Research the SERPs

The search engine results pages or SERPS are the proving ground for a successful keyword strategy. 

It is estimated that the number one website in the results will get a 35% share of clicks. This also shows you important areas to consider in your optimization and content tactics. 

Many times it's not just a webpage that you need to optimize for rankings. It can be a product page, a file, a video, or a podcast. Most times you might be up against local results, which takes up a lot of real estate on the page. 

Other times your competition may be Google itself. One of my keywords from my seed list produces a result that looks like this. This is called the knowledge graph. The search engine will attempt to answer your query with content from another source, and present it on the search results page. 

Now, there are two sides to this. For the search engine, especially Google, it gives answers to the searcher immediately. And without clicking the result, the searcher sees the information they need. 

For the site owner, it's a bit more complex. You see, Google can answer the searcher's question without the searcher ever going to my website. So while my content may have answered the searcher's question, I probably didn't get a visit and will have no way of knowing how many people saw. Plus, I didn't get a chance to present my content to the searcher in the context of my website. 

Next, I want to make note of any results that have ads on the page. When businesses are actively bidding on a term that provides ads, it shows you that there is significant competition for that term. 

Additionally, because most searchers are using a mobile device, the first ad will take up most of the screen. They will have to scroll through the ads to get to the organic results, the ones based on the search engine's algorithm. As you can see in this example, my keyword, Dubai visit, has a results page with four ads at the top of the page, and then the organic results. 

This is critical. If someone's on a smartphone, 

they're not going to see my organic result. They're going to see the ads. So make a note in your keyword list of which of your terms results in ads, and which do not. Highlight those that have ads or the Google knowledge graph, as you may have to change tactics in order to gain visibility.

Full course available at Linkedin SEO: Link Building

Follow the writer Yasser Afify

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Reading search engine result pages (SERP)

Reading search engine result pages (SERP)

Before we dive into working on getting your website to show up in the search results, it's important to understand what those search results actually look like. Although there are a lot of search engines around the world, and they all have some distinct differences, there are some common characteristics that their search engine results pages, or SERPs, may have.

One thing that we're probably going to find are some paid listings. Paid listings are very different than

the traditional organic or natural listings that we'll be focusing on for our SEO efforts. These paid listings are actually advertisements, and programs like Google Ads or Microsoft's Bing Ads, allow advertisers to bid on and place these ads in the search results page.

Search engines are always changing how ads appear in the SERPs, as they try to better their business and please their advertisers. And these changes can have surprising and unpredictable impacts on how organic search performs. But for now, we'll talk about what a typical SERP looks like.

A typical search engine results page will have 10 organic results that link out to different web pages,

sometimes referred to as the 10 blue links. Each result might look a little different, but they'll all have at least a headline, a description, and a visible URL.

It's important to know what these components look like because later in this course, we'll be modifying and optimizing these particular elements that may appear for an individual result. One important thing to point out is that the internet has changed a lot since search engines first appeared. And there's a lot of content on the web, beyond just text and web pages.

Search engines have done a really good job of keeping pace, and while we still view web page results, they also return things like videos, images, news, products, and maps. All of these can appear on a search engine results page. A common way of describing this would be that we now have blended search results, which include all kinds of different content.

Sometimes the blended results will have a group of video clips that match a user's search query. Or it might show a list of local businesses, accompanied by a map. It could be a group of images and prices for a particular product that you can buy.

Social results will often feature prominently when you search for a company. And if that company has made the news, chances are there will be a block of recent news items too. Search results can show up in a variety of different ways, based on what the search engines think is relevant and appropriate to the user's search query. In some search results, you might see a visual carousel of results. Others may include enhanced results, like Google's Knowledge Graph. These results are generated from a variety of sources, like Wikipedia and review sites, as well as information that you can provide search engines from the code of your pages using schema.

The important thing to remember is that you have a lot of opportunities to have your content show up in the search engine results pages. And the more you understand how search engines decide to show results to users, the more you'll understand how to get the search engines to show your content above the rest.

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