If you are having a business, chances are you have website and if you have a website, chances are that you have been looking for factors that determine ranking results on Google’s Search Results Page (A.K.A SERP) and how you can improve your website and content according to them. It is also likely that you have had very little success in finding any information that seems to be concrete. According to Google’s own document “How Does Google Determine Ranking Results” points out to 5 main criteria called “Search Signals” – “Meaning”, “Relevance”, “Quality”, “Usability” and “Context” which help Google decide which content is most relevant to a user’s search.
In this blog we are going to take a look at how each of these criteria work so let’s get started.
What is SEO?
To be very concise, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of activities that will optimize your website for search engines like Google and Bing, to read your content faster and decide where in the SERP your content will appear. We have a whole other blog that dives deep into what SEO is and we highly recommend you to check it out here if you are new to SEO.
How Do Search Systems Work?
Search systems are algorithms designed to receive your search query and sort out everything there is on the internet and present them to you in a way that you will receive the best answers as soon as possible. This means the system has to rush through billions of webpages in seconds, match their content with your intent and then sort them out for you.
To give the users the most useful information that are as closely related to their search intent as possible, search algorithms consider a wide array of factors and signals. SOme of these are the wording of your query, your previous online behaviour, the relevance and usability of the pages, the experience and expertise of each of the sources and even your location.
And to add to that, they have to give a different weight to each factor in different scenarios. For example if you are searching for certain hurricane news, the search algorithm will give more weight to your location and the freshness of the content that is scattered across the web.
Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s see how each of the signals work.
“Meaning” of The Users Search Query
The term “Search Query” refers to the words the user types in the search terms. Now for the system to return the most relevant results, it must first understand what you are exactly looking for or in other words, what is the user’s intent.
Over the many years, search engines have managed to develop language models for this sole purpose. The main job of these language models is to decipher what the user is really looking for. Since users tend to type in a few words, this task is not as easy as it looks. If this step is carried out incorrectly, users will simply not see relevant results.
The effort language models vary depending on the situation. In one scenario they may be correcting the spelling mistakes. In other scenarios, the language model may have to put in more resources to workout the sophisticated synonym systems we as humans use and return the most relevant and to-the-point results even if the exact search terms are not present there. Say a user searches for the “how to restart my Asus laptop” and the manufacturer’s document has written “how to reboot your Asus laptop”. The system here needs to understand the words, their connection and your intent and then create a relation between them before showing you the results.
How Does The Language Model Determine The Context?
Google’s language models use a number of elements to determine the context and your intent. Here are the 4 they have publicly revealed.
1. Keywords
Keywords such as “cooking”, “pics” or “vids” helps the system to figure out if the user is looking for recipes, images or videos.
2. Language
If you are bilingual, you have experienced the fact that a search in English will yield English results while if you search in another language, for example Korean, the system will automatically return Korean results.
3. Localization
Depending on your privacy settings and past activities, Google will have access to your location. This helps the system to determine your local intent. For example if your location is Los Angeles and you search for “pizza”, the system will automatically show you results for restaurants in LA and not in New York City.
4. Current Events
Let’s say it is the Super Bowl season. If you search for sports scores or iconic live performances, you are likely to get the information about the scores or performances in the Super Bowl.
“Relevance” of Content
Once the search algorithms successfully deciphered the user’s intent and the meaning they were after with their search, they will have to get to the available content on the internet and find the ones with the information that matches the user’s requirements.
Amongst all the signals, “Relevance” is probably the most obvious one. The system will look for contents that contain the user’s search query words or its synonyms. This includes the presence of the keywords in the headings of the webpage too.
Google also uses aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries. Think about it like this. Let’s say you type the word “Peacock”. It is highly unlikely that you are looking for a page with hundreds of the word “Peacock” written in it. That is why the algorithm will start to assess pages that contain other relevant elements such as videos, images or even lists of breeds of peacocks.
“Quality” of Content
Now that a list of relevant contents is at hand, it is time to decide which one should appear on top. Remember these content are all relevant so now it is only a matter of “Quality”. This is where the infamous E-E-A-T or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness of the content will come into play.
Luckily for you, we have also explained in detail what E-E-A-T is and how it works in another post and you can read that here.
One of the main factors that determine the quality of a content is that if other websites refer to the content. This is known as Backlinks. The more backlinks a content has, the more trustworthy it is in the eyes of the search algorithm.
Another key factor is if the content has references from other credible resources such as websites with high expertise in the field or governmental and scientific domains.
“Usability” of Content
Other than the quality of the content, it is also important for the content to be actually usable. A page that does not load correctly on your phone or is too slow is not likely to show up in your search results. Some of these are pointed at in the page experience aspects which is another credible Google Document.
Remember that the chief aim of all of this hard work is to create a better, more relevant experience for the users.
“Context” and Settings
Search algorithms aim to connect the human curious intentions with knowledge that is available to them. This means that certain characteristics of the user and their situation must be taken in to account. Things like location, search history and personal interests are just a few of these.
Let’s say you live in Orange County California and you type in “Football” in the search bar. You are likely to get results about American Football, which is otherwise known as “Rugby” in British English. Now the same search query for Londoner will yield results about soccer and the Premier League. If the user in either case is a soccer fan and we are in the season of La Liga, then results about La Liga will also surface.
If this user has visited the La Liga website multiple times even outside of the season, the search algorithms will take that into account and most likely show it to them at the top of the search results for the same query.
Also it is possible for the search algorithms to show new results for a repeating search query in order to shed light on other perspectives of the matter at hand.
Factors That Determine Ranking Results, Is That All?
Obviously not! To prevent algorithm manipulation, companies like Google tend to keep their search algorithms really close to their hearts and away from the public. These algorithms are also constantly changing and improving. Remember the aim here is to serve the most relevant and useful information to the users!
