The use of SERP Analysis Tools to analyze top-ranked websites and find out a correlation of the SEO efforts is on the rise. But how useful is such information?
New tools are in play that analyzes the SERPs or search engine result pages relatively better. The use of statistical analysis of the similarities among the top-ranked sites is the basis for such recommendations. But the search community is still doubtful about the utility of such tools. Should you take the plunge and give it a shot?
Correlation Analysis
The cumulative effort that tries to gauge and analyze various ranking websites on Google search results is SERP correlation analysis. In other words, it is the identification and analysis of the factors that contribute to the rank of websites.
There are startling correlations in the studies that many from the SEO community took up in the past. Such results often have conflicting support from the community as not all of them agree with the findings. For example, one such analysis discovered that the top-ranked sites had higher Facebook likes compared to others. Such a finding is, of course, not true.
A crucial point is that just because some of the top-ranked sites have a few features in common, it does not certainly mean that those contribute to their better rank. Such lack of actual causes between the factors is common, and the absence of the actual reasons why the sites ranked is a problem.
You may observe the sites which are ranking at the top has a common series of factors like:
- Keyword density
- Word count
- Keywords in common
It does not necessarily mean that these are contributing to the higher rank of those pages.
Ten Blue Links
The biggest concern of analyzing only the top ten search results is that the SERPs are no more just the top 10 blue links. Citations from previous studies often considered only the top-ranked ten web pages.
Industry experts do not express much confidence in search result correlation analysis. They say that the data in a correlation study may not include the featured snippets and one box within them. Charting web pages that can give insights that people can comprehend to have better correlation analysis is a key concern area.
Misleading Concepts
Many experts often cite SERP analysis tools as misleading. The approaches that make use of term frequency calculations to scrape SERPs with the help of content optimization tools are most misleading.
It is prevalent for such tools to scan through the content from the top ten to thirty search results, get the common terms, and rate them on relevancy. For the process of rating these terms based on relevancy, they use Google AdWords Keyword Planner.
If you choose to add words to your content based on such tools, it will never lead to be expertly written, comprehensive, and relevant content that can serve as your competitive advantage over time.
Outdated concepts like LSI keywords are often in use by some of the SERP analysis tools. Most experts nowadays cite that these are not important for ranking your web pages on Google.
It is well known among the search community that such concepts have little or no relevance for ranking on the SERP.
What Can Serve Better?
Many agencies help provide solutions to gauge the rank on the SERP. Such companies prove to be more than just helping with keyword analysis. They help to churn reports, manage clients, analyze the SEO work and gather keyword data in one place. Notify in real-time of the changes. You can refer to the services of SerpWatch while shortlisting such an agency.
You can save time and have a reduction in the customer churn rate with automated custom SEO reports. Such solutions also provide easy to interpret, quickly build and branded reports for your clients. You can easily and quickly set up the projects and the keywords that you want on the report.
The effortless solutions also help you choose your recipient list from the project set up and keep more than one person in the loop. There is also a flexibility to have on-demand reporting, which can help you facilitate any internal meeting on a client presentation.
Therefore the availability of a better analysis tool can help you have reports that can guide you to fetch a better result on the SERP. It is also important to not indulge in any conclusion based on a few factors which may emerge from such an analysis. You can choose to use in-depth tools that consider numerous factors to conclude.
