Importance of understanding SERPs
Importance of understanding SERPs for the development and implementation of effective web positioning strategies.
Understanding SERPs is a critical factor for Digital Marketers today. The deeper the comprehension of SERPs, the greatest positive result impacts for your business on search engines.
What are SERPs?
Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs as its acronym in English, are those search engine pages with a list of results that are displayed when people enter any seach criteria in search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo.
These search criteria are commonly known as keywords, and can be words, expressions or questions directly.
How do SERPs work?
The search results will always be different, since although the same keywords are being searched, they will depend on the search location, the search history, the browser configuration, the search criteria configuration, and other associated to user behavior factors.
Search engines today, are committed to deliver the most convenient results and compatible with the search intentions of users. So part of the power of keywords as a positioning factor is now transferred to the interpretation of search intentions.
Classification of Search Intentions.
The competition between the main search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo is focused on gaining more and more users through the improvement of their web browsing experience. So, trying to return the results (SERPs) that best meet the expectations of users is today a high priority for search engines.
The improvement of the user experience in internet searches obliges the providers of these services to the development of search algorithms and artificial intelligence that are increasingly sophisticated and capable of analyzing, interpreting, discovering the user’s intention in a personalized way and in turn learn from individual behavior.
User search intentions are basically classified into three types:
- Informational Search
- Navigation Search
- Commercial or Transactional Search
Informational Search are those in which the intention of the user is simply to find information on a given topic or issue. The user does not intend to buy or locate any specific website. If any of the search engines interprets that the intention is simply informative, then the results that will be displayed will have only informative value and no ads will appear.
In Navigation Search, users intend to find a specific web page whose URL they have forgotten. Generally, these queries return results of specific brands and constitute a great positioning opportunity.
The commercial or transactional search is one in which the user’s intention is clearly related to a purchase decision. Generally, these searches include the keyword “buy”, “purchase”, “price”. The Search Engine Result page will display not only the list of sales websites for the requested services or products but will also display all ads related to the search criteria.
Summarizing, according to the intention of the users, the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) will include organic results, paid advertising, knowledge graphs, featured snippets, images or videos among other serp features.
Thus, SEO strategies and tactics to improve the positioning of websites are going to be as dynamic as the industry and the business itself, and as varied as the habits and behaviors of individual consumers.
So, the understanding of SERPs is critical to the development and implementation of an effective web positioning strategy.