SERP Analysis Before Writing is the step that saves the most unnecessary work. Instead of guessing what the content should look like, you look at what the search engine has already judged to be a suitable answer for the given query. Watch three things. The first is the type of pages that appear – if they are exclusively e-shop category pages, an article will not succeed there, and vice versa. The second is format and structure: whether these are guides, comparisons, lists or definitions, what sub-questions they contain, and in what order. The third is result features such as people-also-ask questions and featured snippets, which show exactly what people are trying to solve. The goal is not to copy, but to understand the expected format and then add what is missing from it.
See also: Information gain, Keyword mapping to pages, Content gap in retrieval.
