How To View Historic SERPs And SERPs From Different Countries In SEM Rush

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hi, Joe here. I’m SEO manager at Koozai and today we are going to look at how to view a historic search results pages in SEMrush and also how to view search results pages for different countries. So first of all, if we navigate to the Keyword Overview tab in SEMrush, which is highlighted in orange here, then we can type in our keyword into this box up here and click Search. And then SEMrush will return all sorts of data about that keyword, including where it’s most popular in the world, the search volume, the keyword difficulty, CPC and lots of other data points about that particular keyword. But what we can also do in SEMrush is look at how the search results were ordered at the particular point in time. Now, by default, this will take SEMrush’s most recent screenshot of the search results. And so we can see that this is the order of the top 10 and we can change this up here. We can look at each group of positions in groups of 10, all the way up to position 100. So if you wanted to look at 11 to 20, 21 to 30, we can do that here. We can also look at the screenshot of the search results page itself in Google. And this might be useful to quickly identify any SERP features that were current at the time. So by looking at this particular snapshot for search results, we can see that there are ads here. Four ads at the top. We can see the new stories here as well in a carousel and the people also ask box. And also some videos. So looking at the screenshot of the search results gives us a better idea of how it visually looks and all the other elements that might affect click-through rate. This is very useful to do. But the most useful part of this tool is probably the fact that you can go back in time. So if we click here, we can look at the historical data, all the way back to January 2012. So let’s say we wanted to view March 2020. We can just click this here and we can look at the search results for March 2020. Now, when we looked at the search results for this term previously, the term we’re looking at here is iPhone 12, Apple were obviously number one, which isn’t too surprising. And then we had UK networks like Vodafone and Three also ranking very well for this term. But if we go back to March, which was before this product, the iPhone 12, was available or even before it was officially confirmed I think, the search results look very different. So we can see it’s mostly tech publications that are doing well for this term. We’ve got the Express here as well, which is more a general kind of mass media publication. All this we can see is dominated by Tom’s Guidebook, or Mac Rumors, Tech Radar, Mac World. Stuff, lots of tech-specific publishers. So that’s one example of how search results can vary wildly across two points in time. We can also see the search volume was a lot less back in March. So that’s how we can check historic search results. Of course, if we want to, we don’t have the option here to actually view the screenshot of the search results but looking at the order here will give us a good idea of what’s going on. If we want to look at the same keyword, the same time period but for a different country, we can just click this dropdown here. At the moment, we’re in the UK, so we want to see google.co.uk results. If we want to see the US, google.com results, we can just click on this and you’ll see that all of this data changes. So search volume is much greater unsurprisingly. And then we can see here the US results. So fairly similar in terms of the theme. So there’s lot of tech publishers ranking for this term. But slightly different to the UK. So we’ve got 9to5Mac in there. We’ve got CNET, which are US-specific publishers. So that’s an example of how you can use SEMrush to look at historic search results and also search results from another country. Two very useful features.