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Cannibalization’s Good Twin (SEO Study)

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Cannibalization's Good Twin (SEO Study)

At Ahrefs.com we’ve got 9.7k cases of multiple rankings. It’s when a site ranks for a keyword with more than one page.

Now, classic SEO theory says that if you rank with more than one page for a keyword, it’s a cannibalization issue, and you should fix it.

But when I spent a day carefully reviewing a sample of 80 keywords with multiple rankings, I found only one case that needed action.

So if all other cases were not bad, maybe they were actually good? Moreover, maybe you should target keywords with more than one page to squeeze out more traffic from a keyword?

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Keyword cannibalization: bad multiple rankings

Keyword cannibalization is when a search engine constantly exchanges ranking between multiple pages or when multiple pages rank simultaneously for the same keyword but are similar enough to be consolidated.

How cannibalization looks on a position history chart. How cannibalization looks on a position history chart.

These cases need fixing because Google will display only one page at a time or you could get more traffic by rolling content under one page.

Example: “seo case studies” 

For the keywords “seo case studies” and “seo case study”, we saw a group of blog posts constantly exchanging rankings in the SERPs.

Although each case study had a different URL, the phrase “case study” in each title and URL may have triggered cannibalization.

Position history for "seo case studies".Position history for "seo case studies".

This meant that whenever we published a new case study, the old one was dropped from the SERPs and substituted with the new one.

We fixed the issue by creating a bare-bones pillar page with internal links to all of our case studies. Google ranked the pillar page as the main result with a selection of case studies as site links.

As a result of consolidating, we rank better with one page than we ever did with several. We almost instantly ranked in the top 10 and have remained in the top 3, most of the time giving way only to Google’s page on the same topic. Some of the case studies even ranked as site links to the pillar page.

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Position history after creating a pillar page. Position history after creating a pillar page.

Example: “broken link building” 

For this keyword, we used to have two guides. As you can see below, these rankings didn’t swap, they ranked simultaneously in the top 10 for a long time.

Position history for "broken link building".Position history for "broken link building".

However, we managed to improve that result with a new guide that consolidated information from the old guides — this is the long pink line you can see in the chart below.

Position history for "broken link building" - after consolidating. Position history for "broken link building" - after consolidating.

So, this was a case of cannibalization because these pages were close enough in terms of content. In such cases, consolidating content can bring better results.

Keyword diversification: good multiple rankings

Keyword diversification is when two or more pages rank for the same keyword simultaneously, and there is likely no benefit in consolidating.

How diversification looks on a position history chart. How diversification looks on a position history chart.

There’s nothing to be fixed here. If Google ranked your site more than once, the system rewarded your content.

Example: “keyword rankings” 

For this keyword, we rank with:

  • A glossary article ranking in the featured snippet.
  • A landing page for a tool at #4 .
SERP overview for "keyword rankings".SERP overview for "keyword rankings".

Do the pages swap rankings? No, they’ve been ranking simultaneously for over half a year.

Position history for "keyword rankings".Position history for "keyword rankings".

Is there any benefit to consolidating? Unlikely. This way, we serve two kinds of intent: we cater to people who want to get a definition of the term as well as those who want to check their keyword rankings.

Example: “SEO audit” 

For this keyword, we rank with:

  • A blog article at #4.
  • A landing page for a tool at #7.
SERP overview for "seo audit".SERP overview for "seo audit".

None of the pages swap rankings.

Position history for "seo audit". Position history for "seo audit".

Consolidating them would make no sense because we would need to choose between catering to searchers who want a tool and those who want a guide.

Why rank once when you can rank twice, right?

Sure, if you rank two times in the top 10, you get traffic from both positions (as shown in traffic uplift in the table below). This may seem like an absolute gain in traffic, but it’s a bit tricky. In practice, the new traffic may not be worth it, and you’re also risking pushing down another valuable page.

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Let me illustrate this. I took a bunch of keywords where we ranked with 2 URLs in the top ten (otherwise, we’d hardly get any traffic) and looked at the click distribution.

  • Traffic uplift — the traffic we gained via ranking another page in top 10 (traffic to new page/traffic to old page).
  • Traffic share of the old page — traffic share of the page that ranked first for the keyword.
  • Traffic share of the new page — traffic share of the page that came later, i.e., the page that created diversification.
Keyword Traffic uplift Traffic share of the old page Traffic share of the new page
keyword search 1.94% 98.10% 1.90%
seo audit 37.74% 72.60% 27.40%
free seo tools 296.13% 25.24% 74.76%
affiliate marketing for beginners 6.63% 93.78% 6.22%
free keyword research tool 677.69% 12.86% 87.14%
keyword rankings 60.71% 62.22% 37.78%
how to become an affiliate marketer 2.39% 97.67% 2.33%
keyword difficulty 9233.33% 1.07% 98.93%

As you can see, pages that come later to the SERPs do not always get a bigger traffic share. Just by looking at this small sample, we can see that there are at least three possible scenarios:

  • The new page can outrank the old page, either by jumping into a higher position than the original page or pushing the old page lower. More traffic will go to the new page, and in some cases (because that also depends on the CTR), you will gain significantly more traffic.
  • The new page will outrank the old, but will get lower CTR, and less traffic. This is what happened in the case of “keyword rankings” — the featured snippet with a definition of a term ranked higher than a landing page with the free tool but got fewer clicks.
  • The new page won’t outrank the old page or will rank in site links. Then your diversification efforts will add a few percent of new traffic at best.

Keep in mind that:

  • All newly added pages ranked for their unique set of keywords, bringing in additional traffic not listed above.
  • We’re only talking about the quantity of traffic here. How qualified that traffic was is a different story.

First off, it’s not something you can fully control. In our case, most of those instances were accidents — Google’s hard-coded propensity to rank some sites multiple times on the same SERP.

But let’s say you see this great opportunity to rank twice in the top 10. It’s definitely possible, but again, a bit tricky. Based on my observations:

  1. The disparity in clicks between two ranking pages can be significant. Oftentimes, introducing a second page might result in only a marginal increase in traffic while potentially reducing clicks on the originally ranking page.
  2. It’s more challenging than the good ol’ one-keyword-one-page tactic because the odds are against you since the site diversity update.
  3. You may need more expensive types of content than what you already have ranking. For instance, a free tool that serves the intent better than an article that already ranks.
  4. Maintaining top organic rankings for two pages is more difficult than sustaining a single high-ranking spot. In the case of ahrefs.com, situations where a second page maintains a long stable position in the top 10 are rare (see image below).
Position history with volatile multiple rankings. Position history with volatile multiple rankings.

Most looked like this or worse — ranking and then dropping for months only to reappear for some reason.

Position history with even more volatile multiple rankings. Position history with even more volatile multiple rankings.

Another thing you might try is to double dip in a keyword by ranking videos for keywords with video SERP features or create a hub of definition pages (like our glossary) to rank for featured snippets that require a definition.

But there’s a hack for diversification, too: buy or launch another website.

Google may claim that they are very cautious about ranking the same site twice, but that does not seem to apply to the same business.

To illustrate, when our competitor acquired a popular SEO blog, Google didn’t care about the connection. It has been treating them as two different sites despite being the same business. As a result of diversification, that play allowed them to “double dip” on 8700 keywords ranking in the top 10.

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Content gap analysis from Ahrefs. Content gap analysis from Ahrefs.

Naturally, they’re not the only example. Glen Allsopp does a fantastic job at following the works of media giants who diversified so well that they literally dominated the SERPs within their niches.

Obviously, more popular keywords will have enough volume to distribute considerable traffic across the top 10. However, that traffic will largely depend on the CTRs, and these are different for each keyword.

If you’re using Ahrefs, open the Traffic share by page report in Keywords Explorer and you’ll get an estimation of how much traffic you can get from each position in the SERPs.

Traffic share by page report in Ahrefs. Traffic share by page report in Ahrefs.

This should give you a good idea of whether taking another position is worth the fight.

Going further, I checked if the metrics and characteristics below had any relation to keyword diversification.

No keyword is too popular for diversification

The median search volume for cannibalized keywords is virtually the same as for our single rankings (50 vs. 40), so we can infer that search volume doesn’t play a determining role.

Distribution of keyword volumes and median for single rankings and multiple rankings. Distribution of keyword volumes and median for single rankings and multiple rankings.

Diversify but make sure to align with search intent

Theoretically, you could rank multiple pages either by aligning with search intents already present on the SERPs or creating something unique but extremely valuable.

If I had to answer this question having only our data, I’d say “follow the crowd”. As you will see in a bit, multiple rankings can happen both with keywords with a single dominant search intent as well as those with a more mixed intent but none of our pages broke outside of already existing types and formats of content.

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To illustrate my point, here’s a breakdown of the same top 10 keywords you saw earlier, but this time with a search intent analysis (using our 3C’s framework). In all cases, our ranking content aligns with the existing content types:

Keyword Content types in top 10 Content format (if article) in top 10 Our ranking content (on Dec 5, 2023)
keyword search Landing pages (free and premium tools) #8, #10 (both free tools)
seo audit 7 articles, 2 landing pages, Guides #5 (guide), #6 (landing page premium tool)
free seo tools 7 articles, 2 landing pages (free tools) Listicles #4 (listicle), #7 (free tools landing page)
affiliate marketing for beginners 9 blog posts Guides #3 with 3 site links (all guides)
free keyword research tool 8 landing pages, 2 articles Listicles #2 (listicle), #4 (free tool)
keyword rankings 7 articles, 2 landing pages (free tools) 5 guides, 1 definition post, 1 listicle #1 (article), #4 (free tool)
how to become an affiliate marketer Articles Guides #3 with 3 site links (all guides)
keyword difficulty 5 articles, 2 forum posts, 2 landing pages (free and premium tools) Guides #1 (free tool), #5 (guide)

So when there are only article ranking, your best chances might be by diversifying with articles. And if you see different types of pages ranking, say an article and a landing page, there’s a chance of ranking by creating both these types.

Tip

If you’re an Ahrefs user, there’s a nifty AI feature in Keywords Explorer and Site Explorer that estimates the traffic share to each type of intent in the top 10. Check it out.

AI feature in Ahrefs for identifying search intents. AI feature in Ahrefs for identifying search intents.

You don’t need less specific keywords to diversify

We’d expect long-tail keywords to have fewer multiple ranking instances (be it cannibalization or diversification) because the intent would be more defined from the query.

To measure this, I compared word count distribution in keywords with single rankings and multiple rankings using boxplots.

Distribution of word count in keywords and median for single rankings and multiple rankings. Distribution of word count in keywords and median for single rankings and multiple rankings.

As you can see, the boxplots are almost identical, so no correlation could be at play here.

However, an interesting takeaway here is that if we look at a histogram of word count frequency in the multiple URL data set, we see that most keywords occupied the 3–4 word count range. That indicates ranking multiple times for quite specific search queries is definitely possible.

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Word count histogram for multiple rankings. Word count histogram for multiple rankings.

Surprisingly, multiple rankings were more common for high KD keywords

I also wanted to see if it would be harder to get multiple rankings for keywords with high KD value (Ahrefs metric), i.e., keywords with SERPs dominated by pages with a strong backlink profile.

Again, I compared multiple rankings with single rankings.

Distribution of keyword difficulty and median for single rankings and multiple rankings. Distribution of keyword difficulty and median for single rankings and multiple rankings.

Here, we can see a clear difference. The median of multiple rankings is way higher than single rankings (64 vs. 37).

One thing is for sure with such a result—you can rank multiple times, even for highly competitive keywords.

Final thoughts

Let’s sum up.

Multiple rankings in Google create two effects: cannibalization and diversification.

This means that classic SEO theory is wrong—you don’t need to go and fix each keyword with multiple rankings.

This also means that you can potentially take advantage of Google’s propensity for multiple rankings and can get more traffic out of a keyword. That said, I’d consider it a pro move, which may have a high opportunity cost compared to targeting some other keyword with just one page. That’s because:

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  • The additional rankings may not last long.
  • You may “outrank yourself”, and the page you outrank will get fewer clicks.
  • You may need more expensive types of content than what you already have. For instance, a free tool that serves the intent better than an article that already ranks.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, find me on X or LinkedIn.



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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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