A marketing approach to aggregating online search results for small businesses

The marketing activities of small businesses have resource constraints and are influenced by aggregators. There has been steady interest in studying online aggregators in the activities of small business enterprises from a marketing perspective. This article continues this interest. The hypothesis of the study is that the activity of small businesses relates to the formalization and inclusion in online aggregators. The study is based on inbound marketing, personalized marketing communications, and the marketing of small businesses. It applies evolutionary and comparative methods to analyze the economic and technical literature on aggregation as a marketing term. The results in the form of types of Internet sites that determine the approach to the classification of the activities of small businesses based on inclusion in the online aggregator. The paper analyses the evolution of Internet marketing from the perspective of online aggregators. The concept of “the level of aggregation” is proposed, which describes the search engine output by online aggregators. The influence of the aggregation level on the formation of selective research in the marketing activities of small businesses are specified. Aggregators have a higher priority in search engine results; a private commercial site has more difficulty occupying the first line of the search output than aggregators do. The study partially confirmed the hypothesis: there is a dependence between the activity of small businesses and their inclusion in online aggregators (determining the quantitative degree of relationship requires further empirical research). The results can be used to select promising areas of activity for the development of small businesses.