Google Updating Its Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)
Yet again, Google has made changes to its search algorithm and user interface, and the relatively simple developments still spell big impacts on online digital marketing strategies and online brands. As with most, if not all, of Google’s changes to search rankings in the last decade, the latest progressions reflect the company’s commitment to improving the user experience — both by acknowledging their changing behaviours online and anticipating their needs even before they know about them. In this article, we’ll go through the latest major changes to Google SERPs (search engine results pages), search rankings and new technologies, along with how these new factors will shape the way you approach your SEO strategy as we move into 2025.
For starters, what does Google SERPs stand for?
Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) refers to the page displayed by Google when a user enters a search query. It includes organic search results, paid ads (Google AdWords Ads), featured snippets, local packs, images, videos, and other search features. The ranking and composition of a SERP are influenced by Google’s algorithms, user intent, and SEO strategies. For businesses and websites, optimising for SERPs is crucial for improving visibility and attracting organic traffic.
Why Does Google Keep Updating Its Search Engine Results Pages?
Google continuously updates its Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to improve user experience, stay ahead of emerging trends, and adapt to the evolving digital landscape. These updates are driven by a combination of factors, all aimed at making search results more relevant, useful, and engaging for users.
Here’s why Google constantly changes and updates its SERPs:
- Improving User Experience: At the heart of Google’s updates is the goal of enhancing user experience. Google wants to provide users with the most relevant, accurate, and timely information possible. As user behavior evolves, Google fine-tunes its algorithms and SERPs to match these changing needs. This includes optimizing for mobile-first indexing, faster sites with improved load times, and providing direct answers to queries through zero click searches and featured snippets, knowledge panels, and other rich results.
- Technological Advancements: As technology advances, Google integrates new features and capabilities into its search results to stay competitive and provide users with innovative search experiences. With the rise of voice search, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning, Google’s search algorithms have become more sophisticated, requiring constant updates to ensure the search results align with these advancements.
- Combatting Spam and Manipulation: Google aims to deliver high-quality, trustworthy results. To fight back against spammy tactics and low-quality content, Google frequently updates its algorithms to penalize sites that try to game the system. These updates help ensure that legitimate, authoritative sources remain visible and that users aren’t misled by clickbait or irrelevant results.
- Adapting to Changes in Content: The type of content users engage with changes over time. With more videos, images, and podcasts gaining popularity, Google has adapted its SERPs to include rich media and diverse content formats. This helps ensure that users are presented with a wider variety of content types, such as video carousels, local packs, and product listings, making the SERP more dynamic and engaging.
- Competitor and Market Pressure: Google doesn’t operate in a vacuum. As competitors like Bing, DuckDuckGo, and new search engines continue to evolve, Google has to adapt to maintain its position as the leading search engine. To retain its competitive edge, Google must continually improve its algorithms, refine its ranking system, and deliver better results to users faster and more efficiently.
- Refining the Algorithm: Google’s algorithm is constantly refined to improve its understanding of search intent. Over time, Google has incorporated more semantic understanding, allowing it to interpret user queries more intelligently. This enables the search engine to display more relevant results and respond to complex queries that go beyond simple keyword matching.
Google’s frequent SERP updates reflect the company’s commitment to delivering the best possible user experience, responding to technological innovations, and ensuring its algorithms remain effective in delivering relevant and trustworthy results. These updates may change how SEO strategies are executed, but they ultimately benefit users by making the search process more intuitive, informative, and engaging.
What is changing the Google SERPs landscape?
As Google continuously and reiterates its service offering, the search engine is looking to create a more integrated, nuanced and natural experience for users. This will elevate their interactions with Google to more of an informative conversation with a smart virtual assistant than a simple machine that can only return relevant results to narrow queries.
Pre Vs Post Bert – Changes To Google SERPs keep coming
Google’s knowledge panel, featured snippets and related questions are all ways that Google tries to answer users’ queries without navigating them away from the results page. The content is richer and more immediately satisfying for searchers, but it means that organic search results are being deprioritised in page design, becoming less visible and harder to rank for. This is especially true for long-tail queries.
So, how do sites stay competitive? The key will be for businesses to focus back on their content, ensuring it’s highly engaging, relevant and structured in a readable, digestible way. Producing and writing amazing high-quality content that aligns with user intent and providing a satisfying solution to a query needs to be at the heart of your SEO strategy.
The rise of AI and voice search technology
With virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Home gaining traction in markets, voice search is increasingly becoming a way that users interact with their search engines. For their part, Google is striving to develop results that cater to voice technology, not just in processing audio inputs but in delivering an experience that’s catered to voice as well.
This means searches are becoming more conversational, creating a dialogue that evolves and takes context into account rather than providing a simple narrow response. Visual search is also emerging as a trend, proving especially valuable for customers looking to identify consumer items they see on social media or in other authentic contexts.
AI plays a vital role in helping Google better understand user queries and give them a more integrated, human-first search experience. Google’s large language model (LLM) called Bard AI was recently soft-launched in a trial released mainly in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence technology.
The model is not yet available to the public, but much like ChatGPT, the AI is being promised as a chatbot that can understand queries, interpret their context and provide answers that are both conversational and can synthesise a number of different simple queries into one, long-form answer.
For example, whereas voice search can currently give you the latest temperature or weather forecast in your area, AI could handle a more complicated, open-ended query searches like “What should I do today?” by using the forecast, local events and previous searches to recommend ideas for activities tailored specifically to the user.
How Have Google SERPs Evolved Over the Years?
Google SERPs have undergone significant changes since its inception. In the early days, the search engine displayed a simple list of organic search results, with around 10 results per page. As Google evolved, its approach to search and user experience became more sophisticated, incorporating new elements such as paid ads, featured snippets, and rich results.
Over the years, Google began adding paid search results to the top and bottom of the SERP, starting with text-based ads. By 2000, the first pay-per-click (PPC) ads appeared. This change drastically impacted the user experience and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, as businesses began to focus on both organic rankings and paid search placements.
Around 2010, Google introduced local near me search results, showing a map with location-based businesses when users searched for services near them. This move enhanced the importance of local SEO, influencing businesses to optimize their sites for geographically targeted queries.
The next big shift came with the introduction of featured snippets in 2014, which provided quick answers to user queries directly at the top of the page. This meant that, in some cases, users no longer had to click through to websites, changing the way traffic was driven to websites and prompting a greater emphasis on optimizing content for featured snippets.
Fast-forward to 2020, Google started experimenting with zero-click searches, where users could get their answers directly in the SERP through knowledge panels, Google snippets, and answers boxes. These updates shifted the focus from clicks to providing immediate, actionable information.
Today, Google’s SERP contains a variety of content types, from video carousels, image results, and rich snippets to PPC ads, local search results, and Google shopping ads. With these advancements, businesses are forced to adapt and rethink their SEO strategies to maintain visibility and stay competitive. The number of organic results has also fluctuated, with fewer organic results appearing as Google experiments with more rich features and ads on the page.
Overall, Google’s SERP evolution highlights the increasing complexity of ranking in search results and the importance of multi-faceted SEO strategies that incorporate both organic and paid search elements.
What is the structure of Google SERPs?
Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) is structured into various sections designed to provide users with the most relevant and useful results. The structure can change based on the search query, intent, and Google’s algorithm updates.
Main Elements of Google SERP:
- Google Ads (Paid Results) – Sponsored advertisements appearing at the top and bottom of the SERP.
- Organic Search Results – Web pages ranked based on SEO factors like relevance, content quality, and backlinks.
- Featured Snippets – A summary box displaying a quick answer to a search query, often at the top.
- People Also Ask (PAA) – A section of expandable questions related to the search query.
- Local Pack (Google Maps Listings) – A map with local business listings, reviews, and contact details.
- Knowledge Panel – A side panel (mostly on desktop) that provides detailed information about a business, person, or topic.
- Image Pack – A selection of images related to the search query.
- Video Results – Embedded videos, often from YouTube, relevant to the search.
- Shopping Results (Google Shopping Ads) – Product listings with prices, images, and seller information.
- Related Searches – Alternative search queries displayed at the bottom of the page.
The Google SERP structure varies depending on the search intent, with some searches showing more ads, local results, or multimedia content. Businesses optimise their websites to appear in different SERP sections to improve visibility and traffic.
What is the difference between SEO and SERP?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving a website’s visibility on search engines like Google. It involves strategies such as keyword optimisation, content creation, technical enhancements, and link building to increase rankings in organic search results.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the actual page displayed by Google or another search engine in response to a user’s query. It includes organic results, paid ads, featured snippets, local listings, and other elements.
Key Difference:
- SEO is the process used to improve a website’s chances of ranking higher.
- SERP is the outcome—the page where search results appear.
Essentially, SEO influences where and how a website appears on a SERP.
What is the Google SERP ranking?
Google SERP ranking refers to the position where a webpage appears in Google’s search engine results for a specific query. Rankings are determined by Google’s algorithm, which evaluates factors such as relevance, content quality, backlinks, page speed, mobile-friendliness, and user experience.
Key Points:
- Higher rankings (especially on the first page) lead to more visibility and traffic.
- Organic rankings are influenced by SEO efforts, while paid ads (Google Ads) appear at the top but are marked as “Sponsored.”
- Google’s ranking factors constantly evolve, requiring ongoing SEO optimisation to maintain or improve positions.
A strong SEO strategy helps businesses achieve better SERP rankings, driving more organic traffic and potential conversions.
What is an example of a SERP?
A Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the page displayed after a user enters a query into Google. It contains organic results, paid ads, featured snippets, local listings, images, videos, and other search features.
Example of a Google SERP:
If a user searches “best SEO agencies in Sydney“, the SERP may include:
- Google Ads – Pay Per Click advertisements from online marketing agencies.
- Local Pack – A map with local SEO agencies and Google My Business listings.
- Organic Results – Websites ranking naturally based on SEO factors.
- People Also Ask (PAA) – Commonly related questions users ask.
- Featured Snippet – A quick answer box summarising a top-ranking result.
- Related Searches – Suggested alternative searches at the bottom of the page.
Each SERP varies depending on the query, location, and Google’s algorithm updates.
What does this mean for SEO?
For search engine optimisers, the direction Google is headed in gives us clues to the development of the industry from the marketer side of the equation. ChatGPT-Like / AI SEO optimisation will become one of the new tools that can elevate SEO strategy, aiding SEO experts in keyword research, meta descriptions and more.
As featured snippets and knowledge summaries become increasingly common, businesses will need an SEO strategy optimised for these types of information presentations. Thinking about how you present data in different schemas and improving your site for speed, especially on mobile devices, will become ways to stay ranked and relevant on Google.
No doubt shrinking the available SERP real estate will mean changes to click-through rates, SERP diversity and the significance of organic search results. As desktop design makes way for integrated voice search experiences, it’s suggested that the ‘first page’ metric may fade into obscurity altogether, being replaced with an endless scrolling feed that dominates most social media apps.
In the short term, positions seven to ten will no longer drive the same volume of traffic they once did. However, the sophistication of Google’s new algorithm allows marketers to focus on creating the best quality content possible to boost their brands’ authority and usefulness to searchers.
This will mean approaching on-page SEO elements such as content with a very intentional and focused approach and partnering with a digital marketing agency with a vision for your SEO strategy reflecting the rapidly evolving SERP landscape.
Why is SERP important?
The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is crucial because it determines how and where websites appear in Google search results. Higher rankings on a SERP lead to more visibility, traffic, and potential conversions for businesses.
Key Reasons SERP Matters:
- Increases Website Visibility – The higher a website ranks, the more likely users are to click on it.
- Drives Organic Traffic – Ranking on the first page of Google significantly boosts website visits without relying on paid ads.
- Affects Click-Through Rate (CTR) – Top-ranking results get the majority of clicks, while lower results receive less traffic.
- Includes Multiple Search Features – SERPs display organic results, featured snippets, local packs, and ads, offering multiple ways to gain visibility.
- Impacts Brand Authority – Websites ranking high on SERPs are seen as more trustworthy and authoritative.
- Essential for SEO Strategy – Businesses optimise for SERPs to improve rankings and stay competitive.
A strong SEO strategy helps businesses improve their SERP position, leading to better online performance and more potential customers.
What is Google Serper?
Google Serper is an advanced API that allows developers and businesses to extract real-time Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) data. It provides structured search results, including organic listings, paid ads, featured snippets, local packs, and other SERP features.
Key Uses of Google Serper:
- SEO Analysis – Track rankings and monitor keyword performance.
- Competitor Research – Analyse how competitors appear in search results.
- Data Scraping – Automate the retrieval of search results for research and reporting.
- Local SEO Insights – Extract location-based search results for local SEO strategies.
Google Serper is commonly used by SEO professionals, digital marketers, and developers looking to integrate search data into their tools and analytics platforms.
Need help?
Need a partner that’s got your back? Our Australian based SEO services agency team at Online Marketing Gurus can help establish a comprehensive SEO strategy for you with the major changes to Google SERPs in mind. Reach out today, and let’s start planning your future online!
