What is SERP? – The Importance of SERPs for Your Website

How can a user enter a search engine and search for various results with any keyword find you and where exactly? Hey, you might not know enough where we plan to meet with the user, thanks to our strong SEO scores: SERPs!

SERP stands for search engine result page. These pages, which are displayed by Google or any other search engine as a result of the user’s search query and can potentially contain millions of results, are much richer than before.

So what’s in the SERP? Why is SERP important for your website and your SEO journey? What do you need to know about SERP in order to redesign your entire strategy?

We asked Screpy experts these questions and got very important answers for you. We will explore SERPs closely in our content today. If you’re ready, it’s time to start!

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What is SERPs?

Let’s start with a simple and straightforward introduction: what are SERPs?

Suppose you, as a user, are looking for something on the SERP. For example, you are looking for “the best coffee brands”. You typed the words you want to search and clicked enter.

Then Google gives you millions of pages to choose from, right? Here’s where you have not yet selected and clicked on any site, the SERP itself. And hey, that’s where you want your website to be.

Remember, the higher you rank in SERP, the higher your chance of traffic.

Google’s advanced algorithms can find you millions of results within a few milliseconds. Of course, not all of these results have an equal chance of traffic. Research shows that while users are interested in the first 3 organic results, the likelihood of clicking on the next ones is quite low. Moreover, in this process, there are also paid results that will be seen above your organic success.

Did we say paid results?

Yes that’s right.

We think it’s time to examine what’s on the SERP and people search for results.

Main Kind of Queries and Different SERPs

Users do their search engine searches for three basic functions. These can be listed as follows:

1. Informational queries: You usually see less paid results in these searches made to get encyclopedic information about a specific subject. For example, the number of brands or businesses that advertise on the history of the First World War is, as you can expect, much less or almost nonexistent than those that advertise the word “best make-up eyeshadow palette”. Non-commercial queries are rich in organic results and you are more likely to see a knowledge graph in these searches.
2. Navigational Queries: In this type of search, users search by keywords to find specific content or website.
3. Transactional Queries: SERPs that are richest in paid results are right here. These types of searches contain keywords with an action meaning that give a clue that users are ready to take any action based on the results they find: for example, searches done in conjunction with buy, rent, or other similar words.

What is on SERP?

To understand SERP better, we have to say this: SERP is not a fixed catalog of results created to be offered to users. On the contrary, each user’s SERP for each search is different from the other. The following situations may change what does SERP includes and what will be displayed to the user:

1. User’s location
2. User’s previous searches (search engine usage habits)

Still, it’s possible to say that we have a complete list of what can be shown on the SERP in general. If you wish, let’s get to know SERP, which is the “user part” of the complex world of search engines.

Organic Results on SERP

We always say that SEO works are very important because thanks to these studies, you can be shown higher in related keyword searches. This is exactly the part where we are talking about “organic search” results.

Certain rankings emerge as a result of Googlebots scanning the sites and marking the most relevant sites among these to rank them higher. As a result of this ranking, an appearance occurs in SERP.

For example, we typed “Barack Obama” into the Google search bar to let you try the SERP yourself. Let’s evaluate the results you see together.

• Knowledge Graph: SERP provides a box where users can get “quick information” about certain topics that are frequently searched for. This rectangular box, which appears on the right side of the SERP, has been actively serving on SERPs since 2012 and enables many people to obtain information without having to click on any website. Here are the answers to the questions that users often ask. For example, above, Barack Obama’s date of birth, schools he attended, years of service, etc. listed in detail.
• Also, the web pages that search users can find are ranked in the rest of the SERP. One of them was a Twitter page specifically for this search.

Paid Results on SERPs

We know that the ads provided by Google based on the Per Per Click logic are the hidden power of digital marketing today.

Hey, it is hidden, because not every brand can create an efficient PPC strategy.

Moreover, this type of ad is not limited to a single ad model. Google’s ads are quite diverse, such as search ads, display ads, remarketing ads. But here we are talking more about “search” ads.

For instance, we searched for ” buy sports shoe ” for you and see what kind of a SERP came out:

In short, although your SEO work is very strong, sometimes a company that does SEM (search engine marketing) studies may appear higher than you thanks to the high advertising budget it pays. But of course, the results of SEM’s are much shorter than the lifetime of the SEO results you can get. They can only stay there as long as the company pays for the advertisement.

Google Featured Snippets

Recent statements say a thing:

Google now scans for paragraphs -not only for headings or the frequency of keywords-. In other words, when a user searches for information, if that information has a direct response within a paragraph in your content, it is likely that Google will highlight this part as a featured snippet on SERP. And hey, you don’t have to do anything extra for this.

Moreover, Google Featured Snippets present other questions and their answers to the users through the “People Also Ask” section in question windows that can be opened and closed. When the user clicks on one of them, he or she sees from which site the response was taken and can click it if he or she wishes.

We wondered how the relevant information was given on this site and visited the site. As far as we have seen, this part of the site was not presented under a separate title. However, since Google now performs a detailed scan of the whole paragraph and all of the content, it has selected this part and added it to SERP as a featured snippet. Here is the screenshot of the relevant website:

How Does Your Web Page Look In SERP?

So, how does your web page look like in the SERP world? Which parts appear before the user in SERP?

Let’s examine this together. Below we searched for “best rice recipe”. Now we will examine the image of one of the pages that appear in the SERP in detail.

Now, let’s choose one of the web pages ranked at high level:

This web page is very rich in Google Schemas and has apparently used many structured data:

1. Rating,
2. Calorie,
3. Cooking time,
4. Votes,
5. Release date

All this has allowed the site to have a much richer and more user-friendly look on the SERP. Also, we see the following parts of the web page, respectively:

1. The URL of the site at the top,
2. The meta title of the content on the site at the bottom,
3. Meta Description of the content in a subsection

All these tell us two things,

1. As a user browses on the SERP, while where a page is ranked affects your browsing behavior, you can also be influenced by the appearance of these pages in the SERP, and the way they look may also have an impact on your browsing behavior -for instance, which website to choose to click on.
2. Meta tags and meta descriptions can be very effective weapons to convince the user that your site is better.

The Relationship Between SEO and SERP

We got to know the SERP in great detail. So, what is the relationship between SERP and SEO? The answer to this question is of course not in paid results, but in organic results. In order for a web page to be listed higher in organic results, it may need to do the following:

1. Strong off-page SEO work – for example, how many different external sources a site receives linking from is very important and this is also called a backlink. But let’s give you an important piece of information: Google understands the tricks on this subject. That’s why make sure every step is organic.
2. On-page SEO optimizations – both content optimization and technical SEO optimization mean powerful results.
3. Site loading speed and page speed monitoring
4. The prestige of the site and the security options it offers

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