If you've already discovered that digital marketing is the best way to boost your business, one of your main goals is certainly to be found by your customers on search engines, and you already know that Google is a key part of this mission.
Google's latest figures show that its users perform more than 3,5 million searches every day, while the number of websites indexed by Google's "library" has already surpassed 60 trillion. In other words, standing out in the search engine and achieving a good place in the rankings, organically, is not an easy task.
That's why it's crucial to optimize your website for search engines—that is, to work on SEO. But to develop a good SEO strategy, you first need to understand how Google works and how it selects and presents its search results.
Paid Results
Paid results are those that appear prominently at the top and bottom of the page, selected through ads generated through Google AdWords. These results are ranked primarily based on Cost-per-Click (CPC) bids and the Ad Quality Score, which is the value determined by Google for each keyword participating in AdWords auctions.
Organic Results
Organic or free results are located in the center, between the paid ads. They are ranked according to their search algorithm, which ranks which sites are most relevant to the user's search.
According to research carried out in the United Kingdom and published by econsultancyIn 2014, users of online services and purchases clicked on Google's organic search results by a 94% margin, compared to just 6% of clicks on sponsored links. This demonstrates the importance of your company's high search ranking.
How Google Search Works
Google search is based on a system of “crawlers”, which act as a type of crawler to find available public pages. This system goes from link to link, discarding only pages that contain indexing codes indicating that they should not be found.
These crawlers are robots that read all available content, going from URL to URL and collecting information about the pages for Google's servers.
Some companies facilitate this indexing process by creating a list of all the pages on your website and sending it to the search engine.
Information, Organization, and Indexing: How Google Fulfills Its Mission
“Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Google's mission says a lot about how it works, since it is through indexing pages that it organizes information and makes it available to its users.
The crawling process always begins with a list of addresses already crawled or provided by websites. As crawlers navigate these addresses, they detect links to other pages and visit them.
Because Google values data freshness, it places greater importance on indexing new sites and making changes to existing sites and active links.
Crawlers determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to search on each site. Their main goal is to identify the best results and provide the best possible user experience.
When Google finds a page, it makes a copy of it on its server and indexes it. From there, it enters the "library" and is eligible to appear as a result on Google.
After this step, when a search is performed on Google, the algorithm can process an analysis of several criteria, more than 200, in milliseconds, seeking to understand which pages in the index meet the searched keywords and the relationship between their content and the topic searched by the user.
Content
During searches, Google assigns greater value to elements in specific spaces, which it considers to be decisive indicators of correlation with the searched topic. Therefore, improving the content of these spaces is one way to achieve a good position in Google's rankings. These spaces include:
Title
It is the text that opens in the browser tab and therefore, the topic of greatest relevance to Google.
Headers
These correspond to the subheadings contained in the page hierarchically. They are tags in the code that range from H1 to H6, with their importance ordered from highest to lowest.
Texts
It's the content itself. Google considers the presence of the keyword and its synonyms throughout the text, but repeating it countless times isn't enough; it needs to be consistent with the flow of the content.
URL:
The link's web address is very important and should be optimized. Be specific and as true to the title as possible.
Alt Tags
Description of images present in the content. This is the text that will appear if the image is not displayed and information used by Google to identify it.
In addition to these elements, Google also considers the context of the page indicated and the links contained within it.
Site Authority
There is no shortage of content on the web, and to deliver the best content to users, Google seeks to understand it through its relevance and authority on the subject.
To do this, it uses as a parameter the number of times the page and the website in general are indicated by third parties through incoming links. This means that the more links other pages create to your content, the more authority you will have in Google's eyes and the greater the likelihood of reaching the top positions in the search engine.
Another factor Google considers is the importance a website places on its content. If it's too far from the home page, it considers that page unimportant to your business and, therefore, unimportant to others.
User Experience
Google is the most popular search engine among users, and much of its success is due to the excellent user experience it provides. Therefore, the user experience while browsing pages is extremely important to Google.
Loading speed, website responsiveness, and even whether or not visitors return to the search engine are indicators Google uses to evaluate user experience. If a visitor quickly leaves a page and returns to the results, Google assumes they didn't find what they were looking for and classifies that site as a poor experience.
Now that you understand how Google works and its ranking criteria, it's time to develop your SEO strategy. Want to be found by your customers and rank well on Google? Contact us! Kaizen specializes in SEO and will bring the best results for your company.
