When talking about search engine result pages (SERPs), you are discussing the pages that Google and other search engines show people in response to their search query. SERPs usually include both organic and paid search results.
Why SERPs Are Important for SEO
The truth of the matter is that most people who are viewing SERPs are only going to click organic results on the first page. Second and subsequent pages are rarely ever visited.
All of this said, ranking on the first page does not always translate to tons of traffic. Many organic links only go to the first few positions, and paid results often push the organic rankings down on SERPs.
If you Google “buy eyeglasses online,” you will find that there are four paid ads above the organic results and 39 percent of all clicks go to the paid results. Google can also occasionally show SERP features that answer a query in the search results, meaning that if Google can answer a question in the SERP, searchers have less need to click on results.
How You Get Into the SERPs
All SERPs consist of the same three building blocks, which are paid ads, organic results, and SERP features. Let us examine all three elements in greater detail.
Paid search results appear above, and occasionally after organic results. The two kinds of results are somewhat indistinguishable, except that paid ads are marked as such.
People obtain paid ads through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which means that advertisers will bid on keywords and pay Google for each click. Highest bidders usually receive prime placement, but Google can take other factors like the relevance of an ad and CTR into account.
Organic search results are pages from Google’s index, and because there are typically thousands of matching results, Google sorts them using hundreds of ranking factors. As a result, the most relevant and high-quality pages are the ones that end up on the first page of the SERPs.
When it comes to ranking factors, we know that the number of backlinks to a page is important. Google displays organic results by showing a title, URL, and a descriptive snippet.
A person can dictate what Google will display in a SERP by setting the page’s title tag, URL slug, and meta description. When it comes to pages with structured data, Google occasionally shows rich snippets alongside the regular organic results too.
When you want to appear in organic search results, you need to focus on creating the best and most relevant result for the query. You also need to make sure Google can index your pages, and that they’re optimized for search.
SERP features are non-traditional results that may be paid, organic, or pulled directly from