What Is A SERP?

When it comes to the online world, you have probably heard or seen people talking about SERPs at some point, but if you don’t actually know what the term ‘SERP’ stands for, you could quickly get lost in all of the chat, but to cut a long story short -

The term ‘SERP’ stands for “search engine results page”

Now you know what it stands for, lets delve into what they actually are...

A ‘SERP’ or ‘SERPs’ is the results that appear on the page when you search for something such as ‘Star Wars action figures’ on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo! and so on.

These were once relatively simple, just made up of “10 blue links” but over the years they’ve grown and become much busier.

The following slide will provide a breakdown of each area of a modern day SERP.

A SERP consists of many different types of results.

● Organic links are websites that the Google algorithm has picked up as the most valuable listings and have therefore put them on the first page of the search queries

● Paid ads have also appeared on the SERP. This is where a webmaster pays the search engine to include them on the first page, rather than being chosen to be there.

● Images also show up on some searches now, whereas they were once confined to the “Images” section of the search engine.

Other types of listings can also be found for example if you search ‘Nandos Nottingham’ a map will also appear on the page (see next slide). As you can also see from the next slide, Google will now show links to Google+ pages as part of the results, encouraging you to use their social platform.

One more example of a SERP, is when you search, for example ‘things to do in London’

Google will present you with a page full with points of interest in London, without having to click on any website. It will also show you a map of London, a picture and a brief description that Google has pulled from Wikipedia. This is great if you’re in or making your way to London and are on your phone looking for somewhere to go, as it is showing people straight away, just what is available to them in London.

This has caused displeasure with some website owners as it has reduced the amount of clicks through to their website, however there is no denying this layout it makes the search process much quicker for users on the go.

This is how the search term ‘things to do in London’ appears on desktop

This is how the same search term appears on a mobile device;

As you can see, the points of interest appear at the top once again, and you can scroll across with the swipe of your thumb. This is much easier and quicker than constantly searching through websites that provide the same information, offering a much better user experience.

That’s pretty much what a SERP consists of.

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