If you’ve ever wondered how Google can sort through billions of pages to find the exact answer to a niche question in less than a second, you’re not alone. To the average person, search engines can feel like a mystery. But if you own a business, decoding this mystery is essential to your online marketing strategy.
Before you begin any search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, or work with an SEO agency, you should familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of how search engines work. Having this familiarity informs everything from strategy to implementation so that you don’t waste time in trial-and-error.
Search engines work through a logical, technical, and creative process built on a three-stage lifecycle: crawling, indexing, and ranking. Understanding this lifecycle is the first step toward a successful search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. Your success depends on how well a search engine’s bots can find, understand, and trust your website.
Search engine bots: the unseen workers of the web
First, a word about bots, the “workers” that do the heavy lifting of the internet. All search engines use automated software programs known as bots, spiders, or crawlers. Think of these bots as the digital scouts of the internet. They work 24/7, jumping from link to link to discover new information and report back to the search engine’s massive database.
But bots don’t see a website the way a human does. While you see beautiful brand colors, high-resolution photography, and sleek layouts, a bot sees lines of code, meta data, and link structures.
They’re looking for signals of quality and relevance. Understanding this distinction is vital for search engine marketing because it’s a reminder that SEO is always done for two audiences: the human reader, who consumes the content, and the bot who determines if that human will ever find it in the first place.
You might be asking, “Why do I need to know about crawlers? I just want to write good content.” But the truth is, even the best content is worthless if search engines and their bots can’t understand it.
The search engine lifecycle
To understand how search engines work, you have to look past the search bar and see the world through the eyes of a bot. Here is the breakdown of the three essential stages every page must go through to reach your customers.
1. Crawling
The search engine journey starts with crawling. Before Google or any other search engine can show your site to a user, it needs to find you and understand what you’re about. This is where the aforementioned bots go to work.
Think of the internet as a vast network of subway stops, where each stop is a different webpage. Crawlers follow the tracks (links) to find new destinations. But if a page has no links pointing to it, the bot may never find it.
Here’s where SEO comes into play in this stage of the search engine lifecycle:
- The technical foundation: SEO lays a solid technical foundation for bots to follow, in the form of a robots.txt file and a sitemap. Your robots.txt file acts as a set of instructions, telling the bot which parts of your site are off-limits, while the sitemap lists all the important pages you want the bot to visit. Setting up these two elements is a critical step.
- Your crawl budget: Search engines don’t have unlimited resources, so they assign a “crawl budget” to every site. This represents the amount of time and energy the bots will spend analyzing your pages. If your site loads too slowly, has a confusing navigation menu, or contains too many broken links, it will waste your crawl budget and the bots may not discover your most valuable content.
The bottom line? You have to take crawling into consideration in your search engine marketing. If your technical SEO doesn’t maximize your crawl budget, your content won’t reach its full potential.
2. Indexing
So what happens after bots crawl your website? The next stage in the process of how search engines work is called indexing. This is a process where bots “render” your page, looking at the code, text, and images to contextualize everything.
During indexing, the search engine’s bots identify what the page is about. They look at your H1 headings, your meta descriptions, and the overall value of your text. If the search engine determines a page is low quality, a duplicate of another page, or provides no value, it may choose not to index it at all.
Once your pages are indexed, their information is stored in a massive digital library. When users search on Google, they’re not actually searching the live web; instead, they’re searching the library that Google has assembled during the indexing process.
This is often where business owners may get frustrated. You might update a page today, but those changes won’t appear in search results until the bot recrawls and re-indexes that specific page. This can take time – up to several days or potentially weeks – which is another reason why SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
3. Ranking
Ranking is the most famous part of the process, but it can only happen after a page has been crawled and indexed. When a user types a query like “how do search engines work,” Google sifts through its index to find the best match.
The algorithm uses hundreds of factors to determine where to rank your website. Among several qualifiers, it attempts to match your content to the user’s search intent. Is the user looking for:
- General information? (Informational intent)
- Information offering more details about a product or service? (Commercial intent)
- A specific website? (Navigational intent)
- A product or service to buy, right now? (Transactional intent)
The search engine will assess the user’s query based on these intents, then provide a page that fits that purpose.
Additionally, search engines give higher ranking priority to pages that demonstrate E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). They look for signals like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and the quality of other websites that link back to you.
Your money or your life (YMYL) websites
Showcasing E-E-A-T is particularly important for YMYL businesses (we sure do love our acronyms in the SEO world!). YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life.” It’s a term used by Google to refer to topics that could impact a user’s finances, health, or personal safety. If your website is in a YMYL category, you need to demonstrate high-quality E-E-A-T information, otherwise you won’t rank.
For example, let’s say you run an online toy store. This isn’t a YMYL topic; it’s still important to produce content that demonstrates E-E-A-T, because that’s the type of content that will help you rank overall, but teddy bears and action figures typically don’t impact a consumer’s livelihood.
However, if you operate a medical testing company, you do fall under the YMYL category because your services have the potential to directly affect someone’s health. If your website’s content doesn’t demonstrate clear experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, your competitors will outshine you.
This was the case for our client, IGeneX, a tick-borne disease testing lab. Founded in 1991, IGeneX is a leader in their field whose website possessed strong domain authority, but their website wasn’t ranking due to thin, lackluster content. Our team worked with IGeneX to overhaul their SEO strategy and produce targeted, in-depth E-E-A-T content for their blog. After one year, their blog ranked for over 167,000 keywords and produced a tremendous boost in traffic of 600,000+ views.
Why it matters to know how search engines work
Understanding how search engines work is critical because it helps you diagnose where your marketing may be failing.
- If your pages aren’t showing up at all, you have a crawling problem.
- If your pages are found but aren’t showing the right information, you have an indexing problem.
- If your pages are there but stuck on page five, you have a ranking problem.
Success in search engine marketing requires a strategy that addresses all three. At Redefine Marketing Group, we believe in building a foundation that makes it easy for bots to crawl and index your site, so that your expert content has the best possible chance to rank at the top.
Contact us today for a free consultation.
