SEO step one: how do search engines work?

Search engine optimisation - SEO - is a key concern for many B2B marketers, and for good reason. 

Research has shown that 89% of B2B buyers use the internet to gather information about potential purchases, and 50% of Google users click on a result within 9 seconds of searching. This shows that B2B buyers aren’t prepared to scroll through dozens of results to find their ideal product or service - so B2B marketers must ensure their website is ranking highly. 

That’s where SEO comes in. It’s an incredibly important element of any B2B marketers’ digital strategy, as it actively reaches customers within the consideration stage, and poor SEO performance could cause them to go to your competitors instead. But getting it right can be really complex. So over the coming months, we’ll be publishing a series of SEO advice to help you to ensure you’re taking the right approach to SEO.  

But before you begin to put together an SEO strategy, you need to understand how search engines work. If you’re aiming to get to the first page of Google, you need to know what it takes to get there - so that’s where we’re going to start. 

There are three vital elements behind every search engine:

1) Crawlers 

Each search engine has its own ‘crawlers’ - also known as spiders or robots - that they send out to scour the web for new and updated content. Crawlers are a computer programme running on the search engine’s server and they go through as many web pages as they can as fast as they can. 

When they come onto your web page, they are going to try to index or record as much as they can about that page. So they’re going to look at everything on your page, from. the images and headings, to the body copy, as well as the way you have structured the content and the words you have used. Depending on the search engine, crawlers might look at different things - for example, Google’s crawlers will look for videos to rank in their video search, whereas DuckDuckGo doesn’t. 

If the same content appears on multiple websites, or on multiple pages of your site, crawlers will only look at that content once. They will not crawl the same content twice, because they would have to store, index and rank it all over again. This applies not only to the copy on a page, but any type of content, such as a video or an image. So it’s vital to ensure that you’re not duplicating content on different pages of your website, as this could lead to less of your web pages being indexed by search engines.

You should also link back to key pages throughout your site, because crawlers navigate through your site by following the links on your pages. If you don’t link to key pages on your website, then crawlers can still find them through your site map, but including links where relevant on other pages will make it easier for them to get to key pages. Anything you can do to make it easier for crawlers to find, index and rank your pages will boost your SEO.

2) Index 

Once your web page has been crawled, the crawlers will take a record of what is on that page and put it into the search engine’s index. The index is a huge library or database of all of the content crawlers find across the web, from copy and links to locations, images and videos. 

The index works to make sense of all of this information and create a clear picture of what’s on your site. All of this data is stored within the index ready for when a user types in a search query, at which point the most relevant information is displayed to them.

However, not all of the content on your web pages will go into the index - which is why you need to be consistently optimising your on-page SEO. On-page SEO involves making tweaks to your web pages to make them easier for crawlers to identify key information and get an accurate idea of what’s on you site. It can involve a range of tactics, from including keywords in the title and URL to ensuring the page renders quickly for a good user experience. In fact, on-page SEO is so vast we’re going to dedicate a whole blog to it later on in our SEO series (follow us on LinkedIn to make sure you don’t miss out).

3) Rankings

Along with the quality and the quantity of the content that is indexed, another key element you’re trying to influence when you undertake SEO is your website’s ranking, which means this element of the search engine is both the most important and most complex for many marketers. 

Rankings are created by the search engine looking through the index and deciding which content is the most relevant for a user’s search query. Exactly how they determine relevance is top secret - search engines do not share their ranking algorithms. Rankings are also different for everyone, which means that when two people enter the same search query, they might get completely different results due to their location, search history, etc. 

You therefore can’t control your site’s ranking, but you can use SEO techniques to make your website’s pages more appealing to crawlers, and ensure that the index contains all of the key pages and content from your site and structure your data to ensure it’s more likely to be ranked higher. Paid search campaigns can also boost your site’s position in the search results, by jumping the queue, but that’s another big topic, so we’ll be covering that in an upcoming article. 

Ultimately, you want to make sure that your site is rising up the rankings, because the nature of the rankings means that if your site is rising, your competitors’ sites are falling down the rankings (and vice versa). Understanding how search engines work is just the first step in your SEO journey - now that you know what’s going on behind the scenes, you’re ready to start taking action to get your site up to that all-important first page of results. 

This process takes time - but with the right support, it’s much easier to achieve SEO success! Look out for the next article in our SEO series for practical advice on how to boost your SEO, or talk to our digital team about how they support your organisation’s SEO goals by emailing digital@themarketingpod.co.uk.