SERP analysis — that’s the subject of this lesson in the SEO Academy. A results page, or Search Engine Results Page (SERP), is of course a list of pages (and their URLs) that a search engine considers useful and relevant in answer to a search term (a keyword).
When writing and optimizing content for SEO to improve organic rankings on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Safari and the rest, one of the first steps any SEO strategy asks of an SEO specialist, SEO copywriter or web marketer is a SERP analysis.
So what is a SERP analysis, and how do you run one? Let’s find out.
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What is SERP analysis and why do it?
SERP analysis is an investigation carried out for essentially two purposes: first, to make sure you’re choosing keywords that genuinely matter to your audience; second, to check whether those keywords give your content a realistic chance of outranking your competitors.
SERP analysis is an important part of the keyword research process — a process that doesn’t end once you’ve found keywords with the right balance between search volume and difficulty.
Finding and choosing the right keywords through SERP analysis
The old way of doing SEO was, in short, to use various SEO tools to uncover particular keywords or key phrases used by an audience and then repeat them throughout your content. The way Search Engine Optimization works today, you have to focus on the topic rather than on individual keywords.
Keywords still matter enormously, but it happens that keywords judged relevant to a business or a market niche turn out not to be, because they aren’t semantically right. In other words, they don’t reflect users’ real search intent.
For the purposes of ranking content on search engines, understanding which needs our content has to meet is therefore fundamental.
But how do you do that?
Image from Google.com
How does SERP analysis reveal user search intent?
To work out user search intent, all you need to do is look at the SERPs for the keywords you want to rank for. Google’s algorithm changes constantly, and factors such as geographic location and others are reflected in the search results.
The informational needs behind a search, though, generally fall into these five types of query:
Informational
The user is looking for information, a need reflected in queries that often start with “how to”: for example “how to do a SERP analysis” or “how to install WordPress”. Google often summarises this kind of information in answer boxes, news and other SERP features.
Navigational
The user runs their search already having a specific page or website in mind — for example “EU Web Agency Academy”.
Transactional
The user searches for a specific product or service from a particular company that they intend to buy or are considering buying — for example “Instagram Course EU Web Agency”, “EU Web Agency SEO consultancy”, “SEO Course EU Web Agency”, “Apple Watch Series 4”, and so on.
Commercial
Closely tied to informational and transactional keywords: at this stage of the customer journey the user is gathering information before reaching a decision. A typical commercial query is “best OLED TV brand” or “best laptop 2019”.
Comparative
The user runs a search query comparing two products or services in order to gather information and judge which is better before a possible purchase. In digital marketing a typical example is a comparison between apps or SEO tools, e.g. “SEMrush vs Ahrefs”.
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SERP analysis examples
Let’s work through a couple of SERP analysis examples to make this concrete.
Example 1
If you have to write or optimize content for a landing page about a product — say a link building tool — you’ll probably consider that phrase one of the keywords to rank for. But as you can see in the screenshot, searching that query leads to blogs and guides about link building.
Image from Google.com
The search intent behind that query is therefore purely informational, not about buying a product. To rank in the SERP with a keyword that matches the actual intent, you’d need a different search term.
In our case, all it takes is adding the word “tool” to the phrase.
Example 2
Skipping a careful SERP analysis is a more common mistake than you’d think, including in keyword research for local SEO.
For the same reasons as in the previous example, a travel blogger reviewing hotels in Rome gains nothing from ranking their content for online hotel booking services.
Image from Google.com
A glance at the SERP is usually enough to show how relevant a keyword is to a specific business and a specific audience.
Competitor SERP analysis
This step covers analysing competitors’ SERPs in order to understand the competition and achieve the best possible organic ranking for your content across multiple SERPs.
Various studies show the considerable difference in click-through rate (CTR) between ranking on page one and page two, and between the top three positions on page one and everything below them.
There are two ways to run a competitor SERP analysis: manually with Google search, or with keyword tools that build the feature in.
Either way, competitors are assessed against specific KPIs, including:
- Domain Authority (DA)
- Page Authority (PA)
- Citation Flow (CF)
- Trust Flow (TF)
- Alexa Rank
- number of external backlinks
- number of social shares
Manual SERP analysis with Google Search
Here it’s the Mountain View company’s own search engine that gives you an overview of the main KPIs, thanks to SEO extensions such as SEOquake (go to site), Alexa or the Moz toolbar (go to site).
Image from Google.com
Another Chrome extension, Nightwatch Search Simulator, lets you simulate queries and then compare your page’s ranking against your competitors’.
Google doesn’t let you view SERPs for specific locations, though, except through dedicated tools that usually cost money. You can, however, simulate your location in the browser by picking an existing place or entering the GPS coordinates of a new one.
The method suggested in a post by Mangools.com is this:
- Open a new page in incognito mode in Chrome.
- Enter a search query such as “web agency”, which will return a SERP geolocated to your current position.
Image from Google.com
- Open Developer Tools with F12 on Windows or CMD+ALT+I on Mac.
- Click the “three dots” on the right to open the menu, choose “More tools” and then “Sensors”.
Image from Google.com
- In the lower right-hand menu, click the “Manage” button.
Image from Google.com
- From the “Settings” menu pick the location you want; if it isn’t listed, click “Add location” and enter the GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude), which you can find easily in Google Maps.
Image from Google.com
- Scroll to the bottom of the SERP and click “Update location” or “Use precise location”.
Image from Google.com
- Refresh the page again (F5 on Windows, CMD + R on OSX).
SERP analysis with keyword tools
Tools like SEMrush or KWFinder have the advantage of putting everything you need in one place. More recently the free tool Ubersuggest (here it is) lets you export a SERP to CSV and run an analysis on it, as well as generate ideas and sharpen your keyword research.
Image from neilpatel.com/ubersuggest
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered SERP analysis. You now have what you need to run a competitor SERP analysis yourself and judge how relevant the keywords you want to rank for really are — but that alone isn’t enough.
The Google algorithm keeps updating, and those updates show up in the SERPs. We’ll keep covering the newest changes that affect how keyword research is done in the lessons ahead.
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
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