reporting use case

Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.

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Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.

Such as:

  • Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
  • Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
  • Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
  • Social media platformsFacebook, Reddit, and Twitter
  • Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage

Sidenote.

If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks

google-looker-studio-partner-connectorsgoogle-looker-studio-partner-connectors

Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:

ahrefs-seo-audit-dashboardahrefs-seo-audit-dashboard
Ahrefs Google Looker Studio integration

With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.

Favorite feature

The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.

Price: Free for 500 URLs

Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.

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Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.

screaming-frog-user-interface-screenshotscreaming-frog-user-interface-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.

Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.

Favorite feature

Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs. 

If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.

screaming-frog-api-accessscreaming-frog-api-access

Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.

Price: Free

Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.

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when-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustrationwhen-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustration

For example, you could use our:

Most common reporting use case

One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.

With AWT, you can:

  • Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
  • See the performance of your website
  • Check all known backlinks for your website
ahrefs-overviewahrefs-overview

Favorite feature

Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.

If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).

Price: Free

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.

Most common reporting use case

For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.

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ahrefs-seo-toolbar-overviewahrefs-seo-toolbar-overview

With the free version, you get the following features:

  • On-page SEO report
  • Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
  • Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
  • SERP positions
  • Country changer for SERP

The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.

If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.

severity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbarseverity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Favorite feature

The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.

indexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbarindexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.

Price: Free

Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.

google-analytics-screenshotgoogle-analytics-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.

Favorite feature

You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.

Price: Free

Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.

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Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.

google-slides-screenshotgoogle-slides-screenshot

Most common reporting use cases

The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.

Favorite feature

One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.

share-video-chat-google-slidesshare-video-chat-google-slides

This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.

Price: Free

Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.

Most common reporting use cases

Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.

Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.

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Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.

bbq-google-trends-graphbbq-google-trends-graph

Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.

Favorite feature

Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.

google-trends-comparison-examplegoogle-trends-comparison-example

Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.

You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.

regional-trends-via-google-trendsregional-trends-via-google-trends

Final thoughts

These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.

The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.

Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.

These findings include:

  • When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
  • 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
  • Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.

Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.

As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.

High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects

The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.

The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.

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The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.

This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.

The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.

Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results

With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.

When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.

Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.

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New Competition From Unexpected Sources

The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.

On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.

An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.

Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search

The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.

Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:

“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”

Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.

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Methodology & Limitations

To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.

The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.

While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.

Why We Care

The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.

Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.

SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.

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As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.

How This Could Help You

While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.

Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:

  • As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
  • Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
  • Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
  • Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
  • Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.

Looking Ahead

While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.

By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.


Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

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