Track Your SERP Features with WooRank
WooRank customers and trial members are now able to track Google SERP features for their keywords using Keyword Tool.
Here at WooRank, we’re all about making sure our tools and features are constantly up to date with the latest SEO and Google best practices in order to deliver you the freshest and most relevant data so you can improve your SEO and marketing performance.
In this update, we’ll cover
- A bit about what SERP features are
- Why you should track SERP features for your keywords
- All about the new SERP feature data you get for your Project with WooRank
Ready? Let’s get started...
What Are SERP Features?
A SERP (search engine results page) feature is a term used to describe a result that appears in Google’s search results outside the normal organic results (those "10 blue links" that have been around from the start).
Google created SERP features as a way to help satisfy a person’s search intent without requiring them to click through to another website.
Here’s an example of the search results for the keyword "best universities acceptance rate" where you can see 2 SERP features right at the top:
In this example, the 2 features — a featured snippet and a "people also ask" box — are outlined in pink while the first organic result is outlined in blue.
Just seeing how SERP features have changed what appears above the fold is enough to realize you need to understand how SERP features are impacting your keywords and appearance in SERPs.
The Benefits of Tracking SERP Features
Knowing the lay of the land
Simply put, SERP features change the way your audience sees pages displayed in search results. In some cases, the appearance of SERP features can cause the top-ranked paged to appear below the fold. Theoretically, people might not see a page even if it’s ranked at the top for a particular query.
Here are the results appearing above the fold for the commercial keyword "best vacuum for pet allergies":
So even if you do rank first for this keyword, how many people are actually going to scroll down and see the link to your site?
Some, but more will click on one of the paid results or on the results in the featured snippet.
Knowing which keywords trigger which SERP features, and where those features appear, will help inform your keyword research as it will potentially impact the keywords you decide to target with your pages.
Leapfrog the competition
SERP features aren’t all doom and gloom for website owners, especially if you can get your site to appear in one. If you go back and look at the SERP for our "best universities acceptance rate" keyword, imagine if you were able to claim the featured snippet or one of the “people also ask” entries.
Your website would appear right at the top of the search result, jumping ahead of any of the pages that rank above yours.
In fact, many refer to featured snippets as "position 0" since it puts the page right at the top of the search results and highlights your content.
Learning more about search intent
SERP features are all about Google trying to meet search intent right in the search results. So it stands to reason that you can learn a lot about how Google classifies the intent of a keyword according to the SERP features it shows for it.
Results with lots of paid results such as Google Ads, Google Shopping and Google Flights is a good clue that you’re looking at a commercial keyword. Featured snippets, "people also ask" boxes and the various carousels can indicate more informational keywords.
If Google is showing the local pack for a keyword, you know that it’s got local intent (obviously) as well as navigational intent.
How is this valuable?
It takes a lot of guesswork out of keyword research and SEO, particularly your content creation. You can help your content rank higher, attract more visitors and convert more users when you’re able to optimize your content around the user’s intent.
Tracking SERP Features
The good news here is that tracking SERP features in your WooRank Project is super easy and incredibly simple.
If you’re already tracking keywords for your Project, just open up Keyword Tool and check it out. The relevant SERP feature data will populate automatically.
If you aren’t using Keyword Tool yet, it’s a snap to get started:
- Access Keyword Tool from your Project or account overview page
- Add your keywords you want to track
And you’re all set! Keyword Tool will start collecting and displaying your keyword data.
Detecting SERP features
Once we have all of your keyword data ready to go, you’ll see data related to SERP features in the table below the positions graph:
The Features column will show a different icon for each SERP feature it detects for a particular keyword.
Simply hover over a particular icon to see what type of SERP feature it represents.
In instances where a keyword’s search results have more than 3 SERP features, you can hover over the plus sign (+) in the Features column to see all the extra SERP features.
Because different keywords have different intents, you’ll likely see different icons for each keyword. You might even see the SERP features for a keyword change over time, with some appearing and others disappearing (and even reappearing!).
This is one of the reasons it’s so important to keep tracking SERP features along with rankings and position changes.
When you click on an individual keyword and look at the top 10 results for that keyword, you’ll see the SERP features appear in the position they do in Google results. You can click the drop-down menu to see more information about a particular SERP feature.
Depending on the SERP feature you’ll be able to see
- URL or URLs displayed in that feature
- Links to the page hosting an image
- Searches related to a tracked keyword
- URLs showing in paid Google Ads listings
Reading your SERP feature data
Keyword Tool uses color to classify SERP feature data in 3 ways.
Gray
An icon appearing in gray means that Keyword Tool detected the associated SERP feature for that keyword, but the website tracked in the Project does not appear in that feature.
Blue
Icons highlighted in blue represent the SERP features detected for a keyword that contain a URL from the domain tracked in the Project.
When you view the top Google results in Keyword Tool for a particular keyword, SERP features that feature a URL from your tracked site will display with a blue dot next to them.
Teal, aqua or green
When Keyword Tool detects a SERP feature for a keyword, it shows that icon in teal, aqua or gray when one of the Project’s tracked competitors appears in that feature.
You can hover over the highlighted icon to see which tracked domain is appearing in that feature.
All the SERP features tracked by Keyword Tool
With Keyword Tool you can track the following SERP features:
- Featured snippets
- Top stories
- People also ask
- Local pack
- Image pack
- Video carousel
- Twitter carousel
- App pack (mobile only)
- Jobs
- Knowledge Graph panels
- Ads
- Google Shopping listings
- Google Flights
- Carousels
- Google reviews
- Featured related search pack
To learn more about each of these SERP features and what sort of information they show, read the full guide to Google SERP features.
Start Tracking SERP Features
Now it’s time to get started tracking SERP features and enjoying all those benefits we talked about earlier.
If you’re a WooRank customer already, just open up one of your Projects (or start one if you haven’t yet), click into Keyword Tool and start entering your keywords.
If you aren’t a customer yet, just sign up and activate your 14-day free trial to start your Project and access Keyword Tool. All of Keyword Tool’s data for a Project will be available for the full length of your trial period.
