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13 Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

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13 Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Content marketing is hot today.

Look at the meteoric rise in interest over the past 20 years, according to Google Trends:

1-google-trends

Many small businesses have successfully grown using content marketing. Beardbrand, Luxy Hair, Lodge Cast Iron—the examples are endless. 

If you’re a small-business owner, you’re probably wondering if you should be using content marketing for your business too. 

In this post, I’ll run through some reasons why you should do content marketing, plus 13 ideas you can apply to your small business. 

Why should you do content marketing for your small business?

Here are three reasons why you should consider content marketing for your business.

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1. Get more traffic

No matter what you sell, there are only so many people who are willing and able to buy at any given moment. 

So if you’re only targeting people who are directly searching for your product, your traffic will be limited. 

Take, for example, our own toolset. We have five main tools:

2-ahrefs-tools

Altogether, these pages account for ~10,000 monthly visits, which is only around 1% of our total search traffic.

3-ahrefs-tools-traffic

If we had simply relied on those five pages, our business wouldn’t have grown. 

Instead, we’ve created hundreds of pieces of content that now rank on Google for more than 140,000 keywords and generate more than 930,000 search visits per month. 

4-ahrefs-organic-traffic

This is how we’ve grown our company to eight figures in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

2. Improve brand awareness

As we’ve established, most people don’t look for products and services directly. Instead, they look for solutions to problems or answers to questions. 

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So, when you create content around these problems or questions, you can use this opportunity to introduce your brand to your potential customers. A prospect knowing your brand means you’re at least one step closer to turning them into customers.

Here’s an example. Billy Blogger started a blog and is frustrated at how his blog traffic isn’t increasing. So he searches for “how to increase my blog traffic” on Google and discovers our article.

From there, he learns that one method to get more traffic is to write about topics with search traffic potential. He also discovers that he can use our free tools to do that. 

With just one article, we’ve turned Billy Blogger from someone who didn’t know we existed to someone who now knows our brand. Repeat that at scale, and you can see how content marketing works to improve brand awareness. 

3. Reduce your marketing costs

Content marketing can be cheaper over the long term. 

Take again, for example, the Ahrefs blog, which receives around 260,000 search visits per month. If we had to acquire all of that traffic from Google Ads, we would have to pay an estimated $355,000 per month or $4.2 million per year. 

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Considering that our content marketing team isn’t paid $4 million in annual salaries, we can say that content marketing is cheaper over the long term. 

Recommended reading:Why Is Content Marketing Important? 5 Reasons

13 content marketing ideas for small businesses

Convinced that you should be doing content marketing? Here are some ideas you can consider implementing.

1. Answer questions people are searching for

We’ve established this earlier: Potential customers don’t search for your products directly, but for questions they want answered. 

So your goal is to figure out what these questions are and create content that matches them. 

How do you find these questions?

The easiest way is to enter a relevant keyword into our free keyword generator tool and switch the tab to Questions.

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If you’d like to see more questions, then you can use a professional keyword tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

  1. Enter a relevant keyword into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Switch the tab to Questions
7-questions

As you can see, there are over 260,000 potential questions you can create content for. If you want to narrow the list further, set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to a maximum of 10. 

8-low-kd-questions

Eyeball the report and pick out those most relevant to your business. 

2. Create a statistics page

Journalists and bloggers are always looking for data to back up their claims. This is why businesses and websites publish data studies and original research—their goal is to get mentions and links from these authoritative websites. 

But as a small business, it can be difficult for you to publish original research. There is one way around it, and that is to curate data. 

That’s what we did when we published our post on SEO statistics. To date, it has accumulated a total of 2,700 backlinks from 1,300 unique websites:

9-seo-statistics-stats

It also ranks #1 for the keyword “SEO statistics”:

10-seo-statistics-serps

Learn how we created this page and built links to it in this video series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTF6OBwidhc&list=PLvJ_dXFSpd2u_ABxIRO6RVK3ucKyzn96Y&ab_channel=Ahrefs

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3. Write for other sites in your industry

There are important topics or questions you want to rank high on Google for. But some of these can be very competitive. As a small business, it can be difficult for you to compete, especially when it seems like other sites have endless budgets. 

But there’s one way around it: take advantage of these sites’ authority to rank. 

How? Most big sites are constantly looking for great content to publish. So use that opportunity to create a guest post for them and rank that page for the keyword you’re targeting. 

Here’s an example. A few years back, I wrote a guest post for SmartBlogger. Even though it’s been some time, that post still ranks #5 for the keyword “niche website” and generates around 250 monthly search visits:

11-niche-website-traffic

Since that post promotes our tools, we’re basically introducing our brand to more new people. 

12-smart-blogger-guest-post

Here’s how to find sites that you can potentially “guest post” for:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Search for your topic

For example, if we search for “keto diet,” you’ll see around 3 million pages you can target. 

13-keto-diet-content-explorer

But that’s too many pages to look through, so let’s set a few more filters to narrow down the results:

  • Website traffic: 500+
  • Words: 500+
  • Language: English
  • One page per domain – Checked
  • Exclude homepages – Checked
  • Exclude subdomains – Checked
  • Live & Broken – Only live
  • Filter explicit results – On
14-content-explorer

This reduces the number of pages to ~21,000. Since you’re looking for authoritative sites to “piggyback” on, you can also set a Domain Rating (DR) filter for sites with a DR of >60.

15-content-exploerr-results

Evidently, 4,000 pages is a much more manageable list. Go through the list and pick out those sites that are likely to accept your guest post pitch.

Then find the website owner’s or editor’s email, reach out, and pitch your topics to them. (Remember, it should be those you want to rank for!)

Recommended reading: Guest Blogging for SEO: How to Build High-Quality Links at Scale

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4. Rewrite or update outdated content on other websites

Riffing on the same idea: What if, instead of pitching an entirely new guest post, you pitch to rewrite or update an older piece of content on other websites? 

Not only can you rewrite the article to naturally include your product (with permission from the editors, of course), you can “piggyback” on these sites to rank for the keywords you want. 

Our chief marketing officer, Tim Soulo, suggested this some time back:

Here’s how you can find authoritative sites that have outdated content you can offer to update:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Search for a relevant topic
  3. Check Exclude homepages
  4. Check Exclude subdomains
  5. Toggle Filter explicit results
  6. Set the Language filter to English (or the language you write in)
  7. Set the Published filter to an outdated period (e.g., 2010 — 2015)
  8. Set the DR filter to something high, like 50
16-content-explorer

Look through the list and see if there are any articles you can offer to rewrite. Find the website owner’s or editor’s email, reach out, and pitch to them.

5. Update your content

As you’re updating or rewriting content for other websites, don’t forget to do that for your own too. 

Some of your content may not rank the first time, and that’s perfectly fine. Simply rewrite and try again. 

The easiest way to figure out which of your content needs rewriting is to use our free WordPress SEO plugin.

Then follow the guide below to learn the best way to republish your content.

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Recommended reading: Republishing Content: How to Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

6. Partner with influencers to create content around your brand

Check out this video: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSaZRXaLxBE&ab_channel=Wah%21Banana

It may look like a comedy sketch, but it’s actually a clever skit designed to promote a video projector. 

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Content marketing doesn’t always mean creating your own content. You can also partner with others, such as influencers, to create content for your brand too. 

From YouTube to Instagram, TikTok to Twitter, there are many ways you can partner up with influencers to create content. For example, a restaurant that invites influencers for a tasting session can get itself featured in a review.

17-sponsored-post

If mega influencers are out of your reach, don’t worry. You can always work with nano or micro influencers to reach more people at lower costs. 

Recommended reading: Influencer Marketing: Definition, Examples, and Tactics

7. Promote your content

You can’t create content and expect people to magically find them. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, you have to put it in front of your target audience. You have to promote it. 

Here’s what we do every time we publish a new piece of content: 

  1. Share it on all our social channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
  2. Include it in our weekly Ahrefs’ Digest newsletter
  3. Get each individual author to share and/or create a Twitter thread about it 
  4. Run ads (Facebook, Quora, etc)

You’ll have to do at least this much to get your content out there—or if you’re a small site, even more. I recommend following this checklist, which includes content promotion tactics to help you get the word out:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoVYweKH4ck&feature=emb_title&ab_channel=Ahrefs

8. Create a comparison page

Like it or not, your customers will compare. After all, they’ll always want the biggest bang for their buck. 

So what you can do is to create a “versus” page where you compare the pros and cons between your business and a competitor’s.

How do you know who your customers are comparing you with? Here’s how to find out:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter your brand name
  3. Go to the Matching terms report
  4. Under the Terms menu, choose “vs” (or some other term that signifies comparison)
18-vs-keywords

For example, if we’re ConvertKit, we can see that people are comparing us with other email marketing services like MailChimp, Flodesk, ActiveCampaign, and more. 

From here, you can choose to create one page each for every comparison. That means you’ll have a page for “convertkit vs mailchimp,” another for “flodesk vs convertkit,” and so on. 

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While that’s the most common way to do it, it’s not the only way. At Ahrefs, we decided to go counter-intuitive and create one page for all our comparisons.

19-ahrefs-vs-page

So far, it’s been working for us, and we’re ranking for most of the comparison-related queries:

20-vs-page-keywords

One page or many—the choice is up to you. 

9. Interview industry experts

No matter how familiar you are with your industry, it’s almost impossible to know and understand every inch of your niche. 

Here’s an example: We wanted to tackle the topic “Google penalties” on our blog. But we are fortunate enough to have never encountered a Google manual action. So even though we have SEO experts on our team, that makes us “unqualified” to talk about the topic. 

So we reached out and interviewed experts: 

21-google-penalties-experts

We have done this a number of times—for our posts on SEO consultants, SEO job descriptions, and more. You should do the same too.

Not only does this help you cover topics that you may not know much about, but you’ll also be in a better position to improve your website’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E‑A-T)—which are important for ranking higher on Google. 

Recommended reading: What Is EAT? Why It’s Important for SEO

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10. Target seasonal events

Events like Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, Singles’ Day, and Christmas are when people are more than happy to splurge. Creating content around these events can generate awareness for your business—and potentially capture these trigger-happy customers who will spend on your products. 

Here’s how to find seasonal topics to create content around:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter a few relevant keywords
  3. Go to the Matching terms report
  4. In the Include box, enter a few holiday keywords (e.g., Black Friday, Father’s Day) and choose Any word.
22-seasonal-keywords

From here, eyeball the list for relevant topics you can target, then create content that ranks for them.

Recommended viewing: Holiday SEO Tips to Maximize Organic Traffic

11. See what people are discussing on Reddit

Known as the “front page of the internet,” Reddit is a huge community with 430 million users. The beauty of Reddit is that it is neatly split into multiple sub-communities—known as subreddits—that span a variety of interests. 

That means that a community about your niche is likely on Reddit. If you can find out what people in your community are discussing, you can create content around those topics too. 

For example, let’s assume you run a site about the keto diet. If you browse through the subreddit r/keto, you’ll find a couple of cool topics you can write about. 

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Here’s something even better: take these topics and enter them into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to see if they have search traffic potential. 

25-vegetarian-keto-recipes-traffic-potential

Then create content that ranks for them. 

12. Create a glossary

If your industry has a lot of specific and difficult terminologies, you can consider creating a glossary that defines and demystifies them. 

For example, the SEO industry has a lot of terms that people outside the industry may not fully grasp. That’s why we recently published a glossary of SEO terms that people should know. 

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Since we published that post, its traffic has been gradually increasing:

27-seo-glossary-traffic

Ideally, your glossary should internally link to your own posts about those topics—just like what Wikipedia does. So if you don’t have those posts, it’s time to start creating. 

As you can see, the best part about creating a glossary is that it basically lists out all the topics you need to cover. With a glossary, your content calendar is practically set for the next year and beyond. 

13. Use Google Trends to find “out of the box” keyword ideas

Google Trends is a great way to discover topics that are trending in your industry. You can cover these topics before other sites do. To do that, simply search for a relevant keyword and scroll to the Related queries section.

For example, if we own a gym, we can search for “weight loss”:

28-google-trends

Scrolling through the list gives us a couple of good ideas we can target, such as “mike pompeo weight loss” and “alec baldwin weight loss.” 

We can take the idea further. If you notice, most of the trending terms are related to X celebrity/famous person. 

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Extrapolating this further, we can assume that beyond the current group of famous people seen on Google Trends, searchers are also looking for other famous people’s weight loss regimes. 

So here’s what we’ll do:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Search for the same term (e.g., “weight loss”)
  3. Set a Word count filter to four words (the length of a person’s name in the Western world + weight loss. If you’re targeting other countries, such as South Korea, you may want to extend it to five words).
29-keywords-explorer

Lo and behold. You’ll see around 150,000 keywords, most of them about a particular celebrity’s weight loss regime. They’re not of crazy difficulty either. These are all great topics to target. 

Final thoughts

The ideas above are a great way to kickstart your content marketing. But if you want to execute content marketing successfully as a marketing channel, you’ll need to have a strategy. 

So before you execute any of the above tactics, I recommend following the guide here to create your own content strategy. 

Any questions or comments? Let me know 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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