Ahrefs’ Digest #200: Search experience optimization, biggest traffic losers in SaaS, and more

It’s the 200th edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest! It’s amazing how many newsletters I’ve sent over the past few years.

Since it’s the 200th edition, I would love your feedback:

• What can I improve about the newsletter?

• What would you like to see more of?

Hit ‘reply’ and let me know. 

Moving on, here’s our meme of the week:

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Quick SEO news

• Google is testing a new display and user interface for forum content within its search results.

• Early reviews of SearchGPT are mixed.

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Best of the week

SXO Explained: How to Adapt to the New Era of Search: SXO focuses on making a brand discoverable along all touchpoints in modern search journeys, no matter where they start or what path they take. Here’s a process for optimizing brand visibility everywhere people search these days.

What Happened After I Outed a Reddit Mod for Affiliate Spam: Continue Lars Lofgren’s journey in discovering and fighting Reddit affiliate spam. Unfortunately, right now, it’s a spam hydra—cut off one head and watch other “affiliate spam” hydra heads grow. 

The 25 Biggest Traffic Losers in SaaS in 2024: We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies, and these are the companies that lost the greatest amount of estimated organic traffic year over year.

How to Be a Great Content Marketer in 2024: More budget and more people make your life easier when the work is complicated. But more money and more people almost never result in better content. Simplicity and speed are always going to be the most effective way to reach people.

SEO for Personal Injury Lawyers: 7 Strategies to Lower Cost-Per-Lead: SEO for personal injury law firms is notorious for how expensive and competitive it can be. Here are the strategies Despina has used to help new and boutique injury and accident law firms compete with the big guns for a fraction of the cost.

Founder Mode: There are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.

Stop Overcomplicating Things. Entity SEO is Just SEO: My little ‘rant’ about entity SEO. Tl;dr, if you’re investing in SEO, you’re probably already doing entity SEO. You don’t need to do anything special or invest additional resources.

See you next week,
Si Quan

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