Pretty much every single person reading this would be familiar with the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that is returned after a search is done via Google or Bing. What we have recently discovered is, some people do not know ‘what is what’ when it comes to how those results are displayed, so in the interests of clearing things up, welcome to our blog on SERPs!

The SERP is broken down into 3 sections:

–          Paid (Pay Per Click)

–          Map Listings

–          Organic

Paid (Pay Per Click)
Everyone wants to be on the top of page one search results. How do you get there? Paid campaigns are pretty much the only game in town. Ideally, there will be four positions at the very top of the SERP that are available to be bid on, allowing you to get noticed by your customers. On some occasions (dependent on the term used) this may be lower and other times when we are talking about terms with a super low search volume, these may not trigger ads at all. As they are a paid service, these ads will appear ‘above the fold’ (the bottom of your screen) to ensure maximum exposure and should return excellent results based on your search term.

There are also three additional positions for ads which appear at the bottom of the SERP. These attract a lower cost to secure and as you would expect, results may vary in these positions.

Map Listings
After the paid advertising, the next set of results appearing on your SERP should be the map listings. These map listings display local businesses that are the most appropriate result for your search. So, if (for example) you are searching for a dentist, you will see dentists that are closely located to where you are searching from appearing. If the search is for a service that is not as comprehensively covered as a dentist, say a turf farm, you might see results from further away.

A while ago, Google started allowing paid advertising in the map listings to allow companies to appear further afield, so occasionally you will see one of these appear in the map listings. If you were to click on the ‘more places’ button below the map listings, you would come across more map listings, both paid and unpaid.

Organic Results
Organic results are the next set of results listed on your SERP. As the name implies, these are organic or natural results that are matched on the relevance to the terms entered into the search engine.

Ironically, there is more time, effort and expense put into achieving these ‘organic’ results via Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns than any other form of digital marketing. The beauty of this is unlike paid (or pay per click) advertising, these results are visible 24/7 and remain in the same/similar positions as long as there is a comprehensive SEO campaign being undertaken.

Hopefully this article has been able to quickly explain what is appearing on your SERP and how these results have been achieved.

Thanks for reading!