How to Use SERP Analysis for Keyword Research and Content Creation

Your website is a vital part of your digital marketing strategy. Besides being the first point of contact your customers have with your brand, it’s also the key source of SEO that will allow you to rank high in search engines. Therefore with every query comes a new marketing opportunity and challenge, and it’s your duty to uncover and take advantage of that opportunity. But how do you do that? SERP analysis.

A SERP analysis is one of the best ways to create SEO-focused content on your webpage. If you want to craft content that will be useful for customers and rank well in search results, you must understand what type of content is top-ranking and figure out what it will take to compete with the top-ranking content.

So what is a SERP analysis? How do you use it for keyword research and content creation? This article will answer these questions and show you how to find opportunities just by ogling the Google search results.

What Is a SERP Analysis?

A SERP (Search Engine Results Page) analysis is the process of exploring the search engine results pages for top-ranking websites to evaluate whether or not the keyword you want to rank for is relevant and determine opportunities to outrank your competitors.

The best way to go about SERP analysis is by looking at what the SERP displays, including top-ranking websites and other SERP features. By studying the top-ranking websites for specific keywords and searches, you can discover how the top-ranking pages managed to reach the highest positions and see how your content displays for searches.

A SERP analysis requires that you:

• Search for the desired keyword.
• Evaluate the top-ranking sites.
• Determine the relevance of the keyword to your site.
• Determine how you would rank for this keyword.

With an SEO checker and analysis tool, you can understand the difficulties and opportunities associated with targeting certain keywords.

How to Use SERP Analysis to Conduct Keyword Research

Many times, beginner SEOs and content marketers hop into their keyword research tools and find a keyword they think is relevant and focus on keyword difficulty scores and search volume. They’ll then start to create content. Even though this isn’t entirely wrong, this approach misses the basic understanding of how Google or any other search engine work.

SERP analysis provides insights into a keyword and its relevance to your products and services, allowing you to rank for the term. Before checking how your content ranks against competitors for a search query, you should first know whether or not that search query is relevant and how your audience uses it.

SERP analysis gives you semantic knowledge, which helps you identify how search engines rank content. For instance, a keyword that seems super-relevant for you can end up as the wrong option because it is semantically incorrect or the search intent doesn’t match the content you want to provide. Therefore, using SERP analysis for keyword research allows you to align your content with Google’s goals and give the best results for the searcher’s query.

This means SERP analysis makes you understand what people want to know when they type queries into Google. This way, searchers find what they are looking for, and you win by improving your organic traffic.

In addition to relevant keywords, SERP analysis, through competitive analysis, shows you how difficult it would be for a keyword to rank at the top of the SERP.It also gives you useful information such as domain authority, citation flow, and external backlinks that you can use to assess your chances of outranking your competitors.

Using SERP Analysis for Content Creation

Whenever you find a relevant SERP that you’d like to rank for, you should perform SERP analysis using a reliable SERP analysis tool to evaluate how prominent the competitors are based on several metrics and factors. To obtain these data about the particular SERP, you need to use SEO tools such as Ahrefs that will help you gather various metrics which give you a rough estimate of your competitor’s “strength” and ability to outrank them with your content.

SERP analysis gives you insight into the competition level and your competitor’s successful strategies, allowing you to develop creative content ideas that will match or exceed your competitor’s content. You can also develop USP (unique selling proposition) that makes your content distinct and valuable from the rest.

The data from SERP analysis gives you an idea of what people are looking for and why they’re looking for it. Therefore, as a vital step in any SEO strategy, you should find out the kind of content that is ranking and what that content is focused on to enable you to gear your content creation toward the standards of the top-ranking web pages.

One important factor in SERP analysis you should consider to create content that will rank for a particular keyword is the search intent. SERP features are vital in determining searcher intent. By looking at what Google shows in the search results, you can make a pretty good guess as to what content the crawlers have found useful for that search query and other related searches. Identifying search intent in the SERP can inform your content strategy.

Therefore, you should use the SERP analysis to establish the search intent before creating content. The better you know the searcher’s intent behind every keyword, the better you meet their needs with content strategy. This assists in boosting your search rankings since it’s more customer-centric than traditional keyword research.

Additionally, SERP analysis can help you to find hidden opportunities that you can use in your content to get you up on the SERP and outrank your competitors much faster. This could be the keywords your competitors are missing or the keyword length. For instance, if short-tailed keywords have high difficulties, you can try using long-tailed keywords, which are more specific and less competitive.

Furthermore, apart from the organic search results, the SERP analysis data may include paid ads and several SERP features, such as People Also Ask, featured snippets, or Related Searches, which can give you various ideas which you can inspect and use to your advantage. 

Finally, with the knowledge and ideas you gain from SERP analysis, you can optimize your existing content so it is complete and relevant, gaining more traffic from the targeted SERP. Also, you can use that data to create content designed to feature on the SERP features. However, ensure you do research because Google wants to rank authoritative, trustworthy, and useful content.

Remember, you should consistently evaluate your content, add new information, and upgrade your existing images and texts with SEO best practices and optimized keywords. Continually improving your content enables the search algorithm to constantly scan your pages, giving you chances to rank higher. 

Conclusion on SERP Analysis

SERP analysis is a vital tool to understand how Google and other search engines read important SEO data and what elements influence how web pages are ranked on the search results page. It lets you see the gaps in your content and helps you find opportunities to optimize it and outrank competitors by telling you how to improve your SEO strategy. You can always find a reliable SERP checker tool to help you conduct a SERP analysis with ease.

Connecting your SERP analysis and your website’s content is not a one-time task. The search intent behind a query and the SERP features displayed in search results keep changing. Therefore, keep an eye on your keyword rankings and those of your competitors and evaluate your content regularly, updating whenever necessary. Most importantly, write for the user because creating content just for the sake of SEO won’t make it as successful as content designed to answer a user’s question.

Featured Image Source: startup.info