A search engine results page (SERP) is one of the primary cornerstones of SEO optimization. The top positions on this page represent the general benchmark for every SEO strategy, whereas tracking your site’s SERP rankings for target keywords helps measure your efforts’ success and find improvement areas.
Apart from this, SERP analytics can give you a glimpse into the type of content that your target audience is looking for, helping you refine your strategy and deliver more value pages to your target audience. It can help support your optimization tactic with informed insights, which is why it can become a helpful addition to your SEO, and we’re going to tell you how to make the most out of it.
What Is a SERP Analysis?
A SERP analysis is the process of determining the top-ranking results for your target keywords and assessing them. This process can serve multiple goals, including:
- Helping assess the relevance of the target keyword to your business.
- Estimating the likelihood of outranking your competitors for a particular keyword.
- Determining the topics and type of content that works for a particular query.
- Examining competitors’ content to find opportunities to bridge content gaps and bring more value.
Overall, SERP analytics is your way to gain incredibly important details to recheck and enhance your SEO strategy, boost organic traffic, and get an advantage in this competitive marketing landscape.
SERP Features: Overview and Impact on SEO
Before you conduct SERP analysis to refine your SEO strategy, let’s briefly review the core search result features:
Featured Snippets
This is a larger box that appears above other organic results and provides a concise but full answer to the user’s query pulled from a particular site. By placing your answer above other results, featured snippets have the potential to increase your visibility, click-through rate (CTR), and traffic.
Rich Snippets
This is a regular search engine result enhanced with additional information, such as ratings, reviews, prices, recipe ingredients, etc. By giving potential visitors more information on what they will find on your site, rich snippets can help stimulate CTR and also drive more traffic.
People Also Ask
This is a small selection of additional questions related to the initial query that appears right below the main result. This section provides short answers to every suggested question (similar to featured snippets) and links to the source.
Getting your site into this section can help you enhance visibility even in searches that you didn’t rank for directly. Besides, optimizing your content for related questions can help you tap into conversational, low-competition keywords and boost your content’s relevance and value.
People Also Search For
This box with selected related terms appears at the bottom of a result page. Looking at this feature and targeting the keywords from it can help you expand your content and improve visibility.
Local Pack
This is a collection of the top three businesses most relevant to user searches for products or services in their area. By getting featured in a local pack, businesses can boost their authoritativeness while also driving additional website and foot traffic.
How to Boost Rankings With SERP Features Analysis: 6 Practical Tips
1. Refine Your Keyword Strategy
SEO SERPs can give you invaluable insights into promising keywords. As you might know, not all SERP keywords have the same competition–some are much harder to rank for than others due to many powerful competitors targeting them.
By conducting search engine position analysis, you can detect low-hanging fruit in the form of relevant keywords that top-ranking competitors are missing out on. Integrating these low-competition SERP keywords into your keyword strategy can help you capture untapped traffic and boost your visibility.
2. Assess Competitor Strategies
Another way to use SERP SEO analysis to your benefit is by identifying your top-performing competitors and checking their strategies. Basically, to do this, you need to type your primary keyword in Google and check the first positions.
The most significant things you want to consider in this analysis, include:
- Content – Analyse what forms of content your rivals’ top-performing pages are using, how long they are, and what topics they cover.
- Multimedia – Consider whether your competitors are adding images, infographics, videos, or other types of multimedia to enhance engagement.
- SEO practices – Check what optimization tactics your rivals implemented that helped them rank so high. Keep a special eye on their target keywords.
- Backlinks – You should also pay attention to the backlinks your top competitors receive. Leverage a special backlink checker tool to assess the quality and diversity of their links and, hopefully, find opportunities for link-building. If you don’t have specific software in mind, you can compare different options to choose the best backlinks checker tool for you.
3. Analyze Featured Snippets to Boost Your Visibility
Checking featured snippets that appear for your target terms is also an important part of in-depth SERP analysis. Featured snippets provide a clear understanding of what kind of pages and answers Google considers the most relevant and helpful. These details are necessary to work on your own content relevancy.
You need only analyze the snippets that appear for your keywords. Then, compare the details found with your important pages and add the same where possible.
Pro tip: To improve your chances of getting into featured snippets, prioritize brief and well-structured answers to common user questions.
4. Use SEO SERPs to Improve Local SEO
There are two ways you can leverage SERP SEO analysis to enhance your local optimization:
- View the local pack that tops results for your target keyword and assess each to see what factors are contributing to high rankings.
- Monitor your top competitors in local results and assess their strategies, site structure, content, etc.
After a detailed analysis, make sure to cover any gaps that might exist and use the obtained insights to refine your strategy. For example, improve your Google Business profile by optimizing it with relevant local keywords, encourage more reviews, create local citations if you see that they affect SEO rankings, etc.
5. Watch Trends
Analyze SEO SERPs for your primary keywords and leverage tools like Google Trends to learn which topics are currently trending in your industry. Cover these trends in the form of news, research, etc., on your site to gain more traffic and visibility.
Additionally, pay attention to features such as People Also Ask and People Also Search For. These features can give you additional ideas about what gaps should be covered in your content to better match your target audiences’ needs and deliver more value.
6. Continuously Analyze Your SEO Rankings
Lastly, if you want to use SERP SEO analysis to dominate and continuously monitor your search results, you should implement continuous monitoring of your own rankings.
Check your search engine rank position before implementing the tips shared above to have a clear benchmark. Then, watch how your position changes as you implement your strategy. Such an analysis should help you see which of your efforts are bringing tangible results and which need to be improved to help you achieve your goals.
Bonus tip: Also, always keep an eye on any algorithm updates that roll out. Different updates can offer new limitations and opportunities that are important to consider in your strategy for better outcomes.
Conclusion
Search engine result pages are a treasure trove of valuable information and insights that can help reinforce your optimization strategy. A careful analysis of different features on result pages can tell you what your business needs to implement in order to gain more visibility. In contrast, a deep analysis of your top-ranking competitors can help you refine your tactic to outperform them.
After reading this guide, you should better understand different search engine result page features and ways to analyze them to draw valuable SEO insights. Start implementing the tips we shared earlier to boost your discoverability. And don’t forget to check SERP ranking of your own site regularly to see how your renewed strategy works and detect areas for improvement.
