Bart says: “My additional insight in 2024 is that all the answers lie in the SERPs. If you look into the SERPs, and you look into your competitors, and slowly start reverse engineering what they are doing, you can get a lot of answers to your problems.”

What would you say are the key answers that you're looking to find out about in the SERP?

“It sounds simple, but it is not simple, because there are so many elements to it and sometimes it can also depend on your experience and knowledge. A lot of the things you hear on the internet are from the gurus and the experts. Sometimes it's hard to dissect what is working and what is not, especially when the SERPs are flooded with AI content and all those mass pages.

On top of that, you also see a lot of cannibalization issues. That’s when you might be typing some of the keywords you or your clients are trying to rank for, and then you scroll down and see your website ranking multiple pages for the same keywords.

One of the problems is that Google is having a hard time figuring out what is happening because of the sheer volume of the pages. It takes time to crawl the web pages of your website and your competitors and to figure out which page to put at the top. This is an ongoing issue which hasn't been solved.

It's been a little while since we've had the last updates, especially the Google Helpful Content Update, and many have been trying to fix their rankings by employing some recovery plans, but none of them have recovered. Some of them may have flat lined, been stagnant, or maybe they have even seen some bumps. But as far as I know, no one has a clear answer on what the immediate fix is.

Something I have been doing for myself and my clients is cutting down on a lot of mass pages that are low quality and focus on internal linking. This can be a great fix for many local clients who may have a high volume of pages, but are thin content and low quality. You can identify them by going to Google Search Console, or running a crawl with Screaming Frog and you can filter them out by clicks and impressions. If you have a high number of pages, and you see that at the bottom of your list there are pages with zero clicks and zero impressions, then you can visually tell this is very low-quality, thin content, so maybe you can delete them.”

High impressions and low clicks. Are there any typical reasons why that happens, or is it not having the target search keyword phrase in the title and meta description?

“I have talked to Michał Suski from Surfer and he has mentioned that as you're publishing content, you might start ranking for some auxiliary secondary keywords that you originally didn't plan to. This means that you can have two, three, or many more different keywords that the same page is ranking for. Instead, you could decide to create a new page for that keyword.

What he was telling me was that Surfer started ranking for ‘AI article writer’, which they had never had a landing page for, instead a blog post was ranking for that. So there's a potential there to create a landing page with an internal link with the target keyword from that blog post to the landing page.”

I was going to ask you if you'd 301 the old blog post to a new landing page, but it sounds like you're advocating for keeping the blog post, but incorporating a link as part of that to a new landing page?

“If it's getting some clicks, I would keep it. I would consider deleting it if it's getting almost no clicks, but high impressions. This is a difficult decision at times. Initially, the best practice would be to internally link it, and then see what happens. If that new page starts to rank in a short period of time, you might redirect it, and that's a good approach.

But if it's not ranking, you can try redirecting it as well to see if that has a positive impact on ranking that page highly for that target keyword term.”

When you're analyzing the SERP, how do you determine what other pages to benchmark your performance against?

“There is something embedded in the algorithm called ‘historical ranking data’ that can be used to benchmark a page properly. So you might have two pages, one had some historical rankings, and one didn't. With the page that had some historical rankings, you have much more data to work with, and that page can benefit you in the long run, and can be used as a benchmark in itself.

On the other hand, if you have a page that never ranked for any keywords, and has no historical rankings, it can’t be used for any kind of benchmark.”

How do you go about determining opportunities that you don't rank for at all at the moment, and how do you determine that you have an opportunity to rank higher than those already featuring in the SERP?

“One way to do this is to look at their page and you need to look at the titles and the URL structure. Essentially, if they are under-optimized, you can beat them with on-page SEO. If that doesn't help, you can obviously build some extra links to it, and that's how you can get ahead. You can do this either in Surfer, or you can do it manually.”

Do you look at existing authority metrics for the competing domain or page?

“Yes, that is one of the main metrics I use. If that domain has historical ranking data, and if you are serious about your business, you will need some significant link power to overtake them.”

What does this look like in terms of creating an annual strategy based upon the SERP? Do you conduct a thorough analysis every few months and then create a content strategy based on that analysis?

“I like to be scientific about it, but that’s an individual preference. Some clients want to outrank their competitors, but in many cases, it's just unrealistic because their competitors have so many backlinks, they have so much content and topical authority. In many cases, it would take you a year realistically to outrank them, but you can kind of calculate the number of backlinks needed to outrank them. Mostly you’d need to focus on high-quality, high-authority domains.

One thing that's working well across so many niches right now is Digital PR and Haro links. It kind of makes sense to move on from those shady, outdated tactics - those black hat/grey hat ones. Especially because as we talked about with the advent of AI, Google still values that genuine human input. That's exactly what digital PR is - big websites, journalists, big businesses, and big domain authorities, that are vouching for you. These links make a difference. So one of the campaigns, you could start to catch up with your competitors is a digital PR campaign.”

How often should SEOs be analyzing the SERP?

“Quite often, if you can’t do it quarterly, then you should be doing it yearly as a minimum. You need to pay attention to the link velocity your competitors are doing, essentially, because many people fall victim to treating their website as something not real, and you have to treat it as a business.

You have to make time and allocate resources into link building and content because that's how, ultimately, you drive traffic to your website and maintain that steady velocity. It doesn't have to be anything rigid, as long as you're feeding the algorithm. You don't have to have a strict schedule, as long as there is some schedule. You can benefit from the algorithm when you sometimes have an irregular schedule. There is no right or wrong way of doing it.

You have to be reasonably consistent. It doesn't mean you have to have one post per day, five posts per day. One day, you can have five posts and one day you can have zero posts. And then three days later, you publish ten. You can be quite flexible with that when it comes to feeding the algorithm.”

How is the SERP changing? What features are you seeing that perhaps didn't exist or weren't as common a few months ago?

“Ultimately, Google is a money-making machine, so depending on the keyword you're looking for, the SERPs can look wildly different.

Some commercial keywords will display a SERP that looks like Amazon, like a shop built in Google. What is so crazy right now is that the search intent is changing nonstop. As Kyle Roof puts it: ‘There is no search intent’. The answers lie in the SERPs.

My answer right now might be completely different than it was a month ago because Google decided to put commercial keywords upfront and display products in some sidebar on the left. So even though you might be ranking number one for your keyword, you're not getting any clicks, or you're getting 50% fewer clicks, and that leaves you wondering why you’re not getting leads or sales.

If you offer any kind of products or services, you might consider going after different keywords. Sometimes, you might have gone after commercial keywords, but then you find that those informational keywords became commercial.”

Would your answer be different depending on the industry sector or country?

“Yeah, you have to pay attention to the SERPs. I scan them every day and it blows my mind sometimes what I see because they just change throughout the day.”

You’ve shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024, now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's productive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I would call it the Shiny Object Syndrome because there is so much information and opportunity to for so many things you want to learn or try.

A lot of SEOs have this problem when they are doing their work, writing, doing SEO, etc, and then they see their friend or their mentor or their guru talking about this brand new link-building tactic, and they’ll want to try it out straight away.

I think the biggest obstacles are those things that distract you, especially for us as SEOs working online, because it's very hard to focus with this influx of information.”

Bart Magera is an SEO consultant, and you can find them over at bartmagera.com.