Understanding Search Engines
As a marketer, you might be wondering – how do search engines work? The good news is, you’re asking the right questions. Search engines such as Google go through a complicated process in order to deliver the most relevant content. Knowing how Google finds and ranks content will help streamline your content marketing strategy and create optimised pages that’ll show up in the SERPs. Google’s values are very specific, so let’s take a closer look.
How to search engines like Google work?
Search engines including Google work by crawling the web and indexing the content it finds. Information from crawled websites gets added to a search index which is essentially a huge digital database. Extracted data and URLs from trillions of websites is stored here. While discovering and indexing content including new links is an essential part of the puzzle, algorithms are then needed to rank webpages in order to deliver relevant results based on a specific search engine search.
Complicated? Well, yes. But it’s all about finding and ranking content in the fraction of a second. Technology is needed to do this effectively, with Google working particularly well as a search engine because of three distinctive points.
- Google has the largest and freshest index on the planet because it crawls and re-crawls the web at a grander scale than anyone else.
- They’ve invested in language models which allow them to understand all kinds of searches, even when they’re misspelt. They also understand synonyms. So, if you type in “how to make money online” you’ll also find results for “earn” and “cash”.
- Their algorithms are advanced, returning the most relevant results.
How Google’s search algorithm works – and why you should care
Taking Google’s algorithm for granted is a big mistake if you want your content marketing strategy to be on point. Yes, the whole process of how it works is confusing if you’re not technologically minded, but there are some key takeaways that’ll make your content better. Google looks at hundreds of factors to find and rank relevant content. So, let’s go over a few of them.
Topical relevance
Wondering how does SEO work on Google? Well, it’s largely about topical relevance. If a website contains keywords relevant to a specific search, Google takes interest. But more is needed. Google also looks for other relevant words on the page to ensure it will be most useful to the user. So, centring pages around topical keyword clusters is a good place to start.
Search intent
Google focuses on the intent behind each search query. For example, if someone Google’s ‘blogging tips’ it’s assumed by Google that the content should be for beginners looking to know more about this subject. That’s why most of the results revolve around beginners. So, when producing content, think about the intent and target audience as well as relevant keywords.
Freshness
Google understands that the freshness of results matters more for some searches than others. If people are looking for the newest movies on Netflix, the algorithm prioritises search results that were published or updated super recently. That’s why keeping your content as fresh as possible and including new links will ensure your pages are crawled and indexed frequently, making them as relevant as possible for such searches.
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