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How to Market Your Small Business (7 Easy Steps)

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How to Market Your Small Business (7 Easy Steps)

Do you want to start marketing your business but don’t know where to begin?

You’re not alone.

Small businesses make up over 90% of all businesses in the U.S., U.K., and Europe.

So if you’re struggling to get noticed or generate inquiries or sales from potential customers, this guide will show you how to market your small business effectively step by step.

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Step 1. Start with a product-market fit

Marketing begins with the products or services you sell and who they’re for. Here are the key steps:

  1. Specify what problem your product or service solves for your target customers
  2. List the top features your product or service will include
  3. Turn those features into benefits
  4. Create a one-page document or landing page outlining your product/service to get initial feedback from a small group of customers

If you want to dive deeper, read our detailed guide to creating product-market fit.

Now, let’s take a look at a few product-fit examples from different industries.

Services

This construction company has three clearly defined services: installing siding, installing windows and doors, and interior remodeling on residential properties.

Service page example #1

Each service page explains the service benefits and process and contains case studies, customer reviews, and a call to action (to get in touch).

Products (e-commerce)

Companies that don’t sell services sell products such as clothing, printed products, vehicle accessories, etc.

For example, this company sells products to enable van owners to customize the top, sides, and internal sections of their work van.

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Product page example #1

Software (or software as a service)

This company recently launched an app for creating email designs using predesigned email layouts and components.

It has summarized the features of the products, along with examples and directions for getting started, on its landing page.

Saas page example #1

Step 2. Create profitable prices

The next step to marketing your business is to consider and decide what to charge customers for your products or services so you make a profit.

For example, if you sell physical products, your pricing strategy may be to mark up the product’s manufacturing, shipping, and delivery costs to make a profit.

Ahrefs, a software product, is priced at $99, $199, $399, and $999 per month and is based on data costs, customer data usage, and the value it provides.

As an example of pricing services, a user experience (UX) design firm may charge more than a web design firm because its clients perceive greater value in UX design.

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And finally, consider what competitors charge and what customers are willing to pay.

Action: In our template, write down the products, services, and prices you want to market.

Step 3. Set a monthly goal

The next step to marketing your business is to have a clear goal so that you can structure your marketing efforts.

The three main marketing goals are to get new customers, sell to existing ones, and keep customers using and paying for your products or services.

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  1. Get new customers (Acquisition)
  2. Sell to your current customers (Upsell) 
  3. Keep existing customers (Retention)

1. Get new customers – Acquisition

If you’re starting in business or don’t sell to the same customers repeatedly, you’ll want to focus on getting new paying customers. That’s easier said than done, of course.

Getting new customers consists of four key steps as your customers go through your marketing funnel: You attract your target audience, show them your product as a solution to their problem, make them consider it, and give them a reason to buy.

The marketing funnel

Write down the number of new customers or the revenue you need each month.

2. Sell to your existing customers – Upsell

For more established businesses with a customer base, the goal may be to sell to their existing customers in addition to getting new ones.

For example, I pay Flywheel to host websites for clients. When I log in to my account, it promotes other services or add-ons to its existing customers.

Customer upsell example

List out any products or services you can provide for your current customers besides your main product or service.

3. Keep existing customers – Retention

Thirdly, if you have lots of customers, you’ll need to keep them happy or they’ll stop paying you. 

Many companies are so focused on getting new customers that they often forget current ones, i.e., love them and leave them.

Let’s say you have 1,000 customers paying you $50 a month; that’s $50,000 revenue a month.

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But if you’re losing 5% of customers a month; that’s

  • 50 lost customers every month.
  • $2,500 lost revenue every month.

To learn more, here’s our guide to increasing your retention (in other words, decreasing customer churn).

Action: In our template, add your goal—or goals if you have more than one priority.

Step 4. Choose places to sell your products or services

Think about all the places where you can sell your products or services.

For example, SaaS businesses, such as Ahrefs, usually sell subscriptions on their websites only.

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Whereas a fashion brand like Universal Works sells via its website, social channels, own stores, and partners online and off. 

Here are some of the main online and offline places to sell.

Online

  • Your website
  • Integrate your products on social media channels
  • Marketplaces
  • Partners

Offline

  • Physical stores
  • Telephone
  • In person

Action: Using our template, in the “Place” column, choose the places where customers can buy your products or services. 

Step 5. Promote your products or services

Here are some of the most common marketing channels you can use to promote your products.

1. Website

Your website is the home of your company, products, and services. Website traffic usually results from how well you promote your brand and products. In today’s world, pretty much everyone needs a website.

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This fashion brand promotes up to 60% off current products on its homepage to make way for the next season’s products.

E-commerce homepage example

This web designer is getting over 80% of her 5,400 visits to her website from direct traffic, no doubt a direct result of her TikTok followers and video views.

TikTok videos

2. SEO and content marketing

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of growing a website’s traffic from organic search results. If your target audience looks up information related to your products online, you should likely make SEO one of your marketing priorities. That’s the case for most businesses.

To market your business to search visitors, you need to do keyword research and create content and links. Here’s a high-level overview of what that involves:

  1. Enter a keyword related to your product or service into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to discover the questions people ask about your business and the keywords they use when searching online
  2. Create a content plan containing the keywords you’re going to target
  3. Use our content outline template to make writing and publishing content in your content plan easier
  4. Use these 15 tactics to get website backlinks, increasing your website rankings and traffic

For local business owners, head to the local SEO guide to learn more. E-commerce owners also need to apply specific e-commerce SEO techniques that are different from general best practices.

3. Email

There are two steps to marketing your business with email. First, you need to get subscribers onto your email list, and then you need to convert them into customers by sending emails.

Getting email subscribers

To get email subscribers, you can include a newsletter or content upgrade sign-up form using any number of email marketing solutions.

For example, this company has a newsletter subscription form at the foot of every page.

Newsletter subscription form example

I offer an incentive or content upgrade on some of my webpages in exchange for the reader’s email address.

Email content upgrade example

Convert customers by emailing them

Once you’ve built up a list of opted-in subscribers, then you can begin marketing to them.

In this case study, an e-commerce retailer earns 25% of its revenue by sending welcome, cart abandonment, win-back, and big spender email campaigns to its subscribers and customers.

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Here’s an email marketing campaign where the company lists four services that can help subscribers; then it includes links to its sales or booking page.

Email to subscribers example

4. Paid search

Paid search or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is where companies pay a fee each time someone clicks their adverts in the search results.

Paid search is an excellent option if you have marketing money to spend and you’re looking for immediate website traffic that can drive leads or sales.

For example, this report shows a company has derived over 46% of its revenue from paid search this year.

Google Analytics revenue per channel

Head over to our PPC marketing guide if you’re looking to start using paid search ads.

This fashion retailer is advertising with Facebook Ads.

Facebook Ads example

And it is also advertising with Google Ads.

Google Ads example

However, there are other types of advertising, including social media, print, direct mail, outdoor, and podcast advertising.

5. Partners, sponsorships, and affiliates

Many businesses use partners or affiliates to reach and promote their products and services to potential customers.

For example, you can sponsor the newsletters of people in your industry with over 10,000 email subscribers with ConvertKit’s new sponsorship network. Or you can follow our guide on finding and paying influencers to endorse your products or services.

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ConvertKit sponsor network

If you sell products, Shopify has introduced a program called Shopify Collabs that enables creators to partner with your company, create content about your products, and earn commissions when their audience purchases.

Shopify Collabs

6. In-app marketing

In-app marketing is a type of marketing where adverts or messages appear within software and mobile apps.

Every time you log in to Ahrefs, we promote the latest features to existing customers.

Ahrefs dashboard notifications

You can use a solution like Beamer to add in-app notifications to your website or application. 

7. In-store marketing

In-store marketing is the practice of promoting products and services at retail stores. This can include advertising on store shelves, signage, displays, point-of-sale materials, etc.

This skateboarding retailer uses its shop window to promote a winter sale to people walking past the shop on the high street.

Promotion sign on a large shop window

Action: In our template, add how you’re going to promote your products or services.

Step 6. Measure and review

In step #3, you set some goals. Now you want to see whether your marketing activities met these objectives.

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Here are a few examples of goals and how to measure them.

Goal: Sell products

If you are selling products using Shopify, you can see where your visitors came from, the products people looked at, best-selling products, average order value, and the conversion rate from the Analytics reports.

In this example, 26 sales primarily came from search and direct traffic; to grow sales, perhaps the business owners can consider PPC advertising next month.

Shopify Analytics dashboard

Goal: Get customers with Google Ads

If you’re using Google Ads to get new customers, you should focus on your cost per conversion: the cost of someone buying your product or the cost per new inquiry.

Google Ads cost per conversion

You do this by setting up conversion tracking at the start of the campaign.

Set up conversion tracking with Google Ads

Goal: Sell to existing customers with email marketing

If you use email to market to existing customers, use Google Analytics to track visitors to your site and their activities, such as purchases or leads.

Look under Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels, and you will see the number of visitors, transactions, revenue, or leads that came from email.

Ask your web developer or designer to set this tracking up for you.

Google Analytics channel conversions

Step 7. Repeat what works

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At the end of each month, review your marketing results and efforts, learn from any mistakes you’ve made, and repeat whatever worked for you in the past.

Final thoughts

For those looking to grow their business, this marketing guide will help you get started on the right foot.

It showed you how to market your company (starting with your products), set prices, set goals, find where to target customers, and promote your products or services. There is also a template to keep you on track.

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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