Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

ANATOMY OF A SEARCH ENGINE RESULT

In Chapter 4, we looked at how the search results are displayed and how important it is to ensure your site has a compelling listing. Let’s look a little more closely.

A search engine results page (SERP) typically contains 10 Web results for a query. Each search result contains the following three elements (Figure 5.4).

Figure 5.4 A Typical Search Result

Source: Google Search

1. Title: This is generally the same as the title of the page. (See Chapter 7 for more details on influencing this.)

2. Snippet: This is the snippet beneath the title. This is your main opportunity to provide a marketing message to searchers to entice them to click through to your site. (See Chapter 7 for more details on influencing this.)

3. URL: The page address. Any keywords from the query are bolded.

Search results can include a number of other components as well (Figure 5.5), such as:

Figure 5.5 Optional Search Results Display Elements

Source: Google Search

• Navigational links to sections within the site
• The date the page was published
• Links to forum content
• Rating and review information
• Breadcrumbs from the page in place of the URL
• A photo of the author of the content on the page

With Google’s launch of “Search Plus Your World,” which integrates Google+, results ...