Understanding Google Search and Search Engine Optimization
According to ahrefs, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a broad term that encompasses SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click advertising).
They define SEO as the practice of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic results.
Google and other search engines look at hundreds of factors to decide which pages to rank for queries. Nobody knows what all of these factors are, but the most important ones are roughly divided into three buckets — on-page SEOC, off-page SEO and technical SEO.
This article isn’t intended to get into SEM or PPC, but rather take a basic look at SEO, what search engine optimization is and how you as a small business can use local SEO to grow your business.
According to Google:
Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources, and your location and settings.
The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query—for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.
Google’s Search Algorithm and Ranking System
Google itself, on it’s own Search Algorithm and Ranking System webpage tells us how Google search works:
The most basic signal that information is relevant is when a webpage contains the same keywords as your search query.
If those keywords appear on the page, or if they appear in the headings or body of the text, the information is more likely to be relevant. Beyond simple keyword matching, we use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries.
We (Google) transform that data into signals that help our machine-learned systems better estimate relevance.
Google’s search algorithm page went on to add that beyond matching the words in your query with relevant documents on the web, “Search algorithms also aim to prioritize the most reliable sources available. To do this, our systems are designed to identify signals that can help determine which pages demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on a given topic.
“We look for sites that many users seem to value for similar queries. For example, if other prominent websites link to the page (what is known as PageRank), that has proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted. Aggregated feedback from our Search quality evaluation process is used to further refine how our systems discern the quality of information.”
Valuable SEO Resources
Ok, so now that we have a rough idea of how Google search works, how can we use this information to ensure that our business is at or near the top of Google search results?
Backlinko recently came out with their On-page SEO: The Definitive Guide as well as the Local SEO: The Definitive Guide — two valuable tools to help us understand and implement search engine optimization best practices to rank our websites and webpages to be found by our target audience.
The local SEO guide covers how to rank in the Google 3-pack, how to build NAP citations, how to optimize your Google My Business (GMB) profile and loads more. This is definitely worth the read and worthy of a bookmark so you can back and re-read and review.
Here’s one quick tip when publishing web content — use your main keyword once in the first 100-150 words of your article. Google puts more weight on terms that show up early in your page.
Backlinko’s On-page SEO Guide, also extremely valuable, includes more tips like that and covers topics such as how to optimize your content, how to create SEO-friendly URLs and how to write titles and descriptions.
Local businesses need to understand Search Engine Optimization (#SEO) and how to use it to stay ahead of the competition and grow the bottom line. This article has two extremely helpful resources to do just that! Click To TweetAs online business continues to get more and more competitive, knowing the basics of SEO — especially local SEO — will be so valuable in helping you to stay ahead of your competition and maintain (and increase) your bottom line.
BONUS: Neil Patel’s Five Dumbest SEO Mistakes
SEO master and creator of UberSuggest Neil Patel covers five of the dumbest mistakes you can make with your SEO. Watch the video below to learn more.
Mistake #1 — Optimizing for the wrong keywords and trying to rank previously competitive keywords early on.
Mistake #2 — Not using analytics or running regular website audits.
Mistake #3 — Overlooking page titles and meta descriptions.
Mistake #4 — Not using anchor tags properly.
Mistake #5 — Building content for algorithms and not your audience.
