SERP Features and Keyword Difficulty updates

The landscape of SERPs seems to be evolving on a daily basis. And even if you concentrate on organic SEO, the ever-changing universe of Google features might be driving some people up the wall.

We feel your pain, and our recent update should bring you some relief.

By popular demand, we are adding a ‘SERP features’ widget to results displayed for our UK and US databases in the Organic Positions report.

This widget allows you to see if any special search engine results are displayed by Google for keywords your competitor is ranking for. You can also see the percentage of keywords that triggers each SERP feature to show in search results.

Use filter settings by excluding/including keywords contained in a certain type of SERP feature - a knowledge graph, for example. Since ‘SERP features’ are the first web page elements to draw a user's attention, competing with them can be a strenuous process. That's why being aware of various features found in SERPs will help you discover the best way to cover more ground and improve your rankings.

We’ve also made another important improvement – the Keyword Difficulty column (KD). All US and UK users will find this column in the following reports:

The Keyword Difficulty column provides you with an estimate of how difficult it would be to seize competitors' positions in the Google or Bing top 20 with a particular keyword. The higher the percentage, the more effort you’ll need to outrank your competition for each targeted keyword.

By sorting results according to difficulty in ascending or descending order, you can decide which keywords are worth targeting and which ones are too ambitious to target.

Also, by estimating various keywords' levels of difficulty, you can decide which ones will require the most time and effort to get high rankings for. But good things don’t come easy, so be patient; keyword discovery is hard work, but it can result in higher rankings and traffic.

We hope you like these updates. Please let us know what you think – email us your comments, ideas and suggestions. Thank you for helping us make SEMrush better!