SERP Analysis

In this session of Conductor's, SEO Bootcamp, we'll be walking through SERP analysis. We'll talk through what SERP analysis is, why it's important, and how to analyze a Google SERP by looking at who is ranking and what is ranking.

To start a little definition, search engine results page analysis is the practice of analyzing the top ranking content for your target keyword. The goal of SERP analysis is to understand how search engines display results for particular queries and identify opportunities to improve our own visibility and performance in search results.

SERP analysis is important for several reasons. Analyzing the SERPs helps us uncover what users want to find when they search so we can better adapt our strategy to meet their needs. The SERP can also shed light on our competitor strategies such as the keywords they're targeting, the content they're creating, and their positioning in search results. Then by analyzing the content and features present in the SERPs, we can identify patterns and trends that can help us optimize and create new content to improve our relevance and rankings. Understanding which features are present for specific queries can help us optimize our content to appear in these spaces and enhance our visibility. Lastly, search engine results are constantly evolving. By regularly conducting SERP analysis, we can track changes over time, monitor rank changes, and adapt our strategies accordingly.

Understanding the SERP can be useful for many teams from SEO to paid search, to social to content teams. Knowing what our audience sees when they search helps us to strategize how we can be there too.

Alright, so let's get into the process of analyzing a Google search engine result page. It's as simple as searching for a keyword that's important for a business. We'll use running shoes as an example.

The first thing we can notice about the SERP is that some of the real estate is paid and some is organic. Paid search is where companies bid to have the results shown for a particular keyword and pay per click that they receive. Organic results are those where Google's algorithm deems the content to be most relevant to show users for that query. Both paid and organic results can appear in different formats.

Let's take a look into organic result types. In particular, when analyzing standard links, there are few questions to consider. Firstly, who's ranking well? Are they direct business competitors? Maybe top ones you always come up against, or emerging ones that have been recently improving their visibility, or are they SEO competitors or huge websites that just always appear on the search engine result page due to their size, or maybe they're content creators who rank due to the quality of information they provide to users.

Next to ask is what kinds of landing pages are appearing? Is it early stage content like guides, educational articles, listicles, or late stage content like category or individual product pages?

And lastly, it's important to take a look at the rich snippets that are appearing, which add a visual layer to an existing result, providing additional eye-catching information that may help a user decide to click on your link. Here we can see some examples such as images, ratings, and reviews, and product information. Other examples of rich snippets you may have come across are video snippets, recipe snippets, or event snippets. You can increase the chances of your links appearing with rich snippets by implementing proper schema on your pages.

Now that we've covered standard link results, let's talk about some of the other features we may find on the SERP. Some of these result types can give us clues into what kind of answer the user's looking to find featured. Snippets, for example, may indicate a user wants to find informational content or even a quick answer to the question. Local results indicate users may want to navigate to a place in person image, and video results may indicate users may benefit from content with a more visual or storytelling aspect.

When analyzing SERP, we can also leverage certain features to more holistically understand how people are searching about the topic. We're interested in search suggestions, related searches, and suggested filters are a great way to find related keywords to target with our content.

People also ask related guides and discussions and forums are also features to pay attention to when thinking about how to more deeply address our audience's needs.

The SERP is constantly evolving from changes in who is ranking and where to new and changing types of results. It's important to keep a close eye on the SERP for your most important keywords.

Wanna help with your SERP analysis? Use content guidance to collect insights from the top 15 ranking pages for Google on any keyword and track changes in who and what is ranking with a keyword details report.