Google & its SERPs

Firstly, what are SERPs? Simple. It’s the search engine results page. This includes the search results listings as well as the additional information added by Google such as sitelinks, Google My Business entries, PPC ads etc. Google is constantly updating its SERPs and soon you will see many more changes come in to improve the experience for the user.

Take a look below at two very important updates that could impact your click through success:

Instant Answer Snippets

Have you noticed recently that when you’ve put a question into Google, sometimes you get an instant answer at the top of the page saving you the trouble of clicking into any links? Well, Google is now adding ‘Related Topics’ to this text to help you find quick links to what you’re looking for if their answer wasn’t quite right or if you want to read a little more.

You can boost the chances of your website showing in these areas on Google by directly answering user questions in your content. Easy starter for this would be to have an FAQ page for your site or have a blog area with posts answering common questions.

Increased Page Title and Meta Description Characters

You can now have longer page titles. Anything up to 70 characters will now show on Google when it was previously only 50-60 characters. Meta descriptions now also show three rather than just two lines of text meaning there is more room for keywords and explaining why the user should choose your link over others.

This means you don’t have to cram so much information into a small space and you have more room for keywords to sit in the sentence naturally!

These two updates by Google will really reward websites with high quality content. It always comes down to making sure the information on your site is valuable to the user and not there for the sake of being there.

Keywords are important but you need to ensure it all makes sense. Read more on what to do with keywords and content here to see the current best practice. It’s always good to have a regular audit of the content on your website. Review your content and make sure the user will be engaged and benefit from spending time on your site.