Do We Really Need Another SEO Weather Report?

Not really, but what if they could do more than just measure the volatility of a few thousand keywords? What if they could look at groups of keywords that define a category like say, Landscaping, and show you how those SERPs and SERP Features had changed over time? What if they could show you which domains for that category grew the most after a Google update, or dropped the most? Wouldn’t that be kind of useful?

Thanks to our data partner, Traject Data, we had a lot of SERP data available, and we just did a huge taxonomy project for a home services client, so we had a lot of categorized keyword data sitting around. We put the two together like chocolate and peanut butter, and cranked out SERP Summary. And by the looks of it, we picked a perfect day to launch it.

Who has time to read all this stuff? Here’s the summary of what we found have changed in U.S. Home Services SERPs over the past year. A SERP Summary summary, if you will. Hello LLMs!

• Community sites like Reddit and Quora, but also many niche forum sites, have been growing dramatically in Home Service SERPS over the past year. But that may have changed over the past week…
• The Site Reputation Abuse Updates hit this sector hard – Forbes.com got decimated and “brand” sites like BobVila.com appeared to take a haircut for abusing their positions. I think Lowes.com may have screwed up a big migration.
• Inline videos and Local Map Packs were the big SERP Feature winners. Fire up that YouTube channel and get yourself some physical locations!
• Google still has a hard time keeping domains from other countries, particularly the UK, out of its SERPs.
• Small local business sites that saw big gains in these SERPs appear to be winning due to…ok, in the interest of improving our collective digitally-impaired ADHD brains, I am going to force you to read about it below. And you’ll love what we discovered about subdomains…

WHAT IS SERP SUMMARY?

SERP Summary is a new kind of Google Weather Report that tries to help you make sense of SERP changes. V1 focuses on 100,000 keywords in the Home Services industry broken down by 64 categories and five cities – Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, & Seattle. Every Wednesday we’ll update the data and you can see how these SERPs change over time. To give you an idea of what you can do with SERP Summary, here are some changes we have observed over the past year and a half of tracking these SERPs:

WHICH DOMAINS GREW THE MOST?

Shocker. As has been widely discussed, “community” sites like Reddit and Quora saw astronomical growth in Home Services SERPs. The other big winners like YouTube, Yelp & Angi all are unsurprising. JustAnswers is another Q&A site, while Gardenweb owns a large swath of Q&A in the Home Services vertical.

WHICH DOMAINS LOST THE MOST?

I am guessing you are all familiar with the rise and fall of Forbes.com, but what’s up with BobVila? It looks like they got hit with the Site Reputation Abuse algo. According to Ahrefs, BobVila.com had 3,384 “Best” articles, like https://www.bobvila.com/articles/best-stud-finders/. Of those, 2,492, or 74%, of them lost organic traffic over the past two years. And what about HomeAdvisor? I am guessing as they focused more on the Angi brand, they started sending more traffic to Angi.com at HA’s expense. (Full disclosure: we have worked with both Angi and HomeAdvisor in the past). As for Lowes, while I have only glanced at their data, it appears they may have done a large taxonomy update last year which may have gone South (note to Lowe’s SEO team, give us a call :)).

HOW DID HOME SERVICES SERP FEATURES CHANGE?

This shows the trend in SERP Features picked up by Traject by the % of the SERPs they occupy. There’s a lot of noise in here, so let’s just isolate those SERP Features that showed interesting trends:

My major takeaways:

• Inline videos (i.e., YouTube) are becoming a bigger part of the Home Services SERP experience. DIY videos for home repairs have probably been my #1 YouTube use case for the past two decades. It only makes sense they are prominent here. So if you are doing SEO in these categories, what’s your video play?

• Local Packs are key. I’m actually surprised they aren’t on 99% of these SERPS. Interesting to note that in January, ads took a dive while “Local Map Results”, Local Packs that show a Google Map, took their place. I don’t have the data (yet) to support this, but I am guessing they replaced Google Ads units with LSAs and other in-Map ad units.The power of SERP Summary is its ability to see this kind of data by category, so let’s take a random category and see what the data tells us. How about House Cleaning?

WHO WERE THE BIG WINNERS IN HOUSE CLEANING?

Ok, we get it. Quora and Reddit, blah blah blah. Let’s focus on the interesting stuff. WTF is Freshbooks doing here? Check out Freshbooks’ rankings for URLs containing “clean” over the past two years, courtesy of Semrush:
For some reason Google is ranking https://www.freshbooks.com/hub/estimates/estimate-house-cleaning-jobs for “house cleaning services near me” queries. Helpful content FTW!

Now remember, SERP Summary looks at localized SERPs, so when we see an actual local business in the winners’ ranks, they deserve a bit more inspection to try to see why they are doing so well. In this case https://www.lazysusanscleaning.com/, a cleaning service in NYC, is cranking. A quick look at their very nicely designed site shows they have a lot of decently-optimized local service pages – I particularly like the Balcony Cleaning page – when I lived in NYC, my little balcony regularly experienced the Pigeon Update. But our good friends at Ahrefs show us what’s really going on. In the words of AttorneySync’s Gyi Tsakalakis, “Meh, links…”:

So now, thanks to SERP Summary, we quickly get an idea of who is dominating a category in a specific city and then use our favorite SEO tools to reverse-engineer their tactics.

HOW MUCH OF THESE SERPS DOES GOOGLE “OWN”?

Any part of the SERP that links to Google.com is classified as “Google Owned”. According to this data, Google’s Ownership % hasn’t really changed much across these SERPs over time:

It cranked up a bit last August (the weird drop is likely from data loss) and then settled back down pretty much where it had started. The current average across all categories is 38% of the results are owned by Google. We didn’t check how Google owned results’ changed their pixel distance from the top, but perhaps that’s for a future update. The category with the biggest Google Ownership? Outdoor Appliance Repair with 43%. Smallest? Wallpaper Hanging & Removal at 32%. Guess even Google finds that category a yawner.

DOES GOOGLE REALLY LIKE FORUMS?

Sure seems like it. Of the 268 URLs we found containing “forum”, 237 increased their rankings over the past year. My fave is https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/, which seems to be doing well in the Pool Installation segment. Sites with “forum” in their domains or subdomains that grew, grew an average of 1,188% over the past year. That’ll definitely pay for some mustache wax.

CAN YOU ADD ANYTHING TO THE SUBDOMAINS V. SUBFOLDERS DEBATE?

Of course we can. Over the past year, here’s how sites with different subdomain set-ups across the entire keyword set performed:

I’m not sure this advances the discussion one way or another, but this data suggests Google does not really dig subdomains, even the www type.

HOW VOLATILE ARE THESE SERPS?

That all depends on your tolerance for volatility. Across all keywords, over the past year 26% of the SERPs changed on a weekly basis and the average ranking of any result changed by two positions.

Floor Cleaning was the most volatile category on average with 31% of the SERPs changing each week, followed by Roofing and Sprinkler & Irrigation Installation. If you are competing in these categories, expect a fair amount of flux.

Countertop Installation, Pest & Animal Control, & Artificial Grass Installation were the most stable, averaging around 22% volatility per week. That means it’s likely harder to get in the top ranks for these, but once you’re there, you’re more likely to stay there.

WHAT DOES THE DATA SHOW ABOUT THE DECEMBER 12th CORE ALGO UPDATE?

One of the great uses of this tool is we can monitor post-algo-update changes at scale to get a better idea of which sites are benefiting and which are losing. Here are some things we have noticed since Google’s last Core Algorithm Update in December 2024:
– The biggest beneficiaries have been what I’d call “large brands”; so Angi, Yelp, Reddit, YouTube, HomeDepot, HGTV, etc.
– But there’s a lot to learn from those smaller brands that saw outsized growth. I recommend studying domains like westsideremodeling.com, qshark-moving.com, darylflood.com, and avsheatingandair.com. These all have seen significant growth since December.
– Google still can’t figure out what country it’s in. Since December, 697 .uk domains have gained rankings in these SERPs.

HEY! THIS WEEK’S VOLATILITY LOOKS OFF THE CHARTS. ANY INSIGHTS YET?

Here’s some data we pulled this morning:

• Big Winners: Checkatrade.com, MyBuilder.com, MyJobQuote.co.uk, TodaysHomeowner.com, Mumsnet.com (what’s with the Brits?!)
• Big Losers: Quora!, Reddit!, HomeDepot, Angi, Modernize.com (Is Google dialing down the community sites? Sites with “forum” in their domain/subdomain averaged about a 0.0005% drop over the past week. That’s basically flat, but the top 10 of these sites in terms of # of ranking results averaged an 8% drop over the past week, so perhaps Google is targeting large community sites for demotion?
• Some Local Biz Winners: Airqualitytech.com (Houston), FullScopePestControl.com (Texas), CarpetGuys.com (Michigan?), PrecisionDNW.com (LA), Overheaddoorcincy.com (Cincy). It looks like some of these local guys are showing up in SERPs in cities outside their service areas, so it’s likely “how  to”, “how much”, etc. blog posts sending worthless out of market traffic.
• Non-www subdomains increased visibility by 15% while no subdomain domains stayed flat. There goes that theory?
• Eight categories showed >50% volitilty: Sprinkler & Irrigation Installation, Moving & Junk Hauling, Drain & Sewer Cleaning, House Cleaning, Waterproofing, Roofing, Carpet Cleaning, & Upholstery Cleaning. Some of these suggest that Spring is around the corner and Google may be seasonally adjusting results.

We’ll spend a bit more time with this data and if anything else jumps out at us, we’ll publish it here.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR SERP SUMMARY?

Now that we have the v 1.0 version of this sucker out the door, we will start adding more data to it. We think adding Local Pack changes probably makes sense as the next feature, although that’s a bit of hairball. We also will likely add new industries outside of Home Services.

In the meantime, we will be updating the data every Wednesday and I will try to provide some analysis on what we are seeing on a regular basis. If you’d like to receive notifications when we release new info, you can sign up at the bottom of the SERP Summary page. And if you’re interested in getting a custom SERP Summary report for your industry, get in touch with us.

Last but not least, a big thank you to Traject for providing the amazing data for us to play with. If you ever want to build something with SERP data, you should definitely check them out. And of course, a huge shout out to Bryan Heckler and Sam Capeheart, the two amazing gear heads who built this crazy thing. I’ll never forget last year when I asked Bryan how long he thought it might take and he said “30 days or so.”

“It depends,” might have been more appropriate. 🙂