How Google Ranks Your Business

by Johanna Ryan
October 5, 2020

Ever wondered why it is that certain pages get listed right at the top of page one on Google search results? It’s no accident which websites make the cut for page one and which are relegated to the bottom of search results. There is an entire science dedicated to the process of improving your website to get to page one. It’s called SEO, or search engine optimisation. Keep reading to find out more about it and how you can boost your search engine ranking with SEO.

What Is SEO?

As mentioned, SEO stands for search engine optimisation. However, it’s not just about targeting your website at what search engines want. Search engines, including Google, are rolling out updates all the time to better focus on what users are looking for. Search engines aim to understand the meaning or intent behind a searcher’s query. Then it will return the answer most relevant to the searcher’s intent. 

That’s why, if you want your site to rank well on Google, you need to add information that people are looking for. Having the answers to searchers’ questions will help you to move up the ranking.

What is Involved in The Ranking Process?

Crawling

The process of Google looking through your site and deciding how to rank it is called crawling. This is a robotic process where crawlers scour the internet in search of new content. This could be a new website, web page, image, PDF, and more!

Crawlers attempt to understand your site structure by looking at all the links on the page and heading over to those to crawl them as well.

Indexing

Then the crawlers index the information they find. This is the process of storing all information that Google knows about websites and pages in a massive index. This is the database from which it pulls relevant search results that it has deemed useful to searchers.

Ranking

Finally, once it has crawled and indexed your site information, Google decides how it will rank the results. Someone types in a search query, and Google scours its index for relevant results. The order the results come back in is what is known as the ranking. Google aims to show the most relevant results at the top and the least relevant results at the very bottom.

Factors That Influence How Google Ranks Your Business

So, what is the exact formula that Google uses to rank your business? We wish we knew! While no one knows everything that goes into the search engine algorithms, Google has shared select information to let us know a little about it. The following are some factors that Google has confirmed influence the way they rank your business. 

Backlinks

Backlinks are links on other sites that point towards your site. They act similarly to recommendations for your site. Because another site has linked to yours, if that one is a credible site, Google assumes that yours must be as well. The more backlinks you can attain for your site, the better, as this will help you move up the rankings. The algorithm associated with screening sites for backlinks is called PageRank. This evaluates the page and decides how credible and authoritative it is, based on the number of backlinks pointing towards it.

Content

For others to want to link to your site, you need to have some quality content on there. In the past, website owners would fill pages with content in the hopes of getting noticed by Google. However, nowadays, Google shows a preference for quality, well-researched content that helps its users find out information. Content can be text such as blogs, but it can also be videos, images, infographics, e-Books, and more!

Keywords

Keywords and Google rankings are a complicated subject, so we’ll just give you the basics of it. Adding relevant keywords to your site content can help you rank better in search results. However, there are a lot of factors that will impact this. If there are a lot of other sites using the same keywords, it will be hard for you to rank higher than them. The keywords have to be terms that people are often searching for. And you can’t just stuff your content with keywords in the hopes of ranking. Google sees this as spammy and may not show your page at all as a result.

Need Help With SEO?

If you think SEO sounds complicated, it is. Luckily, here at Thinkroom Australia, we have SEO experts in our team who are ready to help your site get to the top of Google rankings. Why spend time learning about SEO when you should be focusing on your business? Let us use our SEO expertise on your site and you can simply sit back and watch it rise in the rankings. Contact us today to find out how we can help your site get noticed.

Information sourced from:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/why-search-engine-marketing-is-necessary
https://www.semrush.com/blog/pagerank/
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
Comments Heart
Share Share