What Are SERPs? All About Search Engine Results Pages

By jack123 | SEO | 0 Comments

In the following “What Are SERPs? All About Search Engine Results Pages” article, I will try to explain in-depth the topic of Search Engine Results Pages. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and dive in!

SERP is the English abbreviation and stands for Search Engine Result Pages, i.e. for the results pages of a search engine. These are displayed in the form of a list on Google or other search engines, for example. Each website is assigned a certain rank, which is determined on the basis of many different criteria. Even if these criteria are not published by the search engine provider, SEO is precisely designed to meet these criteria for a website. 

The SERPs present their results using snippets. These are the individual results on the list of search results, also known as Result Page, one of which is assigned to a website. The snippets or rich snippets consist of the title and a meta description. The link to the target page is also included. The results in the SERP can also be supplemented with information. This could be, for example, reviews that were assigned to the site or the company. The user thus gets a premonition of what can be found on the respective page or website. The snippets in the SERP (Result Page) are already part of the SEO search engine optimization, they bring visitors to websites and generate clicks or traffic.

The Google search engine shows 10 snippets per results page (SERP). At the top, Google shows the best organic search result with the so-called featured snippets. This includes the meta description. Depending on the search query, results from Google News or the Google Direct Answer Box can also expand the results number. Depending on the device, app links can also be displayed on mobile devices, for example.

Organic search results and ads

There are different categories. On one hand there are the organic results of the organic search in the SERP. This denotes results that do not have to be paid to the provider. 

On the other hand, there are SERPs with image ads or the “ad” tag that are at the top of the list of results. For these so-called Google Advertising ads, you have to pay a certain amount per click to the search engine operator. Adwords optimization is worthwhile for cost efficiency.

With keyword cannibalization, several pages rank on the SERP for one keyword. You should avoid that. It is also important to think more about semantic search engines in the future. Because they also provide search results for related, semantically identical or similar keywords.

The importance of the SERP

The SERPs have a great influence on the reach of a website. The design of the snippets, which are located on a result page, mainly influences values ​​such as the CTR, the click through rate and the number of visitors. A connection between the SERP snippet and the conversion rate can also be determined. The better it is designed, the more attention it will get. Especially with a niche site, blog or shop, these snippets are often one of the few ways to refer to the site without paying a lot for it. An uninteresting design of the headline and description in the result page are often the reason why a search result is not clicked on and there is no traffic.

Therefore, there are some aspects and factors on how you can use the snippets to generate more attention in the result pages. The design should not be underestimated. You should carry out tests to determine which titles and descriptions are particularly well received in the SERP and then optimize them. The various tools such as Sistrix or PageRangers enable optimization of visibility and ranking with search engines. Such tools are relatively expensive and not essential to get started.

How can I attract more attention to myself in Google results?

There are some changes that can be made to be relevant and noticeable among the Search Engine Result Pages. For this one should fall back on today’s tools for SEO search engine optimization. A good WordPress SEO plugin is, for example, Yoast SEO. This plugin allows the metadata, e.g. the meta description, to be viewed in a preview before the publication of a page in order to be able to assess the effect. This is important because the snippet in the SERP sometimes might show too little information in order for the user to understand the theme of the page.

There are some basic formalities that must be observed. The title should not contain more than 70 characters – including spaces. According to the latest status, no more than 55 characters since 2018 due to the motto Mobile First. The meta description or meta description below should ideally not exceed 130 characters in order to be fully visible to mobile devices. The title and description should be formulated as precisely and concisely as possible. A good meta description is like a short headline that asks the reader to act in the search results of the search engine or the SERP, just like a “call to action” button.