SEO is a lot about SERPs – or search engine results pages. This is where the magic happens, as it is the starting point for a significant portion of your organic customers.
While they ought to be an extremely important aspect of your SEO strategy, it’s hard to find value from them if you don’t know what you’re looking for. To help you to get started, we’re sharing some of the most important takeaways to consider when you’re navigating SERPs.
They tell us about the type of content that ranks well for certain keywords
SERPs are as diverse as the people that use them, so it’s inevitable that the types of content we see for any given search are going to vary. Search engines are constantly looking for ways to serve users with the best possible answers to their queries, and this can boil down to the way that content is produced, or the formatting. Some searches are catered to best by specific content formats, and by taking time to explore how this translates to your own goals, you’ll be able to create content that can compete when it comes to rankings.
Want to put this to the test? Take one of your target keywords, and enter it into your search engine of choice. Take some time to explore the top ranking organic results, and determine the type of content that you’re looking at. The formats you see might include:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Content marketing landing pages
- Product pages
- Reviews
- Category landing pages
- Videos
Now, if you’d like to try to rank for the keyword you’ve explored, you know which types of content perform well for this term.
They help us to distinguish different keyword intents
SERPs also serve as a means of understanding keyword/search intent, a term used to describe the behaviour that different search terms represent. There are four main types of intent to account for:
- Informational – These are longer queries where users are looking for more information on a topic. Think along the lines of phrases that include language such as ‘why’, ‘best’, or ‘how’.
- Commercial – Moving beyond initial awareness, these keywords hint at purchase readiness.
- Transactional – Ready to buy? These keywords signal intent to purchase, and they will often include brand names.
- Navigational – This type of keyword is used when users want to arrive at a certain website.
The best way to apply this to SERPs is to associate content formats with their corresponding keyword intent. For example, if you’re exploring the keyword ‘best at home pilates workout’, you’ll see that the top organic results are links to video content, followed by ‘roundup’ blog posts. Crawlers (the system used to interpret online information) have determined that this type of content is the most effective for answering this specific user query. This also demonstrates the ways that informational intent can translate across different content formats – this might be something to bear in mind if all of your current content is formatted as blogs!
If you’re creating content that doesn’t align user intent, your chances of ranking will be slim – and if you do rank, you’ll likely see high exit rates for your content, as it’s not able to satisfy the searches that users are carrying out.
They can show us more effective ways to share information
As we’ve explained, search engines are designed to answer queries, but this function has also had to account for the ever-changing nature of user preferences. Most of us use our chosen search engine to find the answer we’re looking for quickly, and this is where featured results come in handy.
Providing quick access to digestible, helpful, trustworthy information has always been a priority for all major search engines, and featured results act as a solution. Bing, Yahoo, and Google all take their own approaches to serving featured results to users, and the purpose here is to answer search queries quicker and more efficiently than ordinary SERPs could. Using Google as an example, there are 19 types of ‘SERP features’ that display as featured results, with AI Overviews being one of the newest additions.
Knowing whether or not your target keywords are ranking for content that is shown in SERPs as featured results is helpful from a strategic POV. If you have a piece of content that is targeting a specific search, but the content that is shown in the featured result is formatted dramatically different to your piece, then you can use this finding to make some amends; for example, you might have a long blog post on different pasta shapes, but the featured result may be a link to a ‘listicle’ (an article formatted as a list).
Want to put your findings to work? Inputting schema markup onto pages that you’d like to rank as a featured result/SERP feature can boost its chances, but it’s never guaranteed. For many other types of features results, the guidelines for ranking are slightly vague. In the case of Google’s featured snippets, Typically, pages that are displayed are often well-structured, concise, and they directly answer common user questions. Using clear headings, bullet points, and straightforward language can help make your content more snippet-worthy.
They give us an understanding of the paid vs organic split
Many SEO strategies are sleeping on paid results – there, we said it.
When you enter a keyword into a search engine, the first results you see might be paid ads, especially if you’re exploring commercial or transactional keywords. This can be an indicator of high competition, and it suggests that brands are willing to pay for visibility for these terms. Take note of where the organic results start on the page. If they appear further down the SERP, it might be harder to achieve organic visibility without significant effort. However, if organic results are prominent, it could indicate a keyword where organic SEO can still play a strong role.
Analysing this split helps you determine whether to focus more on organic efforts, or whether potentially investing in paid search would yield better returns for certain keywords. In this way, SERP analysis can inform the way you allocate your marketing budget and resources.
They can debunk some rogue third-party measurements
Sick of looking at your SEO tool of choice and feeling somewhat bewildered by all of the different metric names? The good news is that some of them really aren’t worth losing sleep over, and there are better ways to understand them than by looking at the same old reports.
It’s a similar drill to the one we’ve already shared; head over to your go-to search engine, and type in one of your most valuable keywords. Let’s say you create bespoke engagement rings in all different cuts and styles, and you’d like to rank for the search term ‘engagement rings’. The SERP loads up and you see the likes of Ernest Jones, Warren James H.S Samuel, Beaverbooks… all the big players are there. This is an albeit simple way to gauge a metric that some tools refer to as ‘keyword difficulty’.
Rather than relying solely on what a third-party tool tells you about how hard it will be to rank for a particular keyword, you can directly observe the competition on the SERP. If the first page is dominated by high-authority domains, it’s a signal that ranking organically might be tough, and you might need to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Conducting some thorough SERP analysis is a great starting point for your SEO strategy; and now you have a clearer idea of what to look for. Take our suggestions into account, or simply contact us if you’d like to find out how we can take care of this process.