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How Do Search Engines Work and Why Should You Care? - Coggle Diagram
How Do Search Engines Work and Why Should You Care?
Search engine basics
Two main parts of search engines
Search index. A digital library of information about web pages.
Search algorithm(s). Computer program(s) that rank matching results from the search index.
What is the aim of search engines?
Every search engine aims to provide the best, most relevant results for users. That’s how they obtain or maintain market share—at least in theory.
How do search engines make money?
Search engines have two types of search results:
Organic results from the search index. You can’t pay to be here.
Paid results from advertisers. You can pay to be here.
Each time someone clicks on a paid search result, the advertiser pays the search engine. This is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
SEO vs. PPC: Which Should You Use?
SEO
Pros
Organic traffic has staying power
As long as you can rank highly in Google for your desired keywords, you can generate consistent search traffic to your website.
Paid marketing is like a faucet. Turn on the tap and traffic will flow. But as soon as the tap is off (i.e. you run out of money), your traffic will dry up.
Likewise for social media. In today’s world, social media is a pay-to-play game. Refuse to pay and your engagement will likely drop.
SEO is often cheaper in the long-term
Cons
SEO takes time
Turns out: only 5.7% of pages rank in the top 10 for at least one keyword within a year of publishing.
Even most of the “lucky” 5.7% take about 2–6 months to rank in the top 10.
https://ahrefs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ranking-study-lucky-pages.png
SEO requires unique and authoritative content
PPC
Pros
PPC is fast
PPC allows for granular targeting
With PPC, you can play around with different types of data (demographics, geography, etc.)
As such, you can control and pay only for the people you want on your website.
PPC allows for quick experimentation
Cons
PPC can get prohibitively expensive
If you’re in a competitive industry like insurance, PPC can get expensive fast.
For example, it’ll cost you $40 per click on average if you’re bidding on the keyword “car insurance.”
DropBox experienced this firsthand in 2009. After experimenting with Google Ads, they quickly discovered that they were getting a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of $233 — $388. The worst part: their product was only $99.
PPC can lose effectiveness
The longer your campaigns run, the less effective they become – people start seeing your ads too often. The messaging becomes stale, and novelty effects are real
Ad blindness is real. You’ll have to constantly create new copy, images and refresh your existing ads in order to make them work in the long-term.
You’ll need money to make money
With PPC, you’ll need money to begin a campaign. It is also likely that you’ll lose money in the first few months as you figure out how to optimize your campaigns.
SEO vs PPC: Which is better for my business?
You have an innovative product
To get organic traffic, you’ll need to target topics that people are already searching for. But if you’re building a disruptive company with an innovative product, it is likely that no one is looking for it.
In this scenario, it might be better for you to leverage social media PPC to build awareness for your product or service.
You’re gearing up for a launch / you have a one-time offer
In this case, you might want to consider using PPC or other channels like influencer marketing.
You’re trying to promote commercial content
Generally speaking, people don’t want to link to commercial content like landing pages.
To rank one in organic search, you’ll have to consider using strategies like the Middleman Method. Here’s an animation of how it works:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/middleman-method.gif
You’re building a site with the intention to sell
According to EmpireFlippers, this is the formula for how a website is valued:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/empire-flippers-site-valuation-formula.png
If you wish to sell your site, you should “manipulate” the multiple in your favour.
How? Using SEO.
Ranking in the first place means more and more people link to you naturally over time. And because links correlate with rankings, your rankings stay put.
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SEO and PPC: Using them in tandem
Use Facebook Ads to build awareness
Each post we publish takes 10–20 hours to write on average. Not wanting that work to go to waste, we run Facebook ads to get it in front of as many interested people as possible.
Running PPC ads also seems to help us acquire backlinks, even though this isn’t our primary aim.
Retargeting
Retargeting is a form of online advertising that allows you to target visitors who have left your website. This gives you the opportunity to persuade visitors to come back and reconsider a purchase.
Pursue keywords your competitors are bidding on
Imagine if you could see the keywords your competitors are bidding on in Google Ads? That way, you could find potentially lucrative keywords and pursue them either via PPC or SEO.
Luckily, you can.
You can see the keywords your competitors are bidding on, the landing pages they’re sending traffic to, and the ad copy they’re using
Imagine that SEO is an apple and PPC is an orange. Can you say an apple is better than an orange, and vice versa?
Both are fruits. Both provide vitamins. And both are vastly different.
If you want a complete diet, you should have them both.
After all, you should be taking advantage and leveraging all marketing channels that work for your business.
How search engines build their index
https://ahrefs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/04-how-search-engines-work.png
Let’s break this down, step by step:
URLs
Everything begins with a known list of URLs. Google discovers these through various processes, but the three most common ones are:
From backlinks
Google already has an index containing trillions of web pages. If someone adds a link to one of your pages from one of those web pages, they can find it from there.
What is a Backlink? How to Get More Backlinks
Why are backlinks important?
Rankings
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Discoverability
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Referral traffic
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What makes a good backlink?
Not all backlinks are created equal. Here are some of the many attributes that contribute to a backlink’s quality and utility.
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How to check backlinks
Checking backlinks in Google Search Console
Checking backlinks using a third-party backlink checker
How to get more backlinks
There are three ways to get more backlinks: create them, earn them, or build them.
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Final thoughts
Backlinks are important when it comes to ranking in search engines like Google. That said, not all backlinks are created equal. Relevance, placement, and other attributes all contribute to a link’s quality and utility.
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From sitemaps
Sitemaps list all of the important pages on your website. If you submit your sitemap to Google, it may help them discover your website faster.
From URL submissions
Google also allows submissions of individual URLs via Google Search Console.
Crawling
Crawling is where a computer bot called a spider (e.g., Googlebot) visits and downloads the discovered pages.
It’s important to note that Google doesn’t always crawl pages in the order they discover them.
Google queues URLs for crawling based on a few factors, including:
the PageRank of the URL
how often the URL changes
whether or not it’s new
This is important because it means that search engines might crawl and index some of your pages before others. If you have a large website, it could take a while for search engines to fully crawl it.
Processing & rendering
Processing is where Google works to understand and extract key information from crawled pages. Nobody outside of Google knows every detail about this process, but the important parts for our understanding are extracting links and storing content for indexing.
Google has to render pages to fully process them, which is where Google runs the page’s code to understand how it looks for users.
Indexing
Indexing is where processed information from crawled pages is added to a big database called the search index. This is essentially a digital library of trillions of webpages where Google’s search results come from.
That’s an important point. When you type a query into a search engine, you’re not directly searching the internet for matching results. You’re searching a search engine’s index of web pages. If a web page isn’t in the search index, search engine users won’t find it. That’s why getting your website indexed in major search engines like Google and Bing is so important.
How search engines rank pages
Discovering, crawling, and indexing content is merely the first part of the puzzle. Search engines also need a way to rank matching results when a user performs a search. This is the job of search engine algorithms.
Google famously has 200+ ranking factors.
Nobody knows what all of these ranking factors are, but we do know about the key ones.
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of Google’s most important ranking factors.
Andrey Lipattsev, Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, confirmed this during a live webinar in 2016. When asked about the two most important ranking factors, his response was simple: content and links.
Links have been an important ranking factor in Google since 1997 when they introduced PageRank, a formula for judging the value of a web page based on the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to it.
However it’s not all about quantity because not all backlinks are created equal. It’s perfectly possible for a page with a few high-quality backlinks to outrank a page with lots of lower-quality backlinks.
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Relevance
Freshness
Freshness is a query-dependant ranking factor, meaning that it matters for some results more than others.
For a query like “what’s new on amazon prime,” freshness is important because searchers want to know about recently-added movies and TV shows. That’s likely why Google ranks newly-published or updated search results higher.
For queries like “best headphones,” freshness matters but not quite as much. Headphone technology moves fast so a result from 2015 won’t be much use, but a post published 2–3 months ago will still be useful.
Topical authority
Google wants to rank content from websites with authority on the topic. This means that Google might view a website as a good source of results for queries about one topic but not another.
Page speed
Page speed
Nobody likes waiting for pages to load, and Google knows it. That’s why they made page speed a ranking factor for desktop searches in 2010, and for mobile searches in 2018.
In other words, shaving a few milliseconds off a site that’s already fast is unlikely to boost rankings. It just needs to be fast enough not to negatively impact users.
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendliness
65% of Google searches happen on mobile devices. That’s why mobile-friendliness has been a factor on mobile since 2015.
Since 2019, mobile-friendliness is also a ranking factor for desktop searches thanks to Google’s switch to mobile-first indexing. This means that Google “predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking” across all devices.
How search engines personalize search results
Search engines understand that different results appeal to different people. That’s why they tailor their results for each user.
If you’ve ever searched for the same thing on multiple devices or browsers, you’ve probably seen the effects of this personalization. Results often show up in different positions depending on various factors.
How do search engines personalize results?
Google states that “information such as your location, past search history and search settings all help [us] to tailor your results to what is most useful and relevant for you in that moment.”
Location
Your location impacts results for local queries so dramatically that there’s virtually no overlap when searching for the same thing from two different locations.
Language
Google knows that there’s no point showing English results to Spanish users.
Search history
Perhaps the most obvious example of Google using search history to personalize results is when it ‘ranks’ a previously clicked result higher next time you run the same search.
It doesn’t always happen, but it seems to be quite common—especially if you click or visit the page multiple times in a short period.