SEO Question: What are SERPs?

The term SERPs seems to be used a lot, but what does SERPs mean?

Deeho Says:

SERPs is an abbreviation for Search Engine Rank Positions, and is the order in which organic (natural) results appear in each search engine.

If a site is referred to as doing well in SERPs, then it is ranking well in Google, Bing & Yahoo.

SERPs are often called Google results, organic listings or search placements.

By default, the major search engines show 10 organic listings per page, with the top ten being the most valuable place to be seen.

Page two gets smaller traffic volumes because the majority of searchers find a suitable result in the top ten so don’t need to keep looking in the lower ranked results.

Page three and lower SERPs attract much less traffic, so top ten results should be your initial goal.

Our tests show that many sites actually receive more traffic if they rank at the top of page 2 rather than being 10th at the bottom of page 1…… but this does vary significantly from niche to niche.

Different search engines display their search pages differently. Until 2015, Google had three adwords results at the top of the page, followed by 10 organic results, with 7 more Adwords Ads down the right hand side.

In early 2016 they changed this, removing the 7 Ads on the right and increasing the Ads at the top of the page to 4.

This has had the effect of forcing advertisers to bid more in order to be one of the 4 highest bidding Ads for that keyword.

It’s also had a small effect on organic traffic as there are now more Ads to catch the eye of searchers before they scroll down to reach the ‘natural’ listings.

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