What are SERPs? Why Are SERPs Important to SEO?

What are SERPs?

When you query a search engine, the system crawls different web pages on the internet and returns results showing website links, images, videos, maps, a featured snippet, and more. If you look at the information presented on the search results, you'll realize that everything relates to your search keywords. This page that carries your answer in any of these elements is known as a SERP. The particular elements you see on a SERP and their structure are determined by the keywords you used to search for information. Google has two main categories of SERP elements: paid and organic results.

Paid Results

Paid ads appear on the top and bottom of SERPs. The results come from ads that advertisers have purchased through Google Ads. Google algorithm has set criteria for determining which ad displays first. Ranking factors include bid amount, the relevance of the ad to the search, domain authority, and bid amount.

Organic Results

Google uses a complex algorithm to monitor over 200 rank signals and determine which page appears first on SERPs. It's important to note that the rank criteria are always changing due to the updates Google does on its algorithm. Make sure you follow what Google does with its algorithm and adjust fast to the changes. Have in mind that proper SEO techniques are your best bet to ranking high on organic SERPs.

Why Are SERPs Important to SEO?

It's important for any business with a website to pay attention to SERPs. The information contained in the first pages of SERPs is what most people will see when they search for something. Not many people browse past the first pages on SERPs. So you want to optimize your pages to the first page to increase the chances of drawing visitors to your website.

Now, SERPs dictate how a web page appears on the first page of Google. For instance, let's say you try to organically rank a keyword whose first results on SERPs are mostly paid ads. Then, the paid ads are followed by a snippet. That means the organic results are several lines down. It becomes hard for people to click on your content even if you rank first on organic results.

Another factor to consider when analyzing SERPs is no click searches. These come as a result of the featured snippet. Consider a search phrase that's likely to return abstract data or an instant answer. For instance, 'when did world war 1 start'.

See the results below:

With such a result, why would the user continue browsing the content below?

In this case, if your business wants its pages to appear on the first page of Google results, consider how SERP features appear when analyzing your KWs.

How can your business appear on SERPs?

Here are some tips to boost your chances of ranking high on SERPs.

Track and analyze SERP elements

You'll know what the search engine you're targeting looks for when ranking pages. When monitoring, point out openings you can use to rank high. Use the information to optimize your content and stand chances of landing the first position on the SERPs.

We understand that it's difficult for SEO managers to monitor SERPs manually. To lift the weight off your shoulders, you might consider automatic techniques of gathering data. Data scraping tools such as SERPMaster's Google Search API are an effective way of streamlining SEO tasks. If you want to learn more how SERPMaster's Google Search API works check here.

Post valuable content

Google, the popular search engine, tasks its algorithms to analyze millions of pages for every search query. The bots then display pages with information that's relevant to a search query. In fact, the pages are arranged based on their relevance. To stand a chance, you want to prove to the search engines that your pages carry valuable information that people are interested in.

Make your site mobile-friendly

Today, most people use their smartphones to browse websites. To gain a good percentage of these online visitors, make accessing pages on your website from a mobile device effortless. If they can't navigate seamlessly, they'll quit and Google will record this as bounce rate.

Check your links and linking strategy

Use a few links with relevant information and choose the hyperlink wordings meticulously. Google inspects the words in your hyperlinks to see if they match the content on the link. When linking, check how you choose your anchor text. Also, make sure you are linking to relevant, authoritative websites. Linking to pages with relevant, helpful information reduces the bounce rate. A high bounce rate will lower your page's ranking on SERPs.

Invest in technical and on-page SEO

To compete for a space on the first page of search engine results, you need to work on the SEO for your entire website.

Conclusion

Google SERPs is the response that the search engine returns when you type a query. SEO managers should consider how the elements on SERPs appear when processing keywords for SEO. This is because how results appear on SERPs depends on the specific search terms a user typed on Google search.