Holistic SEOSERP’s is not the UK based State Earnings Related Pension Scheme abolished in 2002, but for many years has instead stood for ‘Search Engine Results Page/s’ and it is the go to term for SEO marketers and search engine optimisation consults such as ourselves.

When a keyword search is performed on the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask etc, in simple terms the page that displays those results, be they 1-10, 1-50 or 1-100 is known as the SERP.

Whilst most webmasters and SEO consultants will know what SERP stands for, it is non the less a techie term that often draws blank looks when talking to non SEO savvy small business owners and managers.

For a Google search on an example search phrase like ‘SEO Liverpool’, the results returned by a search engine normally include a list of web pages / web sites with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page.  A recent addition to the first 10 or so results on the SERP is a small selection of recent news items that may refer to the search phrase or keyword.

Other features commonly found on SERP’s are ‘paid for’ / ’sponsored’ results in the top and right side margins, and tabs on tailoring the search further in order to change it to reflect news, images, documents, maps or videos.

SEO and SERPs

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO is the process of making a website feature higher up the results or SERP. As no search engine users will ever bother trawling through hundreds and hundreds of results, the higher your website,. web page or blog features in the search results, the more likely it will be that traffic will be directed to your site.

The guiding principle is that in order to increase web traffic to your site significantly you should aim to a) use keywords that actual people use to find your products and services, and b) get results for those keywords in the top 30 results on SERP or above.

The SEO / Search Engine Optimisation Holy Grail

Whilst a top 10 result on the Search Engine Results Pages of Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask etc is the Holy Grail to SEO Consultants and SEO webmasters, it is increasingly more and more difficult to achieve a top 10 position.

With the web thought to contain some 170 million web sites and the average page count being 100 there are some 17 billion web pages available on the web. However, estimates are circulating that perhaps only 10-15% of the whole web has been indexed by the search engines and that some 10million pages are added to the indexes each day.

As more and more sites and pages within those sites become indexed, and therefore visible to search engine users, it stands to reason that the race for the Holy Grail and the next top 30 results in SERP will become increasingly more competitive.

SEO / search engine optimisation will therefore become more and more important as more and more sites compete for the same amount of top slots within the search results. Unless web users start searching beyond the first 30 results and in doing so turns the whole search user trend on its head, then its website owners who are going to have to continually adapt as they vie for the top slots.

If you want to know more about how Edible can help you feature higher in the SERPs and get into the top 30 results and higher, then enquire about our Search Engine Optimisation / SEO Consultancy Services for an informal, no obligation chat.