Use the SERPs as your best and most up-to-date SEO tool

"Omi says**: "Use the SERPs as your best and most up-to-date SEO tool. Obviously, we all want to rank well in the SERPs, but we often confuse rankings with SERP visibility. Ranking number one doesn't automatically mean that your website is visible to the user, or even in the number one position in the SERPs. Imagine you're searching for 'running shoes'. First, you're probably going to have adverts in the Shopping slider, then 3-4 traditional PPC adverts, then the Google Map with local stores highlighted, and then the opening times and ratings for 3-4 local stores below that. Your tools might be telling you that you rank number one for running shoes, but your position in the SERP is more like 9 or 10. That situation is even worse on mobile."

Is it still worthwhile trying to rank number one in organic search results?

"Ranking number one is still worthwhile, but you need to know the SERPs, and target what the user is actually seeing. If you want to compete for 'running shoes', that user is unlikely to scroll all the way to position 8 or 9 - they will hit something before that. They are more likely to click on a slider advert or on one of the local shops. Instead of just trying to rank number one, think about what the best position will be for that keyword and target the SERP instead. You need to decide whether you just want to rank number one, or if you also need to target slider ads, rich snippets, or local shops."

Do you need to regularly check the SERPs, or are there tools to help you decide which elements to target in each SERP?

"Tools can help you but at the end of the day, you still need to manually check the SERPs. There's no way around it. It's not just keywords that you need to consider, there are a lot more elements that can only be seen when you're looking at the SERP itself.

Imagine you're on page two and you want to rank well on page one. You check the backlinks of the pages ranking well on page one and see that they have an average of 20 links. Only looking at this information, you might assume that acquiring 50 links will automatically jump your page to number one in the SERP. However, just looking at the number of links is misleading. The companies that rank well in your niche may actually be ranking because they have good authority. If you don't look at the SERP, and you don't see that authority, acquiring 50 links will not help you in the rankings. A bot will compare your page with your competitors and see that there is something wrong. In this case, it may be the content, the performance, or the technical health of your site that is stopping you from ranking well. Of course, you can't check every single SERP manually, but you can definitely check for your top 10 keywords.

I was working for a travel company a few years ago, and we were trying to rank pages in South American countries. We started by acquiring national links for a page in Brazil, but we were not ranking. The only reason for this was because our links were from all over the place, and our competitors had acquired local links. The companies linking back to them were local companies with local pages. There is no way to see this kind of information in the tools, you have to go and see for yourself.

SEOs are always unsure as to whether they should have short or long text on the page. Neither of the answers will be correct without looking at the SERPs. If the first five pages have short text on the page, it's unlikely that you will rank well with long-format text. If the first five pages have well-written long articles, it's almost impossible to for you to outrank them with short and direct answers. It's a manual process, but the only way to truly know whether your page will rank well is to go to the SERPs."

Should you check the SERPs in Incognito, or should you be looking at how it appears for different users?

"Both ways are valuable. If you're in London, and you want to know how a page will appear in London, then check it while you are logged in. If you're in Ealing, and you want to rank a web page in Ealing, check the SERP on your mobile. This will help you to see what the user you are targeting may be seeing. However, Incognito is, in some ways, the best view of the SERP - because it's neutral."

How often do you need to analyse the SERP results?

"For your top 10-20 keywords you want to be doing SERP analysis every six months. You can get a lot of inspiration from this analysis too. If you're trying to write an article on 'How to Run the London Marathon', a tool can give you keywords that are ranking well, but the SERPs can tell you a lot more. Check the People Also Ask questions and answer them all in your article. Even better, use those questions as your H2s. You can get so much information about what people want to know for your topic, that no tool can give you.

If you're analysing the SERPs every six months, you're going to know exactly what the people in your niche are talking about, not just what the tools are telling you. The keywords from your tools may or may not be good for you because they are only telling you the search volume per month. A lot of tools don't even tell you if it's an informational query or a transactional query. Companies will invest a lot of money and expect a 3000-word informational article to rank in a SERP that is transactional. They cover all the key words from the tools and are surprised that it doesn't appear. All they had to do was check the SERP.

You have to understand Google's point of view. We are not the customers; we are just SEOs. We're trying to push our pages, but it's the people who click on those pages who are Google's customers. Google is thinking about them, not us. Google doesn't care if you've included a search keyword in your copy that has a massive search volume, it's deciding whether your page belongs in the SERP. You need to look and see if it does. You're not catering for Google; you're catering for the people who are your target market on the SERP. Their actions determine how the algorithms perceive your site to be relevant or irrelevant for those queries. However, you need to know how Google sees those potential customers, and what the different SERPs will look like for different searches."

What is something that SEOs should stop doing to spend more time looking at SERPs?

"At the end of the day, we are all guilty of talking about rankings as if it's the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to bring in revenue. You may be ranked number one, but with 10 adverts above you in the slider - the normal ads and everything else - your page may not be bringing any revenue. Ranking number one can be almost pointless in that regard - people will still not hit your page if it doesn't suit the SERP. As SEOs, we often spend too much time reporting on ranking every day, thinking that if we manage to rank all our pages in position number one, then we've won. You may be ranking well, but you need to know that what you are doing is actually good for revenue.

I'm not advising anyone to stop what they are doing, but I am asking SEOs to start looking at the big picture. Looking at SERPs will take more time, but it is time well spent. You need to see things from Google's points of view in order to see that your efforts will have the result that you're looking for. Remember that the end goal of SEO is actually to bring value to the business rather than just to report on rankings."

Omi Sido is Senior Technical SEO at Canon Europe.