We talk a lot about SEO, and it’s such a common thing in the marketing and business world to focus on increasing your google ranking, but what is Google ranking and how does it work?
What is Google ranking?
Your Google ranking is the position that Google places you in the search results, based on it’s opinion of the quality of your content to the end user. Google decides how ‘good’ your content is and what use it will be to the person who’s searching for it, and then it decides how high to place you on the list.
How does Google ranking work?
Google uses something called a web crawler to search pages. From here, it will index those pages which literally means that the bot has seen it and reported back what the content contains.
Google then uses algorithms (that constantly change and update), that have over 210 known factors. Once it’s indexed, the algorithms will use these factors to rank your web pages and decide where you’ll sit in the search results for the users who searches for that particular keyword.
If that still sounds a little like words with no meaning, let’s go a little deeper.
What is a web crawler?
A web crawler, sometimes referred to as a spiderbot or a spider, is a bot that browses web pages and feeds data back to Google. A lot like you or I would do in a scroll hole, but being a bot, it wouldn’t need to sleep or eat and is much quicker.
Google algorithms
As we mentioned, once Google has indexed the pages its bot has crawled, the algorithms are then used to rank those pages.
Now, I’m sure you know a bit about algorithms already.
But just in case, Google defines an algorithm as: ‘a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer’.
Google uses a series of complex algorithms, not just one. Just some of factors used are:
- Relevance
- Useability of pages
- Query keywords
- Locations
- Expertise
And that’s a great way to sum it up, Google uses its own algorithms to determine how useful your content is to the person searching for it.
Google makes minor changes to its algorithms every single day. There might even be a few updates per day, but usually these shouldn’t affect your ranking and you shouldn’t notice them.
But you might notice them over time or if they release a major update.
Why is SEO important?
Search engine optimisation is what helps you to climb up the google rankings and get more web traffic to your website – with the ultimate goal of gaining more customers. So, it’s quite important you understand how Google rankings work and why it’s so important to keep on top of your SEO factors.
Changing your content to suit updated algorithms might sound annoying, and we totally get it, we’re not keen on doing it either, but imagine if Google didn’t have algorithms to sort content. Imagine that when you Google ‘4 berth caravans’ any old 10 come up first. Some with flashing text, some in a whole other country to where you live, some for 8 people, lots of two people. How annoying would that be?
If you need a refresher or a full blown SEO course to brush up on SEO, don’t forget we offer tailored course to suit each individual. And of course, there are thousands more out there if you want to use someone else.
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How Does Google Ranking Work?
