How to Do a SERP Analysis

SERP analysis is a process that helps you determine if and how you can rank for a keyword and whether the effort is worth the reward.

It’s important because not all keywords are created equal. Some are harder to rank for than others, so you must choose wisely.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to analyze a SERP to see if it’s crackable.

Let’s get started.

The first step of a SERP analysis is to get a rough sense of the traffic opportunity and ranking difficulty opportunity.

To do this, we can use two of Ahrefs’ core metrics: Keyword Difficulty and Traffic Potential.

• Keyword Difficulty (KD) estimates how hard it will be to rank on the first page of Google for a keyword on a scale from 0 to100.
• Traffic Potential (TP) is the total estimated monthly search traffic to the top-ranking page for a keyword.

Using these two metrics, we will be able to get a top-level overview of the SERP and determine whether it’s worth further investigation.

Let’s use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to get a quick, high-level view of the keyword “when were dogs domesticated.”

So what exactly is the overview showing us?

We can see the keyword “when were dogs domesticated” has a super hard KD of 73 but a low TP of 3.2K.

At first glance, this query doesn’t appear to be worth the effort. But it may warrant further investigation if this topic is lucrative for your business.

With a super hard KD of 73, Ahrefs estimates that we will need ~235 links to rank...