Setting up SERP comparison
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 10:04 am
Because proper keyword distribution is essential to understanding your SERP data (and more than one data point is always better when proving points), we divided our questions into two different categories:
General Intent Keywords. These are searches that can be satisfied without leaving home, as long as you don't want to pay for shipping — like [mountain bike] , [laptop speakers] , and [FIFA 19 PS4] .
Local intent keywords. These are searches that explicitly require physical locations — like [best mechanic] , [vegan restaurant] , and [24-hour gym] .
Then came tracking. We took each group of chile number data , fed them into STAT, and tracked them to specific Portland and New York City zip codes, as well as the overall English-speaking market in the US. So, for example, one SERP is located to "10038 New York, NY" and another is located to just "US-en."
Once we had all of our SERPs collected (just over 600,000 of them), we did a bunch of side-by-side comparisons. We looked at the keywords by keyword and saw if the search results were present on both the zip code and national SERPs, and then if they appeared in the same order, is it here? is it there? are they both in rank four?
The answer to all of the above is: yes, yes, and yes, well, similarly.
But the biggest question on our minds: Are national SERPs accurate enough to trust?
General Intent Keywords. These are searches that can be satisfied without leaving home, as long as you don't want to pay for shipping — like [mountain bike] , [laptop speakers] , and [FIFA 19 PS4] .
Local intent keywords. These are searches that explicitly require physical locations — like [best mechanic] , [vegan restaurant] , and [24-hour gym] .
Then came tracking. We took each group of chile number data , fed them into STAT, and tracked them to specific Portland and New York City zip codes, as well as the overall English-speaking market in the US. So, for example, one SERP is located to "10038 New York, NY" and another is located to just "US-en."
Once we had all of our SERPs collected (just over 600,000 of them), we did a bunch of side-by-side comparisons. We looked at the keywords by keyword and saw if the search results were present on both the zip code and national SERPs, and then if they appeared in the same order, is it here? is it there? are they both in rank four?
The answer to all of the above is: yes, yes, and yes, well, similarly.
But the biggest question on our minds: Are national SERPs accurate enough to trust?