By Great news—the last of our three, search-focused features in SparkToro V2 has finally launched. It’s called Ranking Pages and you can now find it in the keywords section of every SparkToro report. Our next few features will focus on expanding V2’s coverage to the UK and Canada, and providing data about the ad platforms that reach an audience. But, before we get there, let me show you how cool this final, search-centric feature is.
What does Ranking Pages do?
It cleverly aggregates all the pages (URLs) that rank for all the keywords your audience searches for and displays them with multiple sorting options. This solves a key marketing and audience research problem: understanding the content that’s most visible in Google and most successful with your audience.
I filmed this short video showing a pair of examples:
We know that Google search refers almost 2/3rds of all web traffic around the world. Despite what you might have heard about the quality or market share slipping, Google continues to earn more than 90% of all web searches, and the number of monthly searches per searcher is stubbornly high (it hasn’t dipped an iota, even in the supposed era of AI tools taking over).
Knowing what our audiences search for is invaluable, and V2 of SparkToro finally offers that. But knowing what content appears most frequently and prominently for those searches is equally interesting and useful! It can tell us:
- What types of content is having success in our audience’s searchers?
- Which websites is that content hosted on?
- What pages could we learn from or improve upon to potentially earn some of that traffic ourselves?
Answers to all of these are possible by reviewing the Ranking Pages section of a SparkToro report.
In the example above, I’m seeing the types of pages that rank for large numbers of keywords that TrailBlazer BBQ’s audience searches for. I can see how other companies are having success with their pages about various types of trailers and smokers, towable gas grills, custom smokers, and more. This strongly suggests to me that in the world of professional/restaurant-style BBQ grills, more PR-focused articles and classic social media bait might not be as valuable as they are in other foodie sectors. Instead, the product pages themselves are attracting the audience.
This insight gels with my general understanding of the prosumer BBQ enthusiasts. Apart from competitions, cuts, and rubs (those types of pages are also listed further down the page), there isn’t the same interest in ancillary content, research studies, industry deep dives, etc. that you might find in the sous vide or chefs knives communities on the web.
If you’re a content marketer, a public relations specialist, a search marketer, even a CMO, this at-a-glance view can be exceptionally informative about what works in a sector (or doesn’t).
How can you apply this data to your research and targeting campaigns?
For most marketers seeing this feature, the use-cases are likely obvious, but I’ll enumerate them anyway:
- Choosing content priorities – should you go after content type A or B? Make a how-to page, a listicle, focus on product pages, put out a bit of research, summarize a topic? Scanning the pages that rank via this feature can answer those questions.
- Finding content gaps – if a less influential site has lots of rankings from a particularly well-designed page, you may be able to learn from and expand upon their success.
- Competitive content analysis – which competitors are having success across an audience’s range of searches? How much? With what type of content? Should you go after those same keywords with similar content, or take a unique approach? Again, the data here can deliver insight.
- Discovering new keyword targets – for any given content piece, you can see the keywords they’ve earned rankings on, and decide if those might be part of your targets as well!
- Segmenting audience interests and needs – even outside of search marketing, knowing the types of pages popular with an audience can help you build a content strategy that segments those interests into various buckets, which become the roadmap for what you want to create, and what’s not worthwhile. It can also show you content ideas or entire topic areas you might not have otherwise considered.
In short, Ranking Pages is a veritable treasure trove for content-focused and organic-search marketers.
My favorite use for Ranking Pages—Content Ideation
In the first few weeks of my tests, my favorite use case has been helping some of our customers determine the type of content they want to create (and also, types of content that likely aren’t worth their while). Ranking Pages is a little like (finally) seeing the Google SERPs forest among the trees. Instead of merely looking at lists of individual pages that rank for individual keywords, you’re looking at an entire sector/niche’s worth of subjects.
In this example, I can see the various types of content data analysts are likely to come across in the many Google searches around the topic. There are lists of skills, ideas for projects, how-to articles, definitions, and loads more. For the SparkToro customer I helped earlier this month, this was the key insight:
That old list of machine learning algorithms (first created in 2017 and given a 2024 update our customer felt was subpar) was something they spotted as being ripe for disruption. Their content creator got to work focusing on their own list of ML algorithms they felt was a better match for most of those 33 keywords. That one high potential find was enough to elicit a very excited reaction in my inbox 😎
If you have 5 minutes, try this process:
- Search for a particular segment of your customers (using the “words in their bio” option)
- Click on Keywords→Ranking Pages
- Make a list from the pages that look most relevant to the customers you want to reach AND least useful/high quality
- Prioritize the list by keywords or traffic estimate, and get to work making those first couple resources
This process won’t be new to experienced content creators and SEOs, but it is exceptionally well-streamlined in SparkToro (and unlike classic SEO-focused software, this view is on all the keywords the audience searches for, not just the keywords a site/page ranks for 😉).
One more extra feature…
My remarkable co-founder, Casey, also added an extra nice-to-have tidbit inside Ranking Pages: the ability to click on any row and see all the keywords that page ranks for. In the example below, SparkToro is showing me all the keywords that Analytics Vidhya’s Naive Bayes Classifier page has been seen ranking for in Google’s results:
Of course, these can also be found in the Keywords list, but we reasoned many of y’all would want to see the specific ones in context, and perhaps even export them separately 😉.
Stay tuned for more new features coming to SparkToro V2 soon, and please give this new section a test run, especially if you’re seeking content opportunities and inspiration for search traffic.