SERPs

The abbreviation SERP stands for search engine results page. It means the page that Google, Bing or another search engine displays after a search query; in the plural, people speak of SERPs. Anyone in e-commerce who talks about visibility is talking about this page. This is where it is decided within seconds whether a customer comes to you or to a competitor.

Position 1 is no longer at the top

Search for “waterproof hiking boots women” on your smartphone. Before the first organic result appears, you will usually see Shopping ads with image and price, text ads, a product overview with filters, often an AI Overview and a block of related questions. Organic position 1 is then several screen lengths further down.

In practice, this means the question “What position are we in?” falls short. The better question is: “Where on this page are we visible at all, and where are we not?” A store can rank organically in position 3 and still get hardly any clicks, while a competitor occupies the first screen with a Shopping ad and a product listing.

Every search intent has its own SERP

Google builds the results page according to the intent behind the search term:

• Buying: “trail shoes women size 8”. Shopping ads, product listings, prices and review stars dominate the page. Whoever has clean product data wins here.

• Learning: “how waterproof is gore-tex”. AI Overview, featured snippets and related questions are at the top. Whoever answers the question most clearly wins here.

• Local: “outdoor store heilbronn”. The map and business listings (local pack) come before everything else. Whoever has a well-maintained Google Business Profile wins here.

• Brand: “store name” or “store name voucher”. Your own result appears with sitelinks, often next to ads from competitors bidding on your name.

Before you optimise for a search term, it is therefore worth looking at the SERP itself. It shows what kind of page Google expects there: a product page, a category, a guide or a store around the corner.

The elements of the SERP and how your store gets into them

• Shopping ads: Product image, price and store name. The prerequisites are a product feed in Google Merchant Center and a campaign in Google Ads. With a comparison shopping service such as arboro CSS, you pay less for the same Shopping clicks in Europe.

• Free product listings: Products from Merchant Center also appear without an ad budget in the Shopping tab and in product blocks in Search. Many stores give this space away because their feed is incomplete.

• Text ads: labelled “Sponsored”, above and below the organic results.

• AI Overviews and AI Mode: Google summarises answers and names the sources. Whoever provides clear facts and is considered a trustworthy source gets mentioned. This is the field of Generative Engine Optimization.

• Featured snippets and related questions: short, direct answers to questions. Pages that answer a question in the first sentence instead of the fifth paragraph end up here.

• Local pack: a map with three business listings, crucial for merchants with a physical store. The basis is the Google Business Profile, more on this under local search engine optimisation.

• Images and videos: separate blocks, fed by well-named, fast-loading images and videos with clear descriptions.

• Organic results: title, URL and description, supplemented on product pages by price, availability and review stars. These additions come from structured data.

How a single search result is structured

An organic result consists of the site name with favicon, the URL or a path, the title and the snippet, the short description text. Google usually takes the title from the title tag and the description often from the meta description. But Google rewrites both if it finds a better description of the page.

A snippet is an ad you don’t pay for. It competes with all other results for the same glance and has one or two seconds to do so. A good title for a category page names what the customer is looking for and gives them a reason to click: “Waterproof Hiking Boots for Women | 140 Models, Shipped in 24 h” instead of “Women – Shoes – Hiking”. How well this works is shown by the click-through rate. Whatever the snippet promises, the landing page behind it has to deliver. Otherwise the visitor arrives, looks around briefly and is gone again.

Clicks are no longer the only currency

More and more searches end directly on the SERP. The answer is in the AI Overview, the price in the product block, the opening hours in the local pack. For stores, this is no reason to panic, but it is a reason to think about visibility more broadly. If you are named as a source in the AI Overview or appear with price and stars in the product block, you shape the buying decision, even if the click comes later or via your brand.

Everyone sees a different SERP

Google compiles the results anew for every search: by location, language and country, device, search history and freshness. A customer in Zurich sees a different page for “trail shoes women” than one in Stuttgart, and a smartphone sees a different one than a desktop.

That is why you should not check your own position by googling yourself. The result is personalised and says little. If you click your own ads while doing so, you even pay for it. Reliable figures come from Google Search Console, with impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position, supplemented by ranking tools that take location and device into account.

Check your SERP in five minutes

Take your three highest-revenue search terms, open a private browser window on your smartphone and answer five questions for each term:

• What is on the first screen? Count the elements before the first organic result.

• In how many of them is your store? Ad, product listing, AI Overview, organic or not at all.

• Does your result show price, availability and stars? If not, structured data or reviews are missing.

• Are you mentioned in the AI Overview? And if not: who is mentioned instead?

• Are competitors bidding on your store name? Then a dedicated brand campaign is worthwhile.

Within five minutes, the answers show where your store is giving away visibility. This results in a clear order of measures, for SEO for online stores as well as for Google Ads.

The SERP is the shop window every one of your customers walks past. Whoever only looks at position 1 overlooks that this shop window now consists of many windows. Your store can be in every one of them.