Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is a SERP?
When users search on Google, they see a search engine results page (or SERP), showing paid and organic results. The paid results are usually at the top, particularly for transactional keywords, and are marked as ads
Organic results make up a significant portion of the remaining SERP and may also feature concise answers to user questions through Featured Snippets. Additionally, a Knowledge Graph can be present, visually summarizing information relevant to the search topic.
Organic results
For now, let’s focus on the organic results on the SERP. What do people see in the organic results?
At its simplest, organic results consist of the following:
- URL: URL is short for uniform resource locator, and it is simply the web address for the website. URLs are always unique, so search engines use them when filing and retrieving pages from their index.
- Title tag: Title tags are the blue link text that you can click on to visit a page.
- Meta description tag: Meta description tags contain the short snippet of text summarizing what a page is about. It sits below the title tag.
For certain queries, Google goes a step further in enhancing its search results with the following features:
- Rich snippets: Rich snippets help make your listings more visual and stand out. Examples include product reviews or event information.
- Sitelinks: Sitelinks are extra results below a search result. They most often shown for navigational queries as they help a user quicker navigate your site.
- Featured snippets: Featured snippets are concise pieces of information that appear at the top of search results, providing direct answers to user queries.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams teaches search engine optimization at Joe Wills. He holds a degree in Computing Informatics, and he’s been an SEO specialist for over 15 years. He’s consulted and trained many large blue-chip companies including The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Sky. He's on a mission to make SEO easy, fun, and profitable. You can catch him on X and LinkedIn.
These walkthrough videos give clear, step-by-step demonstrations and guidance on how to apply key digital marketing concepts and strategies, and use industry-standard tools. While relevant to this module, you will not be assessed on this content.
