Google is a powerful search tool. It allows users to find, share, and access an almost infinite amount of content, regardless of how or where they connect.
Understanding how Google Search works is essential, if you are a SEO Specialist or if you have an online business and you want your customers to find you. Whether you have a website, blog, social media profile, or Google My Business listing, Google goes through a whole journey to find your business, categorize it, and show it to your potential customers.
First of all, Google needs to realize your business has a presence on the web. For this, Google constantly searches for new content to add to its huge catalog. This discovery process is called crawling.
Google generally discovers web pages by following links from page to page, finding new content never seen before. Once the Google crawler, that is Googlebot, has found your website, it has to understand what the content is all about. This process is called indexing.
Just as you would organize the inventory of your store, whether it’s shoеs, sweaters, or dresses, Google analyzes the content on your page and saves this information to its index a database considered to be the biggest library in the world.
What happens next?
When a user types a search query, Google systems sort through hundreds of billions of web pages in the search index, looking for the most useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second. This step is called ranking.
For a typical query, there are thousands, even millions of web pages with potentially relevant information. Google has to determine the highest quality and most relevant answers, returning the content that provides the best user experience and the most appropriate results. Some of these factors may include the user’s location, language, and device type.
Remember, Google Search results are organic and generated through sophisticated algorithms to make thousands of calculations for each search in a fraction of a second, based only on the relevance of a page to a user’s query. Google never accepts payment from anyone to be included in organic search results or to alter a page’s ranking in any way.