How To Do A Competitor SERP Analysis

Last Updated: November 1, 2022

Typically, it's not enough to understand the right keywords to target. If you want to win traffic, you need to understand search intent for your keyword.

This means getting inside the mind of the searcher to understand what they’re looking for. Sounds impossible, right? Fortunately, Google has done 99% of the work for you. You can start by simply Googling the keyword you want to target!

For example, here are the results for "kittens for adoption":

Here, we see a Google Ad for a rescue organization, a map pack result for local kitten shelters, and an adoption website. Clearly, Google believes the intent of this search is to find a kitten for adoption.

Let’s compare that to the results for “new kitten”:

Although “new kitten” isn’t explicit, all of the results focus on information on how to care for a new kitten - we see checklists, help, advice, timelines, etc. Google is telling us that the intent of this search is to find information about what to do after bringing home a new kitten - lists of essential items, veterinary care, training, adjusting to your new responsibilities, etc. We don’t see results for kitten-related products, or local kitten rescue organizations. While “new kitten” and “kittens for adoption” might seem like closely related keywords (and they are!), the SERP results are very different.

We could also dive into each page on this SERP to further dissect how each satisfies user intent. For a more comprehensive explanation on search intent, check out Search Intent and SEO: A Quick Guide.

A SERP analysis is the process of examining the search engine results page (SERP) for a keyword to analyze the features, the power of your competitors, and the difficulty of the keyword.

After looking at SERPs to determine user intent, take your competitive analysis to the next level by conducting a SERP analysis. You’ll better understand the landscape by looking at things like:

• SERP features, like featured snippets and "People Also Ask" boxes

• The link metrics of all ranking pages

• Keyword Difficulty score

There are a couple of different ways to go about this, each revealing different data points.

1. First, download the MozBar for Chrome

2. Go to Google, and turn the MozBar on by clicking the browser extension

3. Search your target keyword

4. Browse the SERP to quickly see link metrics for all ranking results

5. Better yet, export the results to a CSV by clicking the icon at the top of the page. The MozBar export allows you to investigate within a spreadsheet program. You can see an example of this report in the image below.

6. Final step: In the SEO Competitor Analysis Template, copy and paste the CSV to the SERP Analysis tab.

Finally, you can gather more intel on the keyword with the SERP Analysis report in Keyword Explorer:

1. Enter your target keyword

2. The SERP Analysis report will show you this:

• Keyword Monthly Volume: a highly accurate estimate of how many times per month people search your keyword within a specific region and search engine

• Keyword Difficulty: a score from 1–100 that tells you how difficult it is to rank in the top 10 results for that keyword

• Organic CTR: an estimate of the percentage of clicks that are available to traditional, organic links in the SERP for this keyword

• Priority: an overall estimate of the potential value of the keyword, based on other metrics such as Difficulty, Volume, and Organic CTR

Next up: How To Analyze Your Competitors’ Content