What is a SERP page in Google and Why Page 1 is Everything?

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The “SERP” page is the page you see after you typed something in this search box.

What you see are the best answers to your question.

Yet, “what is a SERP page and why should I care about it?“

You should care because you want your posts and page found, you want traffic and conversions (sales).

AMIRight?

Why Google Page and Position 1 is everything?

Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp on the show Location, Location, Location always said the #1 buying and selling property rule is about location.

The rule is to maximise the return on your investment when selling we must choose the best location today.

Google page 1 and position 1 follow the same rule.

Google’s position 1 is “the winner takes all” the impressions and clicks situation.

More click correlates to more sales.

“Boardwalk and Park Ave” are the Monopoly game best locations. They are perfectly located and demand the highest rents and prices.

In this organic click-through rate, CTR, 👇 chart, position one gets 1/3 of all organic search clicks. 1/3!

Position 1 gets 27.6% of all clicks for that search query.
Position 2 1/6th and
Position 3 11%.
and worse if you’re not on page 1 SERP #1, 2, 3 get >50% of all the clicks for that keyword

Position one is the “winner takes all the clicks” location. Unlike real estate, you cannot simply buy your way into the best location or position 1, 2, or 3.

Check that you can buy your way to the top of Google page 1. That is by buying Google Ads and not organic SEO.

What is a SERP Page? What and How does Search Engine Results Page Work?

A search engine results page, SERP is the page that has the answers to the questions asked.

For example, if a person searching for “what is bicarbonate of soda” the search engine results page:

Right? We ask a question and get an answer.

Further: each question you ask has a “keyword” as part of the questions. The keyword is “bicarbonate of soda“. The intent of the search gaining knowledge because of the “what is” qualifier.

Are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Safari or DuckDuckGo the ultimate oracles🦉 of knowledge?

No no not “oracles”. Not in a wise, insightful or prophetic way.

Search engines are simply databases of answers. And these engines do their best to interpolate your question and serve up the best answer to a question.

How the Google SERP page works is simple yet complex.

The simple answer is that Google has gone and visited every publicly available page on the internet, and “crawled” the pages.

Then indexed and put them in a database. “Indexed them” also means reading and understanding what content is on the page and what the page is all about.

“Indexed them” also is Google categorizing these pages and figuring out which of them is the best suited to as the answer to the question.

Every page and blog post, video, image, podcast etc., on the internet gets rated by Google using an algorithm. This algorithm ranks pages and posts based on their authority and usefulness in answering the questions asked and the usefulness of that page queries people ask.

The ⚙process of “figuring out which page is best” is the ranking process.

The ranking of pages is a closely guarded secret. This Google page is the official how Google search works page.

Yet, clever and observant people have determined the Google algorithm has over 210 known factors used to rank pages. Your “job” is to answer the questions people are asking.

Answering the question is the content marketing aspect of digital marketing.

Google searches its database for the best answer to queries and displays the answer on a search engine results page.

The above answer begs more questions than it answers 🤣

• How-to get pages and posts indexed?
• How-to get pages and posts ranked?
• What are the top 10 most important page and post ranking factors?
• How do I get my pages and posts on page and position 1 of Google?
• Does Bing, Yahoo, Safari, DuckDuckGo et al have their own ranking factors?

Combining it all – What is a SERP Page?

The search results pages are configured in many different ways. Different because the questions “we” ask require different types of answers none are “alternate facts” type of answers. The answers are displayed in a different manner.

For example the search queries…

• “What is Monopoly”
• “Where to buy Monopoly”
• “How to be the best monopoly player”

…have different intent. What is Monopoly game is not the same as where to buy. If Google only displayed shopping results for every question people would defect and use a different search engine.

So the first search query is informational (looking for information); the second is transactional (where to buy); the third is also informational.

These three search engine results pages for monopoly are different from a SERP page for “how to fix a leaking toilet”, “how to scale a business in 2022” or “best steak restaurant” near me.

Different questions, and their search intent, require different answers, different features, styles, types and depths of answers.

A few common search engine result page features are (#1-4 are the most common)

But, What is Search Intent?

The questions people ask have different intentions. These intentions are put into one of three buckets:

• Informational – people looking for raw info or knowledge – What is “Bicarbonate of soda“?
• Transactional – “best restaurant near me”, the intent of this search is to find a location to eat – so buying.
• Navigational – e.g. help in finding a website. “Aviva Insurance”, “Facebook” etc.

Wrapping it all up – What is a SERP Page?

The answer to that SERP page is that it is that page that answers the questions asked. We type our question in this box:

And like magic the answer is displayed on a SERP page:

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