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The Basics Every Business Owner Should Know

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The Basics Every Business Owner Should Know

This article is an introduction to marketing for small-business owners, solopreneurs, and beginner marketers. Our goal is to help you understand the key concepts of marketing without unnecessary jargon.

This guide is going to be packed with information. But keep in mind that we’re only scratching the surface here. So feel free to follow the links to other articles that dive further into topics you’re most interested in.

But first, here’s what we’ll talk about:

Here’s how the American Marketing Association (which reviews the definition every three years to keep it timely) defines it:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

If that definition sounds a bit complex, here’s the gist of it. What this definition is trying to tell us is that marketing is not only about promoting something, but it’s also about creating desirable products and services and distributing them in a way that increases their attractiveness.

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Why is marketing important?

Businesses transfer (sell) goods or services to customers in exchange for value (money). Sounds easy. But here’s what can go wrong for a business:

  • The customer may not know about the product/service.
  • Even if they know it, they may not have a desire for it.
  • Even if they know and have a desire for it, they may choose to buy from another business.
  • Even if a business manages to go through all the steps to transfer its goods, the customer may not be satisfied enough to come back, buy again, or recommend the business to others.

Marketing is a business practice meant to address all those issues, such as generating awareness through generating desire, fostering customer loyalty, and encouraging advocacy. In other words, because marketing connects the business with its customers, there can be no sales without marketing.

So now we know what marketing is and why it is important. But what does marketing actually do? What are the main roles or key areas of marketing?

For decades, marketers have been answering these questions with the four Ps of marketing:

  • Product – What you sell
  • Price – How much you sell it for
  • Place – Where you sell it
  • Promotion – How you get customers

Let’s dig in.

Product

One of the roles of marketing is co-creating the product. In fact, this is where all marketing starts.

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Every product development process needs to take market conditions into consideration. Things like who the customer is, what product features the market demands, who the competitors are, and how to do better than these competitors. We can answer these and similar questions during market research.

Discovering what to build is a critical stage in marketing and in business. That’s because it’s virtually impossible to effectively market a product that doesn’t fit the market. Conversely, a product that can satisfy an existing demand in a promising market doesn’t need complicated or pushy marketing tactics.

So, to give you a taste, here’s how Ahrefs (our product) matches against some fundamental questions that marketing answers in this area:

4 Ps of marketing: product fundamentals. Table with questions on left and corresponding answers on right

Price

A good price is one that your target audience can afford and makes your business profitable. This is easier said than done. But marketing is here to help.

Setting a price point arbitrarily is rarely a good idea. There are various ways marketers can inform executive decisions based on market insights. Here are some basic ones:

  • Run a survey or conduct interviews with your target audience. You can discover what price will make people question the quality of a product and what price will make people deem the product too expensive for their wallets.
  • Make comparisons with your competitors, aka benchmarking. If you set your price close to what your profitable competitors charge, you will likely get a pricing model that works in your market.
  • Adjust for the psychological aspect of pricing, i.e., focus on what your price should communicate to your future customers. Make sure you’re not offering fewer benefits for the same price as your competitors. Or even worse, fewer benefits for a higher price. On a typical value proposition matrix, the best options are the ones highlighted in green:
Value proposition matrix table. Three columns are "higher price," "same price," and "lower price." Rows are "more benefits," "same benefits," and "fewer benefits"

Place

How and where customers will buy a product or service, i.e., place, is another factor that marketing influences (this happens even before we touch on promotion tactics).

Here, market research offers insights into important information, such as the customers’ shopping habits and competitors’ sales channels, to determine the optimal distribution model.

Have you ever wondered why some products are not directly available on the producer’s website? Or why do some types of software come in both digital and physical versions while others do not? That’s no coincidence. That’s marketing.

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Here’s a quick rundown of some popular distribution models that marketers can choose from:

4 Ps of marketing: summary of distribution models. Columns are "types of product," "direct distribution," "indirect distribution," and "examples of mixed distribution models" with corresponding information below

Promotion

Only after establishing sound fundamentals in the product, price, and place can marketers then focus on promotion. These are the tactics used to reach the target audience with a message. Think advertising, blog post creation, social media, email marketing, etc.

Marketers are usually associated with activities from this area of marketing—and this “image” is not wrong. Once the strategic components of marketing are in place, marketers spend most of their time working on promoting what their companies have to offer.

When planning promotion tactics, marketers need to know some things:

  • Who are they trying to reach?
  • What marketing channels work best?
  • What is the typical buying journey of their prospects?
  • What budget and staff do they need to achieve their goals?

For example, at Ahrefs, our core marketing tactic is content marketing. We’ve chosen to focus on this type of marketing because:

  • Lots of people are searching on Google for solutions to problems our product solves. So if we create content that ranks high enough, people can find us through Google and learn about our product. (We’ll talk more about product-led content in the last section of this article.)
  • If we can create content that ranks while “drinking our own Champagne,” we can send an authentic message about the quality of our product and the expertise of the people who build it.

In the next paragraphs, we’re going to focus on the promotion part of marketing. But if you want to read more about the four Ps of marketing, check out this guide.

OK, let’s move on.

Marketing is a process. Professional marketers are well aware that visitors don’t become customers immediately—at least not in every type of business. And marketers don’t argue with that fact. Instead, they take that into account and develop a “path” to convince people gradually.

It’s likely no other marketing concept conveys that truth better than the marketing funnel.

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A marketing funnel is a system designed to attract customers (or clients) to a business. And then convert them. Gradually.

A typical marketing funnel consists of several stages of converting visitors into leads, then into customers, and then possibly into brand advocates.

Funnel with 6 sections. From top to bottom (Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Action, Loyalty, Advocacy)

Take these two tactics, for example.

A blog post about doing keyword research for SEO is likely to drive visits from search queries related to the topic, such as “seo keyword analysis” or “how to do keyword research.” This means that this content is a good way to generate awareness and interest about our brand and product, as people Googling these terms don’t need to know about us in the first place.

List of keywords with corresponding data

On the other hand, we have a landing page that compares Ahrefs to some of our competitors. Since it will be mostly visited by people who already know our product and are most likely in the market for an SEO tool, this is a proper tactic for the Consideration stage of the funnel.

The other important takeaway from the marketing funnel model is that marketing as a process doesn’t end after someone buys from you. If you want your customers to come back and make repeated purchases, it’s a good idea to keep people engaged after the “purchase” stage.

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One of the ways to achieve this is to send out a regular newsletter to your mailing list. Datacamp, a code learning platform, aims to keep its users engaged by sending regular emails. They contain a “weekly goal” reminder and a curated list of resources. Here’s an excerpt from one of those emails:

Excerpt of Datacamp's email

Introduction to the types of marketing

Marketing is a business challenge that has more than one solution. These different solutions are the types of marketing. And these are not secrets in the industry—companies copy and remix them all of the time. The key lies in choosing the optimal combination of these types and using them well. Let’s take a look at some examples.

B2B and B2C marketing

These acronyms stand for business-to-business marketing and business-to-consumer marketing, respectively.

Marketers often differentiate these solutions because some tactics are more effective for marketing to businesses and others for marketing to consumers. Even the messaging style differs.

Here, we have an example of account-based marketing: A company uses emails to promote a new product feature. The emails were carefully targeted, sent only to accounts most likely to benefit from the new feature. Instead of urging prospects to “buy now,” the message is a case study of a solution to a business problem.

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Datanyze's email containing link to case study

Below, we have a tactic often used in B2C marketing: influencer marketing. In this example, an influencer with 21.5K Instagram followers quite obviously advertises a food delivery company on her page. It’s a simple yet powerful message: If that company is good for me, it’s probably good for you too. Here’s a handful of discounts so that you can take action immediately.

Influencer's Insta post promoting Foodpanda and discounts

Inbound and outbound marketing

Another pair of basic marketing types that can be used to describe most marketing tactics is inbound and outbound marketing. The first one is about “pulling the customer in” by, for example, providing helpful content to the prospect when they’re ready. The latter is about pushing the offering to the customer with an “interrupting” message, e.g., advertising.

First picture: lady welcoming man. Picture below: lady with megaphone screaming "buy" at man

For example, when we aim to attract new visitors with an article about email outreach, it’s inbound marketing (if people access the article via a search engine).

Someone searching for "email outreach" on Google, then clicking on Ahrefs' article on SERP

But when we launch a PPC marketing campaign with ads featuring the same article, that’s outbound marketing. This is because we’re reaching out to potential customers who may not necessarily be interested in us or ready to learn more.

Ahrefs ad promoting "email outreach" article

Content marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers. By content, I mean blog posts, podcasts, videos, infographics, ebooks, etc.

Promotion through content marketing usually involves satisfying a prospect’s need (e.g., the need to solve a problem at work, the need for entertainment, etc.) while giving exposure to the product or brand.

For example, Trader Joe’s (a grocery store chain) found a way to serve up helpful and entertaining content featuring everyday products that shoppers can find on its shelves. And it’s doing this in more than one way:

Links to three types of content in Trader Joe's catalog

Trader Joe’s regularly generates three types of content in the Fearless Flyer food catalog that’s also distributed in print.

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So not only does it go the extra mile and provide product information on neatly designed pages, but it also gives some inspiration on what to do with those products:

Recipe write-up on left. Picture of ingredients on right

While sharing recipes for delicious meals, Trader Joe’s also promotes its products.

Take a look at this picture from one of its blog posts titled “Take a Dip Into the New Year” (pun intended). The main characters here are two ordinary jars of olives. But by showing them in the context of a delicious olive dip (there’s a recipe for it too), the olives now look exceptionally tasty to potential customers.

Olive dip with bread

Through its content marketing, Trader Joe’s is turning dull grocery shopping into a colorful, funny, and appetizing journey that gets better with every product shoppers put into their carts.

Trader Joe’s content is an example of product-led content, which we’ll talk more about later.

Email and social media marketing

Email and social media, although quite different from each other, share a similar idea for marketing: gather an audience and use an owned marketing channel for direct messaging.

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For instance, here is the same message distributed in two different ways. One is in a newsletter sent to our email subscribers; the second is a tweet to our Twitter followers.

Excerpt of Ahrefs' newsletter containing short write-up on one of its articles

Do you notice the intersection of different types of marketing here? There’s content marketing (the article about statistics) mixed with email marketing; there’s also content marketing mixed with social media marketing. By “mixing” these, we can reach more people with our articles instead of only publishing them on our blog.

Growth marketing

The last type of marketing I want to talk about is a rather new addition to the “family.” Growth marketing is the process of increasing a company’s revenue by applying an experiment-driven and integrated approach to all stages of attracting customers.

So instead of simply copying what’s working for other marketers or focusing on one marketing channel, growth marketers devise hypotheses and then verify them through data from marketing experiments. Therefore, growth marketing needs to be open to any type of marketing and all marketing channels—as long as they work and there is data to prove this.

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What’s also distinctive here is that growth marketing, unlike some more traditional theories of marketing, doesn’t just attract people to a business. It aims to take care of the entire marketing funnel. So, at one point, a growth marketer may be optimizing ads on LinkedIn. At another, they may be turning customer feedback into product feature ideas.

Take a look at the example below to see how growth marketing can be different from the types you’ve seen above. This model shows a growth loop that works for Notion, a productivity app: Every new user is a chance to attract (and/or retain) another user without the company needing to incur additional costs or take further actions.

4-step growth loop for Saas: attract new users, activate users, retain users, then users build templates

Three marketing tips from an eight-figure ARR company

Everything we’ve discussed so far may sound like basic marketing theories. But make no mistake here—these things work. Here’s how applying some of the above principles helped Ahrefs become a successful, eight-figure annual recurring revenue (ARR) company.

Tip 1. Marketing relies on the product more than anything else

The effectiveness of marketing depends on many factors, e.g., the budget, how well a business stands out from the competition, and whether the business targets the right audience. But above anything else, marketing relies on its fundament which, if you remember from the four Ps of marketing, is the product.

Here’s why:

  • Marketing can’t effectively promote something that the product doesn’t deliver, i.e., it has to be based on what the product truly offers.
  • Marketing is expected to generate customers. But the message that marketing creates is not the only factor that a potential customer takes into consideration. Marketing can point someone toward a product. But the person’s final decision will most likely depend on the functionality and price of that product.
  • People don’t need to trust marketing anymore to learn about a product. Before buying anything, they can check product reviews or see what other people say on social media. This ties back to the importance of having a good product.

At Ahrefs, we made sure our product fit the market before we hired the first full-time marketer. Back then, the product grew mostly thanks to word of mouth from satisfied customers and impressed reviewers. To this day, word of mouth is one of our top three customer acquisition channels.

Poll on Facebook where people prefer Ahrefs to SEMrush

Just one of many polls where people vote for our product. Source: SEO Signals Lab.

Our product-market fit also allows us to invest in content marketing confidently. This brings us to the next point.

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Tip 2. Create product-led content for SEO

To create product-led content means to turn your product into actionable advice for your audience.

Consider the scale below, which we use to rank topic ideas. Product-led content is basically content that gets at least a “1” on that scale:

Table with scores 3 to 0. And explanation of criteria to meet each score.

In general, there’s nothing wrong with non-product content, as it can offer a vast pool of topic ideas with considerable traffic potential. But we prefer sticking to content where we can feature our product because:

  • We can naturally showcase our product in each piece of content: how it looks, how it works, and what it can be used for. And we can do all that in a context that is familiar to the reader.
  • This style of content can serve more purposes when it comes to the marketing funnel. The same article can be an effective way to attract visitors and retain customers.

And finally, to create product-led content for SEO means to develop content with organic search as the main distribution channel in mind. In marketing jargon, the kind of content that is designed to rank in search engines and attract searchers from search engine pages is called SEO content.

This type of content has many benefits. But for the sake of brevity, here are two main ones:

  • SEO content generates almost free, consistent, and passive traffic from search engines.
  • Searchers are likely willing to learn more, as the content answers their search queries.

Let’s illustrate the results of this tactic: Currently, the content on our blog alone generates over 340K organic visits every month. If we wanted to generate the same amount of traffic through paid ads, we would need to spend almost $540K every month.

Tip 3. Experiment, measure, and scale what’s working

As you may have noticed, at Ahrefs, we mainly stick to content marketing. But that doesn’t mean we don’t do other types of marketing. In fact, we experiment whenever there is a chance for us to learn something new or improve something that’s already a commonly used tactic.

Here’s why it matters:

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  1. What works for some may not work for others – So not only is it wise to take any marketing advice with a grain of salt, but it’s also important to test things yourself.
  2. It’s hard to get things right in the first run – And you probably shouldn’t try to. An iterative process of reaching your marketing goals is often the best approach.
  3. Trying something out in practice is often a better way to solve problems – This is compared to just having a theoretical discussion among your peers.

But whatever you do, it’s crucial to measure the outcome. Just like the old business adage says: What you can’t measure, you can’t improve. For instance, let’s look at the chart below showing one of our blog posts’ organic traffic. If we hadn’t measured the post’s performance, we couldn’t have improved it. Consequently, we would have missed out on a lot of traffic.

Line graph showing jump in organic traffic after post was updated

The rest of the process is pretty straightforward. If it works, start doing it regularly. And if it works in the long run, do more of it.

It’s a simple rule, but it sometimes gets overlooked. Marketers tend to get distracted from what’s important by the latest fads. They also get too consumed by the everyday chase of nailing those KPIs.

Final thoughts

Let’s quickly sum up what we discussed in this article. First of all, contrary to popular belief, marketing is not only about promoting a product. It’s also about co-creating the product based on market research and user feedback.

Secondly, marketing is typically a process that connects the right audience with the right kind of product, a sort of matchmaking. It doesn’t end at converting a visitor into a customer. Some marketing tactics will allow you to keep your customers, encourage them to come back, and spur them to recommend your business to others.

Finally, there is no silver bullet in marketing. There are different types of marketing that you should probably try out to see what you can do best and what gives you the best outcomes. On that note, we hope our sharings on the three simple yet powerful things that have worked for Ahrefs will inspire you.

So what are the next steps here? If you’re in need of a battle plan that will guide your marketing efforts, that means you’re in need of a marketing strategy. Well, you can learn how to do that in this five-step guide. And if you want to streamline your learning process, try these 17 Free Online Marketing Courses to Learn Digital Marketing.

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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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