What is SERPs in SEO?
SERPs is an abbreviation that stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s the page that a user sees when they do a search on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any other search engine.
The Google SERPs are constantly evolving and are unrecognizable from the first version of the results page that users would have seen 25 years ago.
Today the SERPs change according to the type of search a user is doing, so if they search for plumbers in New York they are presented with a map that shows nearby plumbers, if they search for waterproof hiking boots they are shown products from e-commerce stores, and if they search for Taylor Swift they get a big knowledge graph with all the related information that someone might want to know
A big problem for websites that rely on SEO is that the Google SERPs is generating more zero click searches because Google is able to satisfy the search term on the SERP itself.
For example, if someone searched for: What is the capital of Nicaragua Google shows the answer in the results page, so there’s little incentive for the user to click on any of the results.
Another big change that is going to happen on the SERPs is the introduction of generative AI to answer user questions. This is going to result in even more zero click searches and make it even harder for websites to generate traffic from the search engines because users can get all the answers they need from the SERP.
For example, someone searching for: What does SERP mean in SEO?
Google’s generative AI, Bard, will be able to answer that question because it has harvested other people’s content around the topic and regurgitated it on the SERP. The user can ask follow-up questions and never have to visit another website.
From a user experience perspective, using generative AI to answer your searches is incredible. From a website owner perspective, it is worrying.
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