How We Analyze Search Results at Scale

At Wheelhouse DMG, we believe in making data-driven decisions to improve our clients’ search visibility. But when you’re dealing with thousands of keywords and pages, finding the right opportunities can feel like searching for needles in a haystack. That’s why we built Lighthouse, our proprietary search landscape analysis tool that helps us analyze search results at scale and uncover opportunities to improve our clients’ visibility in search.

The Challenge of Scale in SEO

Let’s look at a real example. For one of our major healthcare clients, we help manage their blog, which aims to educate people who are early in their patient journey—those who might be researching symptoms or conditions before seeking care. The blog contains thousands of pages, and this year alone, these pages have shown up in search results for over 100,000 different search terms.

Manually analyzing this volume of search data would be virtually impossible—it would take a team of SEOs weeks or months to process, by which time the data would already be outdated. But with Lighthouse, we can instantly analyze the entire search landscape, identify patterns, and spot opportunities that would be invisible to the human eye.

Here’s what we found when breaking down this client’s search presence:

The impact of these positions is significant. Our data shows that rankings in positions one through three receive about a 4% click-through rate, while positions four through six see half that at 2%. Bottom-of-page-one rankings receive less than 1% of clicks. This means that by moving a page from the bottom to the middle of page one, we can more than double its traffic. Moving from the middle to the top can double it again.

How Lighthouse Works

Lighthouse is a sophisticated analysis platform that helps us tackle the complexity of modern search landscapes. While the tool offers numerous ways to analyze and improve search visibility, we’ll explore three of our most commonly used analyses that demonstrate its capabilities. Each of these approaches represents just one facet of how we leverage Lighthouse’s robust data processing and visualization features to drive results for our clients.

1. Organic Search Analysis

This analysis helps us identify where we can improve existing rankings. We can filter results by:

For each topic area, we can see how many keywords we rank for, our coverage in top positions, and which specific pages have the most opportunity for improvement. We can then analyze which competitors are winning in these areas and craft strategies to improve our clients’ rankings.

2. SEO-PPC Integration Analysis

This analysis looks at keywords where clients are spending money on paid search to identify opportunities for organic visibility. By combining paid and organic data, we can:

For example, with one client, we analyzed 9,400 search terms representing $464,000 in paid search spend. By identifying keywords that drive conversions but lack organic visibility, we can create targeted SEO strategies to capture that traffic organically.

3. People Also Ask Analysis

The “People Also Ask” (PAA) feature has become an increasingly prominent part of Google’s search results, often appearing above traditional organic listings. This placement makes it a valuable opportunity for visibility, but the dynamic nature of PAA—where each answered question spawns new related questions—makes it challenging to analyze manually.

Lighthouse helps us cut through this complexity by systematically collecting and analyzing PAA questions across thousands of searches. This allows us to:

For example, when analyzing PAA opportunities for a medical device manufacturer, we discovered that while they ranked well for branded product searches, they were missing out on hundreds of basic educational questions about their product category. By creating content to address these questions, they were able to capture PAA placements for early-stage awareness queries, engaging potential customers much earlier in their journey.

What makes this analysis particularly valuable is its ability to reveal patterns in user questions that might not be obvious when looking at individual searches. These patterns often point to content gaps and opportunities that our clients can address strategically, rather than taking a piecemeal approach to question-and-answer content.

4. AI Overview Analysis

One of Lighthouse’s most cutting-edge capabilities is its ability to analyze Google’s AI Overview feature at scale. As Google increasingly displays AI-generated overviews at the top of search results, understanding and optimizing for this new SERP feature has become crucial for maintaining search visibility.

Our tool identifies which search terms trigger AI Overviews and, importantly, pulls in both the AI-generated responses and their sources. This gives us unique insights into:

This capability allows us to:

By analyzing this new SERP feature at scale—something few others can do—we help our clients stay ahead of the curve as search evolves.

Turning Insights into Results

Lighthouse’s greatest strength lies in its ability to help us prioritize. Instead of making educated guesses about which pages to optimize, we can:

By analyzing search results at scale, we can make data-driven decisions about where to focus our optimization efforts, leading to more efficient and effective SEO strategies for our clients.

Want to learn more about how we can help improve your search visibility? Get in touch with our team at Wheelhouse DMG.