By keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Google (or Bing, Yahoo, etc.), SERP tracking allows you to monitor keyword rankings, shows you what your client’s competitors are doing, and helps you pinpoint opportunities for increasing their revenue (and ultimately your own) through paid and organic search.
But in our experience, there are overlooked features of SERP tracking tools that can be used to strategically drive more revenue-generating traffic.
The three most underutilized features of SERP tracking tools are:
- Grouping keywords into buckets (based on how they impact SEM strategies for your clients).
- Analyzing keyword impact through the lens of local SEO.
- Differentiating between mobile and desktop users.
In this article, we look at the most commonly used SERP tracking features — rank tracking and competitive analysis — to cover the basics and offer our best practices. Then we look at three often overlooked features, and show you how your agency can use these features to deliver better results.
ReportGarden’s end-to-end agency management software offers a SERP tracking tool that allows you to integrate your SEM efforts with the rest of your digital marketing activities, and handle them all in one place. Try it free for 7 days.
The Commonly Used Features of SERP Tracking Tools
The most commonly used feature of SERP tracking is monitoring tracked keywords that relate to your client’s overall SEM strategy. Keyword tracking lets you see how they’re ranking organically for those terms, as well as how much organic traffic they’re receiving from them.
But there is more to using a SERP tracker than just monitoring keyword positions. There are several other ways to use your ranking data to improve SEM results (which we go over below).
This brings us to the second most commonly used feature of SERP tracking tools: performing a competitive SERP analysis. You can use SERP tracking to take a deeper look at the keywords relevant to your business, and see where your competition is outranking you. To go a step further, we recommend looking below the surface to figure out the reasons behind ranking movement.
For example, losing your dominance in Google rankings because of an algorithm change requires a different response than losing ground because you’re producing sub-standard content. In order to respond correctly in these situations, understanding the why behind movements in search engine rankings is essential.
On the flip side of the coin, you can’t always look at your wins as a clear indicator that what you’re doing is immune to improvement. It’s possible you’re only ranking well for specific keywords because your competition isn’t keeping up with the trends and continually updating their content. It isn’t necessarily enough to bet your wins on someone else’s mistakes — knowing why your competition isn’t ranking can also help you improve your content and stay on top in the search engine results.
With ReportGarden’s rank tracking tool, you can set up the basic systems of keyword tracking and do competitive analysis for all of your clients, but the following additional features allow you to dig in even further to improve SEM efforts.
3 Underutilized Features of SERP Tracking Tools
1. Keyword Grouping
The first underutilized feature of SERP tracking tools is keyword grouping.
Let’s say you’re working with a business that sells toilet partitions. After conducting keyword research, your strategist comes up with a long list of keywords (sorted by search volume and keyword difficulty) for which to rank.
Perhaps you’re planning blog posts on the cost of toilet paper or a buyer’s guide on toilet partitions for concert venues. For their home page, you’re seeking to help them rank for “toilet partition supplier”. And you also have different keywords selected for their product pages like “toilet partitions for restaurants” and “toilet partitions for office buildings”.
Especially for larger clients, if you’re looking at all of these keywords across their site in one giant spreadsheet, it’s more difficult to understand the data and see opportunities for optimization. For example, some topics will have higher search volume and less purchase intent, while others will have lower search volume and higher buying intent.
If your objective is to increase revenue, it’s helpful to decipher between higher funnel and lower funnel keywords. This is where keyword grouping comes into play to organize and track keywords more efficiently.
Consider creating buckets such as:
- Core website pages: keep all the keywords for home pages (and other core website pages) in one bucket.
- Blog pages: keep the keywords that you’re trying to rank for through blog pages in another bucket.
- Product and service pages: keep all the keywords for individual product and service pages in a separate bucket.
ReportGarden’s keyword labeling feature allows you to do this easily so you can keep all of your client’s keywords organized within the context of their SEM strategy. For example, you can make a label for blog pages, a label for product pages, etc.
Next up, you also want to get granular with your data by factoring in localization.
2. Localization
The reality of localization with Google search is that your client’s product might be in a featured snippet in Chicago, but on page 3 in Miami. Depending on your client’s business, that can make or break their SEM efforts.
Fortunately, most rank trackers offer localization features. With ReportGarden’s ranking tool, you can keep tabs on how your SEO and PPC campaigns are performing in the different cities where your clients want to reach customers.
3. Differentiating Between Mobile and Desktop Users
Where your clients’ customers are querying is important, but so is how they’re querying. Depending on their business model, differentiating between their mobile results and desktop results can be significant.
For example, if you were to look at Google Analytics and see that more of their customers are converting on desktop than on mobile, and at the same time see their keywords are ranking better on mobile, that would indicate a disconnect worth rectifying.
This data offers insights into the mindsets of your client’s customers. Often the intentionality of people doing mobile searches is much higher, whereas desktop queries tend to be catered more towards deeper research.
Our SERP tracking tool allows you to see how results for keywords differ between desktop and mobile, so that you can find more opportunities to increase revenue for your clients.
Integrating Your SEM Strategy With the Rest of Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Between services like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz, there are great options on the market today for SERP tracking tools. These services function well as keyword research tools, help you aggregate and analyze keyword data, and perform backlink audits and competitive analysis. They can all be leveraged to improve Google SERP results for your clients.
What separates ReportGarden’s SEO tool is that you get most of the features that these other search engine analysis tools provide, but you get to manage them alongside the rest of your digital marketing activities, from your PPC and SEO campaigns, to your client communication.
And right from within our platform, you can also use our white label reporting templates to send ranking reports to clients and communicate the value of your service to them.
ReportGarden’s end-to-end agency management software offers a SERP tracking tool that allows you to integrate your SEM efforts with the rest of your digital marketing activities, and handle them all in one place. Try our 7 day trial FREE (no credit card required).
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