SERPS

In the context of search engines, SERPs stands for "Search Engine Results Pages". This is the page shown by a search engine in response to a search query.

In a search engine optimisation campaign, normally one or more words or phrases (keywords) will be targetted for a website. The SERPs for these will then be monitored over time, with the aim of getting that website to rank highly in the results for those keywords. For certain phrases, getting a website to number one in the SERPs could be worth a great deal of money.

How much is a word worth?

Certain keywords are the focus of intense competition. Good examples would be so-called "money phrases" such as "home loans" or "hotels". Getting to the top of SERPs such as these would bring a large number of visitors who may be planning to spend a lot of money. However, nobody gets these top positions easily : it will usually take expert optimisation and aggressive link building.

Measuring the competitiveness of SERPs is not as straightforward as simply counting the number of other pages that use the keywords. Most pages written in English will include the keyword "the", for example, but it's unlikely that many websites will be using "the" as a keyword. By contrast, there are fewer sites that use "mortgages" as a keyword, but getting a high rank for this will be difficult, not least because few webmasters want to place links on their sites to a page about mortgages.

Fluctuating SERPs

SERPs are not constant, and may even change from one minute to the next on some engines. The search engines are updated periodically as new websites and pages are added. Every now and then there is a major update or a change to the way the search engines organise their results. For example on Google this used to happen around monthly, and was known as the Google Dance, although currently updates happen on an ongoing basis.

How important are SERPs?

Searchers rarely look beyond the first thirty results, because by then they have either found what they are looking for or given up. Some searchers don't look beyond the first page, so being in the top ten for relevant phrases is essential for search engine visibility.

However SERPs are not the most important thing. It's easy to get carried away with being number one, and to forget that the searcher is a human being. Searchers are unlikely to click on a link if the title and description are irrelevant or worse, nonsense. Writing a clear and honest title for a page will attract visitors, without insulting their intelligence by assuming that they will click on the first result no matter how garbled it is.