SERPs

What Are SERPs?

They are pages of results or responses from search engines, which are shown to the public when they do an online search. They determine the position that content will occupy on the Internet. They include both organic and paid results.

How Do SERPs Work?

The sites and web pages on the first page are the ones that the search engines have identified as the most important and most useful for a particular search query.

To arrive at this determination, different search engines rely on complex algorithms with many ranking factors.

In summary and reference to Google, in particular, the process can be described as follows:

Google uses its search bot to crawl a site. In this crawl, the bot goes to different sites to find new information and crawl links.

This information is then indexed and this is where Google uses ranking factors to decide the position of a site or web page in the SERP.

Display is affected by several factors.

Initially, the Google SERPs were practically fixed, and the same for all the public that used Google configured in the same country. Currently, there are different factors. There are different ranking factors when it comes to positioning each fragment on the one hand. And on the other hand, other different signals affect the order of the results, such as:

• If a user is registered with your account or not.
• If a user clears the browser cache.
• If geographic location is enabled, the results will be adapted accordingly.
• If a user makes a query through a mobile device or a desktop computer.

Ranking factors for SERPs.

The programming of the search engines and especially Google uses many factors to decide the position of a page or website in the SERPs. Before this classification, Googlebot must have crawled the website indexed. Once this is done, factors such as the quality of the content and the inbound links, mainly the loading speed, mobile optimization, and keyword approach, come into play. In addition to this, signals generated by the user, such as length of stay, rate of return to SERP, also influence the position in search results pages. SSL encryption is also taken into account to determine the ranking of a website.

What Are The Types Of SERPs?

SERPs typically contain two types of content: organic search results and paid results.

Organic results are lists of websites or positions that have been earned, determined by the search engine algorithm as the most important and optimal overall results for a given search. Search engine optimization (SEO) experts are specialists in improving information, web content, and web pages to achieve better rankings in organic search results.

Certain SERPs show considerably more organic results than others, depending on the intent of the searches. There are mainly three types of search on the net:

• Informative: those in which the user seeks information on a specific topic; Most users who use this search query do not want to buy something, and therefore only informative results are presented in the SERP.
• Related to navigation: are those in which the user wants to find a specific website through searches, such as the case in which they try to locate a web page whose address they do not remember, or those that try to find a web page determined.
• Transactional: in these, the results shown in the SERP are more likely to be paid. Transactional searches have clear commercial purposes; these searches that lead to transactional SERPs may contain terms that imply an intention to buy something.

Paid results, unlike organic results, come from advertisers who pay to be shown by keywords, their placement essentially going to the highest bidder.

Previously, they were mostly limited to short text ads, displayed alongside organic results. At present, however, they can have a wide range of formats adapted to advertisers’ requirements.

What Is A SERP Feature?

A SERP feature is the result of a query on a Google search engine results page (SERP) that is not a traditional organic result. Among the most common SERP features we have:

• Featured snippets, these show a snippet of content from some of the highest-ranked web pages. They are frequently seen at the top of the SERP.
• Knowledge cards, these are shown at the top of the SERP and give a short and conclusive answer to the question or query.
• Knowledge panels provide information about the main topic of the consultation. Most of the time, on mobile devices they are near the top of the SERP and on desktop computers, they are on the right side.
• Image package, these show a group of thumbnails through which (by clicking on them) you can access Google Images.
• Featured Stories show recently posted articles on a carousel, live videos, and blogs. The title, publisher name, thumbnail, and timestamp are presented for each result and are usually near the top of the SERP.
• People also ask (PAA), these results present related questions asked to Google by users.
• Purchase results (PLA) show results of important products from paid advertisers. The result says the name, price, seller, and review of the product.
• Boxes of tweets, present the most popular current tweets in a carousel, usually from an official Twitter account related to the query.
• Videos, these are organic results enriched with a thumbnail video.

Why Is SERP Important For SEO?

The importance of the SERP is that the results are indexed based on ranking signals that indicate the position of a site or web page on the results page. Generally, people click only on the results of the first page of the SERPs, and having a low ranking means having less visibility, fewer clicks, and fewer earnings, and this is why a position on the first page is so desired.

It must be taken into account that not always appearing on the first page leads to a lot of traffic, firstly because most of the clicks are taken by the first positions, secondly because generally the paid results move the organic ranking down in the SERP, and third because Google and other search engines present SERP functions that give answers to queries in search results and therefore it is not necessary for users to click on a result.

How To Improve Rank In SERPs?

Among the main tactics to improve the ranking in the SERPs we have:

• Keep the content of the site or web page fresh, recent, adding new content constantly.
• It is not enough that the content is fresh; it must also be of high quality, without duplicates, without grammatical errors.
• Improve page load times and make content mobile-friendly.
• Links are key in ranking; you have to remove broken links, add internal links and get quality backlinks.