Some of the features described in this article might be available only for Tracked Campaigns. Learn more.
How we detect & track SERP Features
Tracking SERP features offers valuable insights into the dynamics of the search landscape. By understanding and analyzing these features, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your website or content is positioned and perceived by Google and by users.
Each feature serves a specific purpose and can differently impact the visibility, click-through rates, and overall performance of websites and content.
We detect the SERP features on all the keywords in order to help you:
discover the SEO opportunities they can open, and
understand the organic opportunities they can interfere with
To make this data easy to use, we also compute the SERP feature impact on organic results.
We employ a comprehensive approach to detect and track SERP features and gather specific details associated with them, to provide you with up-to-date and accurate information for understanding the ever-evolving search landscape.
Continuous Monitoring and Updates
To ensure the most current and reliable data, we implement a continuous monitoring system for SERP features. This means that alongside daily keyword rank updates, we also keep a close eye on the presence and changes of SERP features. This helps you see which SERP Features appear on each of your keywords, and which ones your website is listed in.
Daily tracking for Desktop and Mobile
Keywords have different SERP Features on mobile and desktop, so our tracking covers both devices. Each day, we update and analyze SERP features for both, for a comprehensive view of your website's performance.
Gathering SERP-Feature-Specific Information
Understanding the intricate details of SERP features is crucial for effective analysis and decision-making. In addition to detecting the presence of SERP features, we collect SERP-feature-specific information to provide deeper insights:
We identify the websites listed within a specific SERP feature, allowing you to evaluate your website's visibility and competition in relevant contexts.
Furthermore, we gather data on the count of features, such as the number of ads, top stories, questions and/or images present within the results, which can offer valuable insights into the visual landscape of search results.
For some SERP features, we also get your website position within the SERP feature, plus other details, e.g. the name of the entity on a Knowledge Graph.
SERP features we detect and their specific details
With updates to Google, the names of the SERP Features (as seen on Google) are also updated. The below table tells you what we call these SERP Features and what details we present.
Google's SERP feature/s | SEOmonitor | Shows no. of elements in SERP | Other details |
Ads | Ads Pack | Yes |
|
Dictionary | Definitions | - |
|
Directions | Directions | - |
|
Featured Snippet | Featured Snippet | - | URL of the featured page |
Flights | Flights* | Yes |
|
Hotels | Hotels* | Yes |
|
Images | Images Pack | Yes |
|
Jobs | Jobs | Yes |
|
Knowledge Graph | Knowledge Graph | - | Name of the entity on the Knowledge Graph |
Places | Local Pack | - |
|
Product listing | Product listing | - |
|
Recipes | Recipes | Yes |
|
FAQ/People Also Ask | Questions | - | Content of the SERP feature(the questions that appear in the feature) |
Top stories/News | Top stories | Yes |
|
Videos | Video Carousel | Yes |
|
Apps | Apps** | - |
|
*For Flights, Hotels, and Recipes, which don't have the URLs in the feature, we use an algorithm to figure out your website's presence, using the homepage title and the titles found in the feature.
**The Apps SERP feature tracking is available only on the Mobile View in the Rank Tracker. To view its data, toggle to Mobile and expand the SERP features drop-down:
Where to find SERP feature data
You can view SERP feature data in the Rank Tracker in a few places:
Keyword level
In the keywords list, you can view the SERP features triggered by each keyword in the SERP data column. Clicking on the SERP features icon opens the feature details – if applicable, here's where you can find the SERP feature position, the number of elements in the feature, and your website's position in the feature:
In the Keyword Details Sidebar: In the Overview tab, you can view the SERP features history, which tells you which feature was present on the keyword and whether your website was listed on it, within the timeframe selected in the Rank Tracker. You can also see the Questions from the People Also Ask feature, listed in this section.
From the Performance tab from the same sidebar, you can also download the HTML of the results page to view the SERP Features.
Keyword group level
For all your keyword groups, you can view the aggregated SERP feature data in the top stats.
All tracked keywords get updated SERP features, but to analyze the daily SERP feature presence and spot the potentially-missed listing opportunities at scale, you need the group-level data.
For the Top 10 SERP features where we detect your website to be present in the listings, we also show the count (device-relative): keywords that currently (today) have specific SERP features present and, additionally, in how many of them your website is listed.
At a group level, you can also use the SERP feature Visibility metric, which allows you to view your website Visibility on the SERP features that are triggered by the keywords in the selected group, and compare it with the Visibility on other dimensions (e.g. Questions Visibility vs. Mobile Visibility):
In the group Visibility Trend Explainer, check the main SERP Feature presence for the group of keywords. This tells you how many keywords out of the total keywords in the group the SERP feature was present within the selected timeframe, alongside their search volume. In the breakdown below, you can also see the impact of changes on the group's SERP feature Visibility:
Conclusions
By understanding the presence and impact of SERP features, you can make data-driven decisions and optimize SEO strategies to achieve better visibility and engagement in search engine results.
We want to include more SERP features in the future!
Help us better prioritize by letting our Customer Service team know which SERP features you'd need to track next.
Update: We detect and track all the SERP Features listed in the video, except Jobs. We now also track the Video Carousal feature.