Ranking well on Google and improving your overall web presence to generate targeted leads should be the main goal of an SEO campaign. There are many factors to help improve your SEO, but one strategy is often overlooked, even by the professionals.
Reviewing the top SERPs on a regular basis is something most website owners (and even agencies) fail to do, but it is necessary to maximise the chances of your own ranking success.
So what are SERPs?
SERPs stands for Search Engine Results Pages, which are the various web pages that Google displays for a particular keyword or phrase. The top websites are known as the top SERPs, and this is where a lot of analysis should be done.
Reviewing the top SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) when optimising your pages for SEO is crucial for several reasons:
1. Understand Search Intent
The highest ranking search results display what Google believes users actually want when typing in a particular phrase. Since many phrases can have different intent, it’s imperative to ensure the intent of the top results aligns with what your business offers too. Otherwise you’ll end up wasting time optimising for a phrase that isn’t suitable.
For example, one of our clients provides surfaces for running tracks. And the keyword “running tracks” gets a lot of monthly searches. So on the surface (pardon the pun) this seems like a good keyword to target. However, when you look closely at the top SERPs, you’ll see all the results are focused on the best places to run in the local area.
This means the search intent does not relate to our clients’ offering, and thus isn’t a good phrase to target for their SEO campaign.
2. Identify Content Gaps and Opportunities
Looking at the top SERPs for your main keywords can help you discover what topics are being covered (or left out) by the most popular websites. This allows you to compare against your own target page, and adjust your content to provide something of similar focus and equal quality, or even more comprehensive.
Elements to identify:
- Common sub-themes
- Use of FAQs in the content
- Multimedia (videos, infographics)
- Reviews & testimonials
3. Analyse On-Page SEO Strategies
Looking over the top-ranking pages in Google provides insights into how these high performers structure their meta tags, page headings, image optimisation, internal linking and keyword density.
Ensuring your target page is comparable with the top players will go a long way in helping you reach page 1. Our SEO agency are experts in determining what should go on each individual target page, to both resonate with your customers AND Google.
4. Benchmark Quality & Depth
Google states on its own website the importance of creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.
Some of the parameters it uses to determine quality content include:
- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
- Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?
- Does the main heading or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?
- Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- Is the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
You can gauge what Google deems quality content for your target keywords by reviewing the top SERPs based on:
- Word count
- Depth of coverage
- Expertise/tone
- Freshness of content
5. Analyse Competitor Authority
By performing a competitor analysis of the top search results for your target keywords, you can identify a range of metrics across each one. This lets you assess what it might take to outrank them, and whether it’s feasible based on your budget and ideal timeframe for success.
Key metrics include domain authority, page authority, trust flow and referring domains.
6. Customise Your Own Strategy
Reviewing the top search engine ranking pages for your target keywords gives you a clear indicator of what Google sees as the benchmark. It not only takes out the guesswork of how to structure your pages but helps with planning what content to create and how it should be optimised.
If you’re doing SEO and not reviewing the SERPs, you’re essentially flying blind. Good luck with that!
If you’d like to discuss a strategy that gets results, let’s have a chat.
