The SERP as an auction place? Remembering Google’s purpose
SEO is an unusual profession. With little in the way of concrete rules and regulations to guide SEO professionals, much of the industry’s wisdom comes from intuition or rumours, leading to accepted truths on how Google works within the SEO community.
What’s often forgotten is how Google themselves see SERPs — which is frequently very different to how SEOs see it.
In a recent Q&A at Bay Area Search, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes, often their spokesman on SEO issues, stated: “The SERP is an auction place. Everything you see works by bidding for places.”
As paid ads increasingly encroach on organic listings’ territory, it’s a quote to strike fear into any SEO’s heart — but thankfully Illyes wasn’t referring to “auction” literally, but figuratively.
His meaning was that the pages that rank highest for a keyword are those that make the ‘highest bid’ — i.e. provide the best case for their site being selected in that ranking position.
While Illyes remained vague on what constitutes a strong bid, we can assume that authoritative, genuinely useful content, supported by relevant backlinks and a technically sound site, remains the winning formula.
And just like a real auction, the highest bidder in the SERPs is constantly changing as competitors up their offer and new bidders enter the market — albeit this auction is one where the auctioneer’s gavel is never brought down.
“When results constantly appear and disappear, it means their bid is very close to someone else’s,” Illyes added at Bay Area Search.
This way of seeing SERPs makes it easy to visualise how small differences between sites, or small changes to a site’s ranking URL, can make all the difference when pushing for the top positions — for example, one additional backlink, a new embedded video, or even an extra paragraph of text.
It also reinforces the importance of researching what currently ranks when targeting a new keyword — what are the strengths and weaknesses of the top results and what can you offer that would top their bid for that position?
Remembering Google’s basic purpose
It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing SERPs as an abstract concept — the same set of rules to follow for each keyword — or to feel Google has some kind of vendetta against your site if you don’t rank well for keywords you think you should do. But the truth is simpler — they’ve just judged someone else’s bid to be of higher value to users for that search.
It’s similar to the way Google’s basic purpose — to organise information and display the most relevant results to users — is often forgotten by people trying to game the rankings system.
It’s good to take a step back and get some perspective, which is easily lost when you’re working on trying to elevate a site’s rankings in the SERPs every day.
Regardless of what you think Google’s future plans might be or whether it has ulterior motives, its basic purpose remains the same: to organise information and give people what they’re looking for. This is often forgotten by people trying to game the system and overthinking it. My former colleague Michael Sandford wrote a great post on this and how SEOs at odds with Google’s mission end up trying to swim against the current, making their lives much harder.
And though the ranking algorithm gets ever-more complex, recent updates’ focus on authoritative, trustworthy content and rewarding mobile-friendly site support this fundamental goal of giving users what they want.
Dan focuses on international SEO at Twinkl, researching how customers in different countries display different search patterns. He comes from a Journalism background and is a music reviewer for a local Sheffield magazine.
