Perform SERP Analysis In 5 Steps: A Beginner-Friendly Guide

SERP analysis involves reviewing pages appearing on the first page of search engine results. This exercise helps website owners to know which pages are ranking high and why. SERP analysis is also helpful in discovering search engines’ criteria for ranking pages. A wise website owner can implement these insights and the strategies used by top-ranking website pages to rank better.

Steps to Insightful SERP Analysis

Keyword Research

Start by creating a list of keywords you want your website to rank for. You could use a keyword research tool to find your keywords. Type the keywords on search engines to see the web pages and content ranking for those keywords. Document the results for each keyword and start analyzing the high-ranking pages. You’ll get an idea of who’s ranking, what their SEO tactics are, and the content type that’s working.

Check whether you could find additional keywords related to your industry already performing well and include them in your list. Don’t focus on your direct competitors only. It’s helpful to have a broad idea of what else is going on in your industry.

It’s also helpful to check whether there are any keywords similar to your company name. For keywords that match your company name, investigate where the content is based in. Remember, search engines are increasingly showing location-based search results.

Determine the search intent

Search intent can be navigational, transactional, and informational. In this step, you want to discover the user’s search motive and ensure it matches your plans for the keywords. It’s vital to create content that answers the user’s queries. Such content increases the chances of your pages ranking high on the search engines.

Another insight you gain by looking at search intent is the type of content people using this keyword are consuming. Do they prefer videos, blog posts, or product reviews? To get a clear idea of the popular type of content, pay attention to the SERP features.

You may discover your keywords have multiple user intents too. For instance, users searching for products to buy may read product reviews or information about the product before purchasing. With multiple intent searches, Google provides several search features on SERP such as a local pack, information pack, and a people also ask for section, among others.

Competitive analysis

This involves looking at the pages that are ranking high for these keywords to determine whether they belong to authoritative domains. If you are competing against industry-leading pages, then your chances of ranking for such keywords are slim. This will help you determine if you are better off looking for alternative keywords with low competition.

Competition analysis can also enable you to unearth unique opportunities for a keyword that your competitors haven’t exploited yet. For instance, you might realize the content that’s ranking high is short-form, yet there’s much more to cover in a topic. You could also notice that the high-ranking content is lacking, and you have valuable ways to improve it. Run this idea through the user intent and decide if creating longer content could stand a better chance.

Pinpoint ranking opportunities

Good opportunities could present as keywords your competitors haven’t ranked for or a unique content approach. You could also watch out for keywords that don’t have a featured snippet showing on the SERP yet.

Updating existing content

The best part about consistent SERP analysis is that you’ll stay abreast with changing trends. This gives you insights into what’s working and how you can improve existing content assets to keep giving you desired results. You’ll discover new keywords you could include, better content structure, new queries your content could still answer, and others.

How to get SERP analysis data

To make sense of any SERP data, it’s necessary to go through a lot of info from different pages comparing different metrics. Collecting a large amount of SERP data isn’t easy, especially if you rely on manual methods. Fortunately, technology has made it easy to collect this data through automated tools. There are tools designed for collecting keyword data, website rank position, SEO monitoring, and more.

Most of these tools charge hefty subscriptions for users to enjoy their services. So, if you’re a small business or an individual interested in pocket-friendly data harvesting, consider Google scraping using a search engine API. It’s an all-around data scraper that gathers information from search engine results pages that is useful for various purposes. So, whether you are looking for new keywords, monitoring rank positions, studying your competition, or doing SERP analysis for any other goal, consider SERPMaster’s Google Search API and meet all your data needs.

To learn more data scraping for SERP analysis, check out this blog post!

Conclusion

Keyword research isn’t complete without doing a thorough SERP analysis. Neither is your SEO strategy bulletproof if you haven’t checked what top-ranking pages are doing to stay in high positions. Yes, SERP analysis takes time and financial investment. But the results you gain make it worthwhile.