I recorded a short SEO Walks episode about this, and it is worth expanding, because it saves more time than almost anything else I do.
A lot of the questions people agonize over are already answered. Not in a blog post, not in a course. Not by some self proclaimed SEO expert.
In the search results themselves.
Most people treat the SERP like a scoreboard. Here is who is winning, here is where I am. That is not all that it is.
The Search Results Are Evidence
The results page is the output of everything Google knows about a query, and that includes how people behaved when they got there.
This is not a guess. NavBoost, Google’s system for re-ranking results based on user behavior, was confirmed under oath by Pandu Nayak during the DOJ antitrust trial, and the 2024 API leak named the fields: goodClicks, badClicks, and lastLongestClicks. Google is not just counting clicks. It is tracking whether the click satisfied the person or sent them back to try something else.
So a results page is not a list of who has the best backlinks. It is what survived after Google watched people click, skip, and search again across more queries than you will see in a career.
You are not going to out-think Google on what people want. It is watching them.
Which means when you are guessing at something, and Google is right there showing you the answer, go look.
Here are five questions it answers in about a minute each.
1. What Kind of Page Should This Be?
This is the one I would check first, because getting it wrong wastes the most work.
Look at what is actually ranking. Not the domains, the page types.
If the first page is eight listicles, that is what the query wants, and your single deep-dive is fighting the format. If a video carousel is sitting near the top, people want to watch this, not read it. If everything ranking is a category or collection page and you were planning a blog post, you have a mismatch. If the results are tools and calculators, an article explaining the concept is not going to compete with something that does the job.
You can decide to fight that. Sometimes the SERP is stale and a better format wins. But make it a decision, not an accident.
2. Should This Be Its Own Page, or Part of an Existing One?
People argue about this for weeks. Run both queries and compare the results.
If mostly the same pages are ranking for both, one page can cover both topics. Google is showing you that pages serving both at once are the ones winning. You do not need a second one.
If the results are completely different, those are different topics and they need their own pages.
That takes ten seconds and settles an argument that otherwise eats a planning meeting.
3. What Does the Person Actually Want?
Everyone has an opinion about search intent. Google is not guessing.
If the page is all product and category pages, the query is commercial and a guide is not going to rank. If it is all tutorials and explainers, it is informational, and pushing a product page there is a waste. If comparison and versus pages dominate, people are evaluating, not learning the basics and not ready to buy.
The practical value is that this tells you what the page has to do, not just what it has to cover. Somebody at the comparison stage needs different things on the page than somebody who just learned the term exists.
4. How Current Does This Need to Be?
Look at the dates on what is ranking.
If everything on page one is from the last few months, freshness is part of what is being rewarded, and publishing something you never touch again will not hold. If the top results are three and four years old and still sitting there, it is an evergreen topic and you can stop worrying about a quarterly refresh schedule.
That single check tells you whether you are committing to maintenance or writing something that will age fine.
5. Is This Worth Going After?
Forget the difficulty score. Look at who is actually there.
Ten national brands with household names is one answer. A Reddit thread, a forum post, and two small sites nobody has heard of is a completely different answer. That second one is an opening, and no keyword difficulty metric is going to tell you that as clearly as looking at it.
How to Look at It Properly
A few things that make the difference between reading the SERP and misreading it.
Use an incognito window, and check what location Google thinks you are in. Personalized and localized results will show you a page that nobody else sees, and decisions made off that page will be wrong.
Read the whole page, not just the blue links. The People Also Ask box, the related searches at the bottom, and which features fire at all are part of the answer. A map pack means local intent. A shopping carousel means transactional. An AI Overview eating the top of the page tells you something about how much click volume is left.
And treat it as a snapshot. Results move. If a decision is a big one, look again in a couple of weeks before you commit.
The Best Part
None of this requires a tool. None of it costs anything. Most of it takes less time than opening the tool would have.
Before you guess, and before you ask somebody else what to do, go look at what Google is already telling you.
