General Intent Keywords

[kexej28769@nongnue]

Diving into our general intent keywords first, we were surprised to find a bit more similarity between zip code and market level SERPs.

For starters, they shared 83 percent of their top 20 organic URLs. Of course, while this is higher than we expected, it still means that if we track our keywords without putting a searcher on the map, we’re saying goodbye to 17 percent of real-life search results, which is a lot.

What important insights might we be missing—are we chile number data and not knowing it? Are we letting a competitor sneak up on us?

Result type Similarity: NYC vs. No Location. Similarity: Portland vs. No location.
Organic 83.11% 83.14%
SERP Features 73.69% 67.02%
Looking at whether any of these results appeared in the same place from one SERP to the next, things got even more worrisome. Only 28 percent of organic results on both local and national SERPs appeared in the same ranking. So, even if we decide that it’s okay for us to do without 17 percent of our searchers’ results, we can’t rely on the degree to which the results are accurate.

Shifting our focus to SERP features, we found that only 70 percent appeared on both zip code and national SERPs, which is less than organic results. Local packs are a good example of how much you can lose. 31 percent of Portland SERPs and 27 percent of NYC SERPs returned a local pack, while only 12 percent of national SERPs produced one. So, even though these keywords don’t require a physical location, when Google knows that a real searcher is standing in a real place, it will err on the side of local intent and adjust its results accordingly.