How Search Engines Work: The Basics Every Small Business Should Know

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies to boost the visibility of your website or business on search engine platforms like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It helps you drive organic traffic towards your website, which lets you reach the targeted audience for higher sales and revenue.

Have you ever wondered why small businesses prefer SEO over traditional marketing tactics these days? It is because search engine optimisation is affordable and more accessible to reach a wider audience across the globe online. This, in turn, boosts their web traffic and attracts more customers and sales within an estimated budget. However, mastering the art of effective SEO is crucial to achieving desired results.

Fret not! Let’s unveil the process of how search engines work. Every small business owner should know the key basics of search engines and algorithms to improve their brand visibility and stay ahead in the high demand digital market. You can also hire a professional SEO Gold Coast to optimise your website for search engines.

Let’s Get Started!

1. What are Search Engines?

Search engines are software programs that enable web users to search and access information from the enormous database of content available on the internet. These programs leverage algorithms to crawl, index and rank web pages based on the queries of users. It provides a list of the most relevant results for users to retrieve information. Google, Yahoo and Bing are the most popular search engines.

In simple words, when you type a keyword into a search bar on Google, it will scan millions of web pages and shows the most relevant results at the top. If your website is optimised according to search engines and algorithms, you will gain online visibility with ease.

2. How Search Engines Work: Three Step Process

Every small business should know that search engines work on three key aspects, that are:

Crawling: When Search Engines Crawl Web Pages

This is one of the most basic functions of search engines. They have computer programs, also known as crawlers, that find information or content like web pages available on the internet. The crawler intensively scans the web and creates a list of all relevant websites. Next, it visits each website and reads the HTML code to understand the web page structure, content, its authenticity, as well as relevancy.

If your website has broken links or slow loading times, crawlers won’t be able to read web pages and will refrain from including it in search engine results. So, it is vital to optimise your site for search engines and let crawlers easily find and access your web page content. You can also hire SEO Gold Coast, which can help boost your site ranking by submitting a sitemap to Google using tools like Google Search Console.

Indexing: Analysing & Organising Web Content

Once the crawlers scan the web page content, search engines like Google organise, sort and store information in a central database (its index). This allows search engines to analyse and process the content by the ranking algorithm to boost online visibility on its SERPs.

It is good to write a clear meta title and meta description for each web page to let search engines index it to add its information to their database. A properly indexed website increases the chances of appearing in the search results for a specific query, which in turn, improves your conversion rate.

Ranking: Generating Search Results

This is the final and most crucial step in understanding how a search engine works. Ranking is when search engines generate search results in response to a relevant query. Google, Bing and Yahoo use advanced algorithms considering numerous factors to create personalised, relevant and precise results.

It lists results in order of relevance. It is important to understand that ranking is influenced by hundreds of factors, including relevance of your web page content related to the query, quality of content on the site, speed and easy navigation and credibility. These factors help search engines rank your website at the top of search engine result pages.

3. What Prevents a Website/Web Page From Getting Indexed?

Search engines may not index every page they crawl because they want to show web users the most relevant and high quality content. A web page with low quality or plagiarised content may not get indexed by Google. Similarly, you may face difficulties in getting a web page indexed if it returns an HTTP status code error (4xx or 5xx) or the design creates issues.

There is no guarantee for indexing, and therefore, it is essential to create pages that meet Google’s search quality standards to generate desired results. You can also submit your website for indexing in your Google Search Console account.  It is good to create a digital marketing budget plan and allocate necessary funds on SEO to generate quality results.

4. How to Optimise Your Website for Indexing?

You should always focus on writing valuable, quality, relevant, original and SEO friendly content for your website. It is also important to add meta tags like titles and meta descriptions for each web page to help search engines understand the purpose of your URL. A Title tag should not be more than 60 characters, while meta descriptions should not exceed 150 characters.

SEO Gold Coast professionals also recommend using header tags like H1, H2, and H3, as they determine the URL’s framework. This keeps your web page content organised and helps Google to index it for driving web traffic to your website. Apart from this, include images, graphics, and videos on your site to help search engines find relevant information quickly. For images, make sure you add alt text to let crawl bots read the image.

5. Proven SEO Strategies for Small Businesses

Below are some great hacks to help improve your website ranking on search engine platforms:

• Set up a Google Business Profile to let web users find your business on Google Search and Maps on the go.
• Leverage location specific keywords such as SEO Company in Gold Coast, instead of an SEO company.
• Always generate clear headings and subheadings for your web pages
• Make your website mobile friendly to reduce speed load times
• Optimise on page elements such as Page URLs (short and crisp), Page titles (add relevant keywords), headers, alt text for images, clear meta descriptions, etc.
• Use the best link building strategies
• Measure and track SEO performance

Wrapping Up

Understanding how search engines work can help every small business create tailored strategies to boost its ranking on SERPs. Search engines process by crawling, indexing and ranking your website. Thus, optimising your site and minimising SEO mistakes can help your content rank higher for targeted keywords, which in turn, boosts your ranking and generates more organic traffic towards your website.