Evaluating SERP Layout for Keyword Attractiveness

Evaluating SERP Layouts for Keyword Attractiveness

November 5, 2019 - by Jason Kamara

If there’s one thing that’s remained consistent in SEO for the past couple decades, it’s the importance of keyword research and targeting when optimizing website content. Of course there are now vastly more tools available and they’ve become quite powerful. One of the drawbacks of having these powerful tools at our disposal is that they can become a crutch when relied upon as a sole means for sourcing and vetting keywords. Popular keyword research and management tools like SEMrush and AWR have even integrated SERP (search engine results page) layout features which scan the SERPs for each keyword and identify features found in the layout (some of which will be discussed in this post). This is a handy feature – particularly when we’re tasked with high volumes of keyword research. Even with this capability, we are missing the manual part of the equation. As a marketer, I want to know whether or not the keywords I choose are going to drive enough organic traffic to my content to justify the time and expense of creating and promoting said content. This is where a visual evaluation of Google search results pages is critical to understanding the true attractiveness of keywords when making our final selection.

Using a SaaS Company Example

I’m going to use the example of a start-up in the mHealth (mobile health) industry. Let’s say I’m doing keyword research as a basis for planning blog posts for the quarterly editorial calendar. One of the topical areas I want to focus on is patient activation. I’ve opened my SEO toolbox and sourced a list of a hundred or so keyword candidates that I’ve whittled down to a shortlist of 3 for this particular topical area. I want to choose one of these keywords for a high-value blog post the marketing team plans to publish the following month. These are the 3 shortlisted keyword candidates along with a few useful data points provided by my research tool (SEMrush in this case).

Evaluating SERP Layouts for Keyword Attractiveness - SEMrush export example

Now I could go ahead and just choose the keyword that has the highest monthly search volume, lowest keyword difficulty and competition levels. But these numbers can be inaccurate, inconsistent, incomplete and rarely tell the whole story. So I’m going to evaluate each of these keywords by visually reviewing the search results pages they trigger.

Tools for Conducting a Visual SERP Evaluation

To do this, I want to make sure that I’m using the correct Google database. If you’re primarily targeting US consumers, you’ll want to use Google.com. But if your market is restricted to Western Canada, you should be using Google.ca. I’m also going to install a handy browser extension for Chrome that will help me evaluate the strength of organic competition within the SERPs. I use the free MozBar extension to provide an overlay that highlights the domain authority (DA), page authority (PA) and number of backlinks to each of the organic results. An example of a top result with the MozBar overlay is shown below. For more information on the MozBar click here. If you’re not familiar with DA and PA, follow the jumps for a quick rundown of Domain Authority and Page Authority.

Evaluating SERP Layouts for Keyword Attractiveness - MozBar Overlay

Visually Evaluating the SERPs

Now I’m equipped to visually evaluate the search results layout pages for each of our keyword candidates. Let’s review them in order. SERP Layout for Keyword Candidate #1: “how to increase patient activation”

Evaluating SERP Layouts for Keyword Attractiveness - SERP 1

This is a nondescript layout with 6 organic results – two of which happen to be PDFs. At first glance, this layout looks like an appealing one to target since my new result would not be competing against anything splashy. Looking at some of the competitor statistics for the top 3 results I see one result with a very high domain authority (DA: 93) and one result with a lot of backlinks (156 links). Result #3 is from Berkeley University which may be hard to supplant. Result #1 comes from a less authoritative domain but has a lot of backlinks which may be the main reason it’s ranking so high. Overall, this result is still looking quite attractive. Let’s move on to the next candidate. SERP Layout for Keyword Candidate #2: “patient activation tool”

Evaluating SERP Layouts for Keyword Attractiveness - SERP Layout 2

Immediately upon executing my search with our second keyword candidate, I see a featured snippet at the top of the search results. Also referred to as “Position Zero”, a featured snippet in the top position can gobble up a lot of the traffic that would otherwise go to competing search results. Due to its position and prominence in the search results, a featured snippet can steal clicks from other top results which means fewer clicks for our new blog post – unless we can manage to replace it and secure that hallowed spot for our own post. Aside from the featured snippet, there are no other elements that could steal potential clicks from our new blog post. But… then there’s the matter of competition strength. For this keyword, I see top pages overall that have a lot more backlinks. Yes the Domain Authority and Page Authority of the top results are not tremendous, but we may have to work on promoting our post more aggressively to supplant one of these current top results. I’m not yet sold on this keyword candidate. Let’s continue on to our final keyword candidate. SERP Layout for Keyword Candidate #3: “patient activation and engagement”

Evaluating SERP Layouts for Keyword Attractiveness - SERP Layout 3

Things get a little interesting when evaluating my third and final keyword candidate. You can see here that this SERP is filled with distracting elements that are likely to steal traffic from my future blog post. Even if we were able to achieve a top ranking, we may not even appear above the fold for most desktop searches! There are two Google search network ads which indicate that these keywords do have some value – if vendors are willing to pay for these clicks they should be monetizable. IBM and Qualtrics in this example both have deep pockets to shell out for Google’s increasingly high cost per click rates. Immediately below, there is another type of rich snippet for scholarly articles which gives preference to articles from non-commercial, authoritative domains. Then we see a featured snippet with a large image. While it’s not in Position Zero this time, it still draws the eyes – particularly with the bright blue image embedded. Next, we finally see a regular organic search result in Position #1. Finally, we see an increasingly common People also ask accordion box designed to keep searchers on Google. Regardless of the search volume and level of competition, this SERP layout is quite unattractive. Given that there are only 10 monthly searches for this keyword, we can anticipate maybe 4-5 clicks for a #1 ranking and half that for a ranking of #2 or #3.

Keyword Recommendation

Based on a visual assessment of the three keyword candidates, and their potential to drive organic traffic to our future blog post, I would opt for candidate #1 – “how to increase patient activation”. Not only does this keyword have the highest monthly search volume and a comparable level of organic competition, it has the most attractive SERP layout. In this case, my visual assessment happened to coincide with data found by SEMrush which is sometimes not the case. Visually evaluating the SERP layout for keyword candidates provides great insight into the searcher experience and what options they face on different search results pages.

,