People use search engines every day to find information on the internet, but what are the parts of a search engine, how do they work and how does it affect your SEO? In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the different components of a search engine and explain how they help us find what consumers look for online.
Search Engine Results Page
When you want to search for something in Google, whatever you type into the search bar is your keyword or keyphrase. When you click search, you are brought to the search engine results page, also known as the SERP. The results page can be broken down into about seven sections.
Paid Results
At the top of a search page, the first thing you see are the paid results. These are the few results that say Ad on them. These are ads that companies can purchase to be listed at the top of the SERP. In order to be listed in this area, you need to bid on keywords within the Google Ads program.
Local Search Results
Next to be seen on an SERP are your local search results. This is where businesses with physical locations within a certain geographic area are shown. These results appear as a list of three, with an option to view the rest of them if wanted. If you have a local business, getting into the top three that are immediately shown should be a top priority. Using localized SEO is a helpful way of doing this.
Organic Search Results
Following the local search results are the organic search results. This is where Google lists the websites that it believed to be the most relevant to what I put into the search bar. Appearing in the organic search results does not cost a company money. Google needs these results to be as relevant as possible to avoid users becoming frustrated with their results. Due to this, optimizing your SEO strategy is important in order to appear within the first ten organic results.
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets offer an opportunity to show up even higher than the paid search results. These are usually shown as an answer box at the top of the SERP because Google believes it will quickly answer whatever question has been typed into the search bar. Different types of featured snippets can include lists, recipes, videos, etc.
Rich Answers
Rich answers appear the same way that a featured snippet does. These are shown when there is only one possible answer to the search, making it so a user does not have to visit another page to get it. There is no attribution to a website for these as the single answers are considered public domain by Google. Therefore, there is no benefit for SEO for being featured here, so you may want to avoid using keywords that might result in this.
Knowledge Graph
Knowledge graphs are typically shown as a carousel of cards at the top of the SERP related to your search. An example of this is if you were to search for movies in Denver, Colorado, the information would be organized and presented from different sources and shown in the form of these “cards”.
Rich Snippets
Rich snippets come from structured data that is programmed into the websites that appear on the SERP. This information helps the search engine understand more about the content within the website. Rich snippets work as a way to make your search result pop out more compared to the others.
All parts of the internet are made up of many moving parts. This guide serves as a great foundation for the basis of a search engine results page and what each part means. There is always more to learn, however, we hope that this gets you started off on the right foot!