SEO Guide: How Google Actually Works
💡 Who is this guide for: This guide is created mainly for business owners. You are just starting up, you want to rank your website on Google, and you have neither the money nor the experience to vet and hire a professional. It's also for aspiring marketers who want to get into SEO.
To learn how to rank a website, we first need to understand how Google and other search engines work.
The first important aspect is to understand that Google does not know the correct answer to any question you ask it. When you type "best ski shop in Boston," no one from Google actually visited all the ski shops and made a formal list that the search engine now surfaces.
What they do instead is show you the best possible result from the available pool of websites that fit the description.
But how does it know that this is a ski shop and not a boutique?
Because of how the website looks, what it says, and how often it says something. This is what's called on-page SEO.
The other aspect is what other people say about the website: on social media, on review aggregators, and on other websites. This is off-page SEO.
If you think about it, those are ALL the online signals Google could draw from. There is nothing else. There are only two aspects to it: what is on your website, and what's around the internet that mentions you.
How Google judges YOU
This is actually kind of similar to how we judge people.
If someone claims he's a lawyer, I would expect him to be sophisticated and logical in his speech. Well dressed, if not in a suit, then at least in clean, branded clothes. He certainly wouldn't wear a boot for a hat.
I would expect him to be well regarded among his peers.
The more nuanced trust factor would be how his clients interact with him. Is he recommended? Is his office full at all times, teeming with customers?
You might think the analogy is weird, especially the boot on the head part. Yet I once had a client with a "custom coded" website whose <footer> started before the <head>… Can you rank a website like this? Perhaps you can, if other trust signals are strong enough, but it would probably be best if you stopped wearing a boot on your head.
In SEO it's all about sending the right signals.
Many people keep chasing the newest "trends," and there have been many of them, such as:
- Keyword stuffing
- Backlinks from PBNs with perfect anchors
- Keywords as the name of the brand
- Programmatically created websites to get the perfect "location" + "name of the service" match
- and many others…
Those can be effective for a short period of time, until your website tanks back down to its proper place.
Now, with semantic analysis by AI, those kinds of cheap tricks are less likely to work than ever.
All things considered, SEO is and will remain the same. To put it simply, there are no other trust or ranking factors Google can consider beyond what it currently has… that is, unless they actually start sending mystery shoppers, but I think that's unlikely for quite some time.
To summarize, good SEO consists of two main things:
- On-page SEO
- What do you say on your website?
- How often do you say it?
- How is your content structured?
- How quickly do your visitors find the information they need, and do they find it at all?
- Is your website technically sound?
- Off-page SEO
- Are you running any socials, GBP, YouTube, or other content that people interact with?
- Are you mentioned on social media, and in what manner?
- Are you getting linked to from other websites as a source of authority in your niche?
- Are there any review aggregators that mention you?
- Any studies, case studies, or other unique sources of information that are quoted by others?
- How commonly is your brand mentioned in natural speech?
That's it. There is nothing else, and don't get baited by the snake oil salesmen. There are no true shortcuts. We are in the mature phase of the internet.