SERP

SERP is the abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page, or plainly: the page with the search results. The term turns up in every agency proposal and means nothing mysterious — it is what you see after clicking "Search". It is only interesting because that page today has little to do with what most people picture.

The image of ten numbered hits comes from a time that is over. On a search results page today you will find, depending on the query, paid adverts right at the top, a map view with three nearby businesses, a box with a short answer, expandable follow-up questions, videos, images, reviews — and somewhere among them the unpaid hits. For travel and hotel queries, a booking block of its own takes up the upper part of the page.

From this follows the most important practical insight: position one does not mean first place on the screen. On a mobile phone, the first unpaid hit can sit so far down that it only appears after several swipes. Anyone talking about visibility without looking at what else is on the particular results page is working with a number that says nothing on its own.

These additional components are called SERP features in the jargon, and they differ from search term to search term. For a purely informational question, an AI answer often sits at the top. For a search with a local element, the map view decides who gets called. For a product search, adverts with an image and a price dominate. For a business, the question "which features does this results page show" is therefore often more important than the question "which position am I in".

What you can influence about your own listing is limited, but not without effect. The title and the description have a share in deciding the click. Structured data can bring additional details into the result, opening hours or follow-up questions for instance. A well-maintained business profile is the precondition for appearing in the map view at all.

What you cannot influence belongs on the table just as much: which features are shown is decided afresh by the search engine for each query. There is no purchasing channel for a box with a short answer and no sign-up for an AI answer. Anyone promising a fixed position is promising something they do not control — the display is assembled anew with every search, depending on location, device and previous behaviour.

For your own assessment, this determines which numbers actually say something. Impressions say how often your listing was shown to somebody. Clicks say how often it was taken. The click-through rate — clicks divided by impressions — says whether the result convinced. And the average position says where you stand, but not whether anyone clicks there at all. All four numbers are available free of charge in the Google Search Console for your own domain.

An example from our work makes this tangible: one client site sits at an average position of 6.6, so at no top position, and still brings in 594 clicks in 90 days at a click-through rate of 14.6 per cent. Conversely we see search terms where a good position brings hardly any clicks, because the upper part of the results page is taken up by other components. The two together are the reason why we do not promise rankings but measure what actually arrives — set out as well in the guide on how to measure whether a website works.