Why are SERPs Important?
SERPs are important because they provide your audience with a chance to encounter and get acquainted with your business website. Think about the SERPs you have seen when using a search engine: there is always a title and a small description of each site that comes up on a search engine result page, always based on the proportion of keyword matches.
The higher the proportion of exact keyword matches in the title and small description (also known as the meta-description) of your site, the greater the chances are that your site will rank higher. Of course, it is important to remember that while keywords and keyword phrase matches are important, this is not what SEO is all about and that there is much more to search engines assigning websites certain ranks.
What’s the Difference Between Organic and Paid Search Results?
On every SERP, there are two main types of content: organic results and paid results. Both types of results can be optimized, but it is the organic results that require more work in order for them to rank higher and drive traffic.
Organic Results
Organic results are the listings of webpages that appear as a result of a SERP without paid help. The rank of an organic result depends on the search engine’s algorithm as well as the relevancy of the keywords used within the content. Search engine optimization plays a large role in the rank of a website or webpage.
Paid Results
Paid results are different from organic results because they have paid to be displayed by an advertiser. While paid ads used to be small, text-based ads that usually popped up right above or next to organic results, today they can be large ads in various formats that reach hundreds or thousands of users.
Typically, advertisers use PPC for paid results on a SERP. These ads are then ranked and position depending on their quality and other factors the search engines are looking for. Paid results are faster acting than organic ones because they become visible the moment they’ve been paid for, driving traffic much faster than organic results.
