Are you optimally visible in search?

Organic vs paid search results

The way Google's search results page (or Search Engine Results Page, or SERP for short) looks has changed considerably over the years, from dry lists of text to a current variety of different types of visually designed snippets. One thing has remained the same throughout: the mix of paid advertisements and organic (unpaid) search results.

The quantity and variety of paid and organic search results varies according to the keyword used (and the search intent behind it), but the structure follows a standard pattern.

For commercial searches, paid advertisements are generally shown first, followed by the organic results. For informational searches, the SERP more often begins with an organic search result, while both situations can occur for terms with ambiguous search intent.

From the ratios between paid/unpaid results in the SERP, you can draw various conclusions. What is your SERP coverage, in other words: how visible are you online through different channels in your industry? What are your competitors doing? Which search terms are most interesting to invest in, and which are not?

Step by step, valuable insights for fine-tuning your own marketing strategy.

SERP coverage in the nut industry

To illustrate the value of SERP analysis, we are going to create an imaginary online nut start-up. Our nut webshop offers a wide range of nuts, seeds and kernels, and also supplies supplementary health products such as dried fruit and grains.

The start-up still has to decide which products are most interesting to promote online. Its marketing strategy is also still open. The nut retailer is unsure whether to focus on organic search engine optimisation (SEO\nPPC\n

By tracking 463 commercial and informational keywords related to nuts, kernels, seeds and other relevant products for this industry, we examine organic and paid SERP coverage in the nut segment.

Which marketing channels?

To determine the paid and organic competitive landscape, we conduct a SERP analysis that tracks the top 20 of the SERP for each nut keyword for 30 days and checks which parties appear in the unpaid search results and in 2 types of paid advertisements: Shopping and regular search advertisements.

The analysis shows how often the websites appeared, expressed as a percentage (on a scale from 0 to 100), in each of 3 channels: organic search results (Organic Search), paid search advertisements (Paid Search) and paid Shopping advertisements (Paid Shopping).

Graph 1 , SERP coverage by channel for all ranking websites in the keyword selection.

Organic is an important channel for the nut industry: apart from one party, all websites have appeared in the organic top 20 over the past 30 days. Some parties are fully committed to the nut theme and are visible across all 3 channels. For some parties, nuts appear to be a less significant focus; some websites are not visible in paid advertisements.

What are the competitors doing?

We can add together the coverage scores for Organic Search, Paid Search and Paid Shopping to create a scale of 300 showing the best-performing websites overall.

Graph 2 , The coverage scores for Organic, Paid Search and Paid Shopping added together. A website's area is larger the more keywords the site appears for. The darker the area, the higher the total SERP coverage.

The graph immediately shows who the nut start-up's biggest competitors are and who it needs to take into account. Websites with high coverage scores in both the organic and paid areas are probably working hard to achieve this level of visibility.

Nut specialists such as De Notenshop, Bas Boer Noten, Top Noten and Noototheek were highly visible in the SERP over the past 30 days, but broader (natural) food shops such as Pit&Pit, Holland&Barrett and KoRo also apparently consider nuts an important part of their range. Nuts also appear to be a profitable product for supermarkets such as Albert Heijn and Jumbo, as both web giants are not only highly visible organically, but also invest heavily in PPC.

Which keywords are worth the investment?

Based on their margins and a previous keyword research, the nut start-up has decided that Brazil nuts, cashew nuts and almonds are the most interesting nuts in their range. There is high search demand for walnuts, but competition is higher for these.

They are also considering investing in dates and pine nuts online because of the high search interest, and low competition. The nut webshop would also like to be easily found for the generic term ‘nuts’. For certainty, they are conducting another SERP analysis to see whether this is indeed their optimal focus.

Starting position of organic #1 positions

The pie chart below shows where the organic top positions for the 463 nut keywords are located in the SERP. As mentioned, the search results page consists of a mix of organic and paid search results, with the advertisements generally appearing at the top.

Achieving a number 1 position in organic therefore does not always mean that your website is also displayed as the very first result.

Graph 3 , Pie chart showing the percentage distribution of organic starting positions.

The chart shows that only 6% of all organic #1 positions are actually displayed right at the top, including featured snippets. In the majority of cases, namely 56%, there is another (paid) result above the organic top 1 in the nut industry.

This is not too bad; in some industries, it is not unusual for there to generally be 3 to 5 paid advertisements above organic number 1. For PPC, however, this also means that there are very few relevant keywords showing more than one paid search advertisement, so the chance of the nut start-up being displayed here is small.

For our nut start-up, this at least means that a large proportion of the 463 keywords remain interesting options to focus on with SEO. We take a closer look at the data behind the pie chart.

Keywords & search volumes by starting position

Graph 4 , Total search volumes per organic starting position.

The pie chart translates into a bar chart that shows the distribution in total search volumes. If we zoom further into chart 4 above and look further at the keywords with starting position 1, then we find there, as expected, many keywords with informational and/or ambiguous search intent:

Graph 5 , Zoomed in on the keywords with organic starting position 1: search terms for which there is no paid result above the organic search results.

Users typing in ‘couscous’, for example, are not searching for the product, but for a recipe. The keyword ‘almonds’ may refer to the type of nut, but also to tonsils, while the singular ‘walnut’ produces search results exclusively about the walnut tree. In the long term, visibility for informational search terms can be highly valuable, but in the short term our nut webshop could invest its money more effectively in other keywords.

The same applies to keywords that are only displayed at starting position 4 or lower. As an SEO focus, these terms are currently not ideal due to their moderate visibility, but they can be very interesting keywords to advertise for.

The 259 keywords with starting position 2 add up to 448.360 search volume, almost 60% of the total, at first glance, enough opportunities, then. These search terms are much more relevant and commercial, as shown in the graph below.

Graph 6, Zoomed in on the keywords with organic starting position 2. For clarity, the graph shows a smaller selection from the original graph with 259 terms.

Users typing in ‘couscous’, for example, are not searching for the product, but for a recipe. The keyword ‘almonds’ may refer to the type of nut, but also to tonsils, while the singular ‘walnut’ produces search results exclusively about the walnut tree. In the long term, visibility for informational search terms can be highly valuable, but in the short term our nut webshop could invest its money more effectively in other keywords.

The same applies to keywords that are only displayed at starting position 4 or lower. As an SEO focus, these terms are currently not ideal due to their moderate visibility, but they can be very interesting keywords to advertise for.

The 259 keywords with starting position 2 add up to 448.360 search volume, almost 60% of the total, at first glance, enough opportunities, then. These search terms are much more relevant and commercial, as shown in the graph below.

The nut start-up's marketing strategy

The preliminary research is complete and the nut start-up has made its decision. To determine its marketing strategy, it combines the insights from its previous keyword research, the SERP analysis and the commercial margins.

The SERP analysis showed that the focus terms they had previously considered may not have been ideal to start with, while cashew nuts, pecans, Brazil nuts, peanuts and chia seeds performed better in the test.

Based on the search coverage in the nut industry (chart 1), combined with the information about the organic starting positions (chart 3), the nut webshop concludes that the paid search channel is not profitable enough, but paid Shopping is. As a starting point, our nut startup can therefore begin with a combination of SEO and Shopping campaigns, to ensure that the website is visible in all important places.

What is your search coverage?

Based on our analyses, the new nut startup could easily identify where it could best begin its marketing strategy. In addition, however, a SERP analysis is at least as valuable for mapping the search coverage of your existing website.

Using our new analyses, we immediately show through which channels you and your competitors are visible in the search results, what your visibility percentage is, and shed new light on which keywords are worth the investment (organic or paid). Are you curious about where your opportunities in search lie? Fill in our contact form, and our specialists will gladly explore how we can help you!