Decoding the SERP Landscape: A Guide for Leaders

SEO is an area of marketing that is more often than not, slow to show results. SEO projects can take months, though occasionally it might be weeks, to show marked changes. Demanding clients might want proof that the significant budget they are investing with your agency for SEO is giving them a return, and they might think that success is solely whether they rank in organic position one or not.

Meanwhile, client marketers can struggle to get buy-in from their leaders to reserve budget for SEO because it’s not the tactic that will deliver a deluge of leads, at least at first anyway. Failing to do it at all will have detrimental consequences down the line. Doing it badly may be worse than not doing it at all. When you’re offering SEO services to your clients, understanding the potential impact of ranking higher for any keywords is essential – but it’s not always as simple as rank higher and you’ll be seen by more people, instead you need to help clients understand what they are missing because they’re not currently investing, or not investing in the right way.

Spoiler Alert: SEO isn’t always the right approach for particular keywords or areas you want to capture market share on. We believe in taking a pragmatic approach to ranking where you’re more likely to get clicks or using other channels (like paid or social media, or even digital PR)  to capture space where a single organic listing may have less impact.  

Visualising the SERP makes all the difference

SEO is regarded as a dark art by some. Lots of talk of data and algorithms can switch anyone off. How do specialists best position SEO to those with less knowledge?
Visualising and quantifying a client brand’s share of page one, showing the evolution of their share over time, clearly showing gains and losses for their domain or those of their partners and competitors would go a long way to improving their understanding of the work your agency has been doing for them.
In addition, understanding the questions and related searches that have appeared on page one for your client’s keyword set, enables your team to gain a deeper understanding of your client’s prospective customers and you can use the same information to make strategic content recommendations too. 

Which SERP features of Google are shown one page one?

Generally in business, people have a vague understanding of what SEO is. Usually they’ll point to it as enabling a brand to sit in position one in organic search results. But why do they want this? Ultimately they’re looking to get the most visibility to people searching for their products/services and stay front of mind ahead of competitors. Ranking first organically may have been the only way to do this years ago, but with the introduction of more and more rich features to Google SERPs, achieving position one doesn’t necessarily mean a brand is at the top of the page or even that visible on page one.
Reframing SEO thinking is essential, so that success isn’t purely seen as boosting rank position, but about being dominant on page one and standing out. Because those rich SERP features help users get the answers they need without even needing to leave the search engine. 

Who is competing against your clients for visibility across these features of Google?

In search results, you’ll likely have some brand competitors appearing on the page one SERP, but you’ll also have some other types of companies competing to be on page one. If you’re selling software, you’ll probably find that you’ve got comparison sites or review sites appearing on page one. If you’re selling cosmetics, you might find lifestyle websites appearing with articles on best makeup brands or such like.
It’s time to consider that if someone is searching for something like ‘best SaaS for agencies’ do you care if you are owning the top result? Or is it just as (or even more) powerful to see a dominant independent reviews site which speaks positively about your brand? A truly successful SERP strategy focuses on owning the narrative on the page one of results, not just looking at standalone rankings.  

How can you find the opportunities to out-manoeuvre your clients’ search competitors?

SERP analysis shouldn’t just be about identifying what competitors are doing in search. What they aren’t doing is equally as important, as that’s where agencies can identify missed opportunities or newly emerging features that your clients can target.

Understanding the changing SERP landscape over time, understanding where new features are appearing or existing ones are no longer appearing, is crucial for dominating page one. Does shopping appear at all? Or map packs? Is Google promoting a video on the page? Has a Question displaced the organic results at the top of the page?

Another example might be that you notice on high priority terms that new questions are emerging in the People Also Ask section, which currently competitors are yet to notice and provide answers for. If you can move quickly to produce expert content on the topic then you could step in to take this position for your clients, making it a much harder challenge for a competitor.

Being able to understand these details allows agencies to refocus tactics to reflect the SERP landscape and increase their clients’ share. And ultimately, dominating the SERP proves to clients that your SEO work, and their investment in your agency, has paid off. 

Using visualizations and charts to make SEO easy to understand

Being able to group different domains into domain types like owned, competitors and partners allows you to understand where share is generally being gained or lost on the SERP over time, by the type of business.

And some SERPs are very stable where little variation is seen at all week-to-week or month-to- month. But others can be very volatile and share of page can go up and down frequently, be that from competitors changing their approaches or Google testing different SERP features regularly. But seeing the overall progress between two points can help prove that tactics undertaken during that time have resulted in an increase in page one share.

Getting the granular data on changes in the SERP, seeing where wins and losses are, again helps to focus and evolve the SEO strategy. Perhaps your client has lost share for one or two keywords, but gained share in a number of others.

Additionally, being able to visualize the changes in a SERP to see why, for example, a conversion rate has been impacted is of great value. Perhaps Shopping or Ads used to be at the top of the page, but now they are to the right or at the bottom, and people are being distracted by an Answer box or a video instead. 

Pitching for new SEO work

A pitch to a potential new client can take hours of time and lots of data prep. But being able to run, in just a few minutes, reports that give you:

• A quick overview of a prospect’s dominance or lack thereof in page one space
• Which channels take the biggest ownership on page one
• How the prospect performs against their brand keyword or top 10 keywords

…would go a long way to speeding up that pitch. And being able to share those visuals with the client, including any individuals who are less knowledgeable about SEO, allows you to simply explain their current state and areas you’ve identified to help them better their situation. 

Quantify and visualize share of page one

SERPsketch shows leaders what appears on SERPs for their most important keywords, helping them to understand where their web and social content might be lacking compared to others competing for those same terms.

With a range of different data views and graphs, as well as details on Questions and Related searches to help with keywords and content planning, and the ability to export data to LookerStudio, SERPsketch offers insights other SEO tools miss.

SERPsketch was created to make page one analysis much easier to understand and to simplify the way those results could be viewed, rather than having to cobble together data from multiple sources. It’s free to try for one month, so why not sign up and add your keywords?

About the Author

Kevin Harris is the co-founder and CEO of SERPsketch. A contact in the digital marketing world approached Kevin to help them create an SEO tool that didn’t focus on page rank, but rather on share of page one and that’s how SERPsketch was founded. Kevin is also CEO at Igale, a bespoke software development company. He has previously held a number of director-level positions for both large and small software development businesses.