Can somebody explain how this service differs from a dump of a SERPIQ report? Because that sure is what it looks like.
Hey Bits, this is a good question, and I'm happy to answer it.
First off, I think SERP IQ is a fantastic tool, and I encourage anyone who wants to step up their SEO game to make use of it in order to better understand the onpage and offpage profiles of the pages currently ranking for whatever keywords they may be targeting. You can check out SERP IQ
here.
For me, having the data at my disposal doesn't mean much in and of itself unless I actually take some time to interpret it within the context of the SERP I'm looking at. A good example would be the term "car insurance cheap". This KW is an out of sequence variant of "cheap car insurance", and although the volume of "car insurance cheap" is much lower, it could still be a very profitable KW if you were to rank for it.
The problem I see with tools that assume one set of onpage rules to be universal really becomes apparent when you look at a KW like this. Popular tools will tell you that in order to effectively target "car insurance cheap", you should have the KW in bold, you should include it in your H1, H2, and H3 tags, and your meta title, description, and keywords. However, a look at the top ten results for "car insurance cheap" shows that
none of the ranking sites are doing any of those things. In fact, they seem to ranking for the term by
not targeting it, and focusing on related terms instead.
It's my belief that onpage over-optimization for keywords like this is rampant, and that there are definitely penalties involved when a page crosses the line in an attempt to corner the SERP for a novel but profitable KW, and that the best way to rank for some of these KWs may actually be to target them indirectly in order to avoid looking like you are trying to hard.
Depending on your KW, you may find that that your competitors are NOT actively targeting it through onpage optimization, and you might be much better off following the example set by the ranking pages than following an arbitrary set of onpage "best practices" that do not apply to your particular SERP.
In addition, I feel that depending on the type of SERP (info, e-com, lead-gen, hybrid) the role of images, H tags, and OBL as potential onpage ranking factors may be significantly increased. Google has been forthcoming in regards to the fact that they handle different search queries with different rules, and I feel that rich content (images), depth of organization (tags and taxonomy), and community involvement (OBL) may be significant factors to consider depending on the type of SERP you are trying to crawl into. If all of your competitors are linking out to .gov resource sites, and you are linking out to wikipedia articles, it's safe to say your page doesn't fit in as well as it could, and we all know what happens sooner or later to pages that don't fit in.
As with anything in SEO, people are going to agree or disagree with my ideas here, and that's fine. I've seen good results by attacking onpage in a more organic way, and paying close attention to factors that may be overlooked by popular tools. If you think I'm crazy, I'm ok with that, if you think maybe it's worth looking at your SERP in a slightly different way than you have been, I'd be glad to talk to you via PM or skype. Thanks for the question.
