Don't Sleep On SERPs.

Your organic customers hang out on SERPs, so it'd make absolutely no sense to overlook them as the starting point of your strategy.

I'm new here - what is a SERP?

Search engine results pages (SERPs) are the place that users land after searching something on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any of the other search engines that exist! They contain results (links to external websites) that the search engine systems (crawlers) have decided are the most relevant, helpful sources of information for any given query.

In SERPs, we see a mixture of organic and paid results. An organic result is shown as a result of crawlers deciding that the page has enough relevance to be displayed. whereas paid results appear when a business has put budget behind a page appearing for a specific search.

At first glance, it might be hard to deduce any kind of actionable value from the results that search engines serve to users - but there's plenty to pick apart when you know what you're looking for! Make note of these pointers.

Creating the right kind of content for queries

The beauty of SERPs is the sheer volume and diversity of information that they show - you'll see results in all different formats, for every imaginable topic. The trick is, some topics are best answered by certain 'types' of content. Some examples:

• Search 'best at home pilates workout' and you'll see the top answers are shown as links to popular Youtube videos, with a sprinkling of 'listicles' (articles formatted as a list).
• Similarly, search 'timeline of the Tudors' and you'll see most of the results are formatted as timelines, supported by long-form information.

In this way, search engine crawlers have established the most effective way to answer user queries - and you should take note of formatting in this way when researching topics that you'd like to publish any kind of content on.

Targeting the right types of keyword intent

The contents of your SEO content will be geared towards the user first and foremost, but you'll also most likely be targeting a handful of relevant keywords. It's easy to hyperfixate on search volume when we're talking about keywords, but this leads to overlooking an equally - maybe even slightly more - important factor; we're talking about keyword intent! Different keywords represent different user behaviours, and they've been categorised into four distinctive groups; informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational. Each intent type also naturally corresponds to different content formats -

• Informational keywords like 'how to be more organised' align with blog posts.
• Commercial keywords like 'sustainable baby clothing' relate to product categories.
• Transactional keywords such as 'buy men's Stone Island jeans' are associated with product pages.
• Navigational keywords such as 'Gmail login' represent specific websites/pages.

Take note of the intent of the keywords that you're targeting, based on current SERP results, and make sure it aligns with your content.

Sharing valuable, accurate information, effectively

Search engines are here to make our lives easier, giving us quick access to helpful, accurate information (cough cough, AI Overviews). In their long endeavours to do this, they've all (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) come up with ways to serve information in a way that meets this expectation. We're going to reference Google here, just because.

Google utilises around 20 SERP features to give users answers to their searches, in handy formats. From videos, to highlighting information (featured snippet), to video content, and many more. The likelihood is that some of the keywords you'd really like to rank for will have a SERP feature ranking - and being aware of this could be handy when it comes to creating your own content!

There are some ways that you can boost your chances of securing this kind of ranking, including adding Schema markup to pages, but the gist of many other suggested approaches is simply to provide concise, well-structured information.

Navigating the landscape: paid versus organic

Paid and organic results cohabit on SERPs, and it's worth getting your head around the territory that each kind of result occupies for searches that matter to you. Some searches will be dense with paid ads, especially if you're exploring a mega-competitive term like 'engagement rings'; and there are plenty for which you'll see fewer paid results (an indicator that the search term isn't as lucrative from a paid POV). It might also be interesting to look at your competitors and analyse both types of results - look at their ads and take note of what they're targeting, then scope out their organic ranking. We've identified a few wins for clients in this regard, where we've been able to optimise on-page aspects based on things our competitors were missing from their organic rankings - i.e., poorly produced meta descriptions.

Knowing what third-party tools are really telling you

We love a third-party tool, but we don't treat what they tell us as gospel! And sometimes, the figures they show us are a little bit hard to interpret. There's one metric in particular that manual SERP analysis can give you a clear feel for, and it's often called 'keyword difficulty*'. When you're scanning SERPs for those super competitive terms we've already mentioned, if you're seeing lots of high profile domains within the first page, then you've got a 'difficult' keyword on your hands.

So, go spend some time scoping out SERPs, and put your findings to work!