Google’s New SERPs and Their Effect
May 17, 2010 | Posted by Sujeet K. Singh | No CommentsRecently we noticed that Google has redesigned it’s search result pages. They have had those search options available already for a few months, but have not been in front of the user. With this new design, users don’t have any choice but to notice the options that are available. It’s not too different from Bing or Yahoo in that respect. The only difference is that a lot more people search with Google on a regular basis, in fact, for the last few months Google reportedly has been dominating the search market even more than usual.
Now since Google has rolled out it’s much awaited new SERP we have to think how it’s going to affect searchers behavior and businesses, which are always in lookout for better search rankings.
More Engagement from Searchers:
With more options available users will start going to the different options Google provides them, taking them to different sets of results. Now that the options are in the limelight, users are more likely to use them. Yahoo and Bing have already seen this change with their filtering options.
Being Social Even More Important for Businesses:
The options in the left panel pull from “everything” – classic Google results, blogs from Google blog search, books from Google books, images from Google image search, news from Google news, maps from Google maps, shopping from Google product search, videos from Google video, and Updates from Google’s real-time search.
Google’s real-time search is of particular note, because before users generally saw this option only on select news queries unless they sought after them. Real-time search for any query is now much more accessible, which makes real-time search a bigger deal for search marketing.
Social interactions are becoming more important. The new SERPs also place much more stress on social search results. The same goes for location. You’ll notice “nearby” is one of the options. Discussions is another option. Google appears to pull from a variety of sources for this one; this means that engaging in conversation throughout the web has some value to Google’s results. There are definitely a lot of results from forums in these results. Q&A and blogs articles are also seen as results for this option.
Ranking Diversification in Google is the Key:
What it comes down to is that ranking in Google’s various search engines has become even more important for getting traffic from Google. I expect traffic for sites listed in these to improve as a result of Google’s new SERP. Remember that Google has been testing this for a substantial amount of time. If Yahoo was seeing increased engagement, imagine what Google will bring in.
Though they have already experimented a great deal with this layout, yet looking at some less relevant search results I expect we’ll see a lot more tweaking as time goes on.
Tags: caffeine, google, seo, serp
