CRAWLING, INDEXING, AND RANKING IN SEARCH ENGINES
CHAPTER THREE :CRAWLING, INDEXING, AND RANKING IN SEARCH ENGINES
Search engines, as we said in Chapter 1, are answer machines. They exist to uncover, understand, and arrange the internet's content in order to provide the most appropriate answers to searchers' requests.
Your material must first be visible to search engines in order to appear in search results. It's undoubtedly the most critical aspect of SEO: if your site can't be found, you'll never appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
How do search engines function?
Search engines provide three main functions:
- Crawling: Searching the Internet for content by inspecting the code/content of each URL found.
- Indexing: The process of storing and organizing the content discovered during the crawling process. When a page is added to the index, it is eligible to be presented as a result of relevant queries.
- Ranking: Provide the content that best answers a searcher's query, which means that results are ordered from most relevant to least relevant.
What exactly is search engine crawling?
Crawling is the technique by which search engines dispatch a team of robots (referred to as crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated material. Content can take many forms — it could be a webpage, a picture, a video, a PDF, or anything else — but content is found through links.
Googlebot begins by retrieving a few online pages and then follows the links on those pages to discover new URLs. By following this route of links, the crawler can discover new content and add it to its Caffeine index – a vast database of discovered URLs — to be retrieved later when a searcher is looking for information that the content on that URL is a good match for.
What exactly is a search engine index?
Search engines analyse and store material they discover in an index, which is a massive database of all the content they've discovered and deemed suitable for serving to searchers.
Ranking in search engines
When someone conducts a search, search engines explore its index for highly relevant content, which is then ordered in the hopes of answering the searcher's question. Ranking refers to the ordering of search results based on relevancy. In general, the higher a website ranks, the more relevant the search engine believes that website is to the query.
It is possible to prevent search engine crawlers from accessing parts or all of your website, or to encourage search engines to avoid indexing specific pages. While there may be valid reasons for doing so, if you want your information to be found by search engines, you must first ensure that it is crawlable and indexable. Otherwise, it's nearly invisible.
By the end of this chapter, you'll have the context you need to work with, rather than against, the search engine!
Not all search engines are created equal in SEO.
Many newcomers are perplexed by the relative relevance of various search engines. Most people are aware that Google has the highest market share, but how critical is it to optimize for Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines? Despite the existence of more than 30 major web search engines, the SEO community mostly focuses on Google. Why? The quick answer is that the vast majority of people search the web through Google. If we include Google Images, Google Maps, and YouTube (a Google product), Google accounts for more than 90% of web searches — about 20 times that of Bing and Yahoo combined.
Can search engines find your pages by crawling?
As you've just learned, getting your site crawled and indexed is a need for appearing in the SERPs. If you already have a website, you should check to see how many of your pages are in the index. This will provide useful information about whether Google is crawling and locating all of the pages you want it to and none that you don't.
The advanced search operator "site:yourdomain.com" can be used to examine your indexed pages. Enter "site:yourdomain.com" into Google's search bar. This will retrieve Google's index results for the supplied site:
The number of results Google displays (see "About XX results" above) isn't exact, but it gives you a good indication of which pages on your site are indexed and how they are currently showing up in search results.
Monitor and use the Index Coverage data in Google Search Console for more accurate results. If you don't already have a Google Search Console account, you can create one for free. You can use this service to submit sitemaps for your website and track how many of your submitted pages have been included to Google's index, among other things.
- There are a few reasons why you could not be appearing in the search results:
- Your website is fresh new and has not yet been crawled.
- There are no links to your website from other websites.
- The navigation on your site makes it difficult for a robot to crawl it properly.
- Your website contains some simple code known as crawler directives that prevent search engines from indexing it.
- Google has penalized your site for spamming techniques.
Inform search engines about how to crawl your site.
If you used Google Search Console or the advanced search operator "site:domain.com" and discovered that some of your important pages are missing from the index and/or some of your unimportant pages have been mistakenly indexed, there are some optimizations you can implement to better direct Googlebot how you want your web content crawled. Telling search engines how to crawl your site might give you more control over what is indexed.
Most people think about ensuring that Googlebot can find their critical pages, but it's easy to overlook the fact that there are undoubtedly pages you don't want Googlebot to find. These could contain ancient URLs with thin content, duplicate URLs (such as e-commerce sort-and-filter parameters), special promo code pages, staging or test pages, and so on.
Use robots.txt to direct Googlebot away from specific pages and portions of your website.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt files are situated in the root directory of websites (for example, yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and use specific robots.txt directives to advise which portions of your site search engines should and should not explore, as well as the speed at which they crawl your site.
What Googlebot does with robots.txt files
- If Googlebot cannot locate a robots.txt file for a site, it will crawl the site.
- If Googlebot discovers a robots.txt file for a site, it will usually follow the advice and explore the site.
- If Googlebot finds an error while attempting to access a site's robots.txt file and is unable to establish whether or not one exists, it will not crawl the site.
Adjust for crawl budget!
Crawl budget is the average number of URLs Googlebot will crawl on your site before departing, therefore optimizing crawl budget guarantees that Googlebot isn't wasting time crawling through unnecessary pages and risking ignoring crucial pages. Crawl budget is most significant on very large sites with tens of thousands of URLs, but blocking crawlers from accessing stuff you don't care about is always a good idea. Just be careful not to prevent crawlers from accessing sites to which you've added other directives, such as canonical or noindex tags. If Googlebot is denied access to a page, it will be unable to view the instructions on that page.
Not all web robots adhere to robots.txt. People with malicious purpose (for example, e-mail address scrapers) create bots that do not adhere to this protocol. In fact, some unscrupulous actors use robots.txt files to determine where you've stored your private information. Although it may appear rational to restrict crawlers from private pages such as login and administration pages so that they do not appear in the index, putting the location of those URLs in a publicly accessible robots.txt file also implies that persons with malicious intent can reach them more easily. Rather than including these pages in your robots.txt file, NoIndex them and lock them behind a login form.
URL parameter definition in GSC
Some websites (often e-commerce) make the same content available through multiple URLs by attaching particular parameters to URLs. If you've ever bought online, you've probably used filters to limit down your options. For example, on Amazon, you may search for "shoes" and then narrow your results by size, color, and style. The URL changes slightly as you refine:
https://www.example.com/products/women/dresses/green.htmhttps://www.example.com/products/women?category=dresses&color=greenhttps://example.com/shopindex.php?product_id=32&highlight=green+dress&cat_id=1&sessionid=123$affid=43
How does Google determine which URL version to serve to searchers? Google does a decent job of determining the representative URL on its own, but you can tell Google exactly how you want them to treat your sites by using the URL Parameters tool in Google Search Console. If you use this function to tell Googlebot to "crawl no URLs with ____ parameter," you're essentially asking Googlebot to hide this content from it, which could result in the pages being removed from search results. That's fine if those criteria result in duplicate pages, but it's not ideal if you want those pages to be indexed.
Can crawlers find all of your vital content?
Now that you've learned some strategies for keeping search engine crawlers away from your irrelevant content, let's look at some optimizations that can assist Googlebot identify your key sites.
A search engine may be able to identify parts of your site by crawling, but other pages or sections may be obscured for various reasons. It's critical to ensure that search engines can find all of the information you want indexed, not just your homepage.
Consider this: Can the bot crawl through your website rather than simply to it?
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Is your material protected by login forms?
If you need people to log in, fill out forms, or answer surveys before they can access particular material, search engines will not index such sites. A crawler will almost certainly not log in.
Are you using search forms?
Robots are unable to use search forms. Some people feel that by including a search box on their website, search engines will be able to find everything that their users look for.
Is text concealed within non-textual content?
Non-text media (pictures, video, GIFs, and so on) should not be used to show text that you want indexed. While search engines are becoming more adept at detecting photos, there is no certainty that they will be able to read and comprehend them anytime soon. It is always preferable to include text within your webpage's HTML> code.
Can search engines navigate your website?
A crawler needs a path of links on your own site to take it from page to page, just as it needs links from other sites to discover your site. If you have a page that you want search engines to find but it is not linked to from any other pages, it is effectively invisible. Many websites make the fundamental error of arranging their navigation in ways that make it inaccessible to search engines, limiting their potential to appear in search results.
Common navigation errors that can prevent crawlers from accessing your entire site:
- Having a mobile navigation system that produces different results than your desktop navigation system
- Any sort of navigation in which the menu items are not in HTML, such as JavaScript navigations. Google has improved its crawling and understanding of Javascript, but it is still not an ideal process. Putting anything in HTML is a more certain way to ensure it is found, understood, and indexed by Google.
- Personalization, or providing different navigation to different types of visitors, may appear to a search engine crawler to be cloaking.
- Forgetting to include a link to a main page on your website in your navigation — remember, links are the routes crawlers take to find new pages!
- This is why your website must have easy navigation and useful URL folder structures.
Do you have a well-organized information architecture?
The activity of organizing and identifying content on a website to promote efficiency and findability for users is known as information architecture. The greatest information architecture is intuitive, which means that visitors should not have to think too hard in order to navigate your website or discover something.
Do you make use of sitemaps?
A sitemap is precisely what it sounds like: a list of URLs on your website that crawlers may use to find and index your content. One of the simplest ways to ensure that Google finds your most important pages is to produce a file that fulfills Google's specifications and submit it using Google Search Console. While providing a sitemap does not replace the requirement for good site navigation, it can help spiders find all of your relevant pages.
If your site has no external links, you may still be able to get it indexed by submitting your XML sitemap to Google Search Console. There's no assurance that a submitted URL will be included in their index, but it's worth a shot!
Are crawlers encountering problems when attempting to reach your URLs?
A crawler may encounter difficulties when crawling the URLs on your site. You can use Google Search Console's "Crawl Errors" report to identify URLs where this is occurring; this report will show you server failures as well as not found errors. Server log files can also show you this, as well as a plethora of other information like crawl frequency, but because accessing and examining server log files is a more advanced strategy, we won't go into detail about it in the Beginner's Guide.
Before you can do anything useful with the crawl error report, you must first comprehend server failures and "not found" issues.
4xx Codes: When search engine crawlers are unable to access your content due to a client error
4xx errors are client errors, which signify the requested URL includes incorrect syntax or cannot be fulfilled. The "404 - not found" problem is one of the most prevalent 4xx faults. These could be caused by a URL typo, a deleted page, or a failed redirect, to mention a few possibilities. When search engines get a 404 error, they are unable to access the URL. When users encounter a 404 error, they may become frustrated and depart.
When search engine crawlers are unable to access your content due to a server issue, use 5xx codes.
5xx errors are server errors, which signify that the server hosting the web page failed to fulfill the searcher's or search engine's request to access the page. There is a tab dedicated to these problems in Google Search Console's "Crawl Error" report. These often occur because the URL request timed out and Googlebot abandoned the request. To learn more about resolving server connectivity issues, consult Google's documentation.
Fortunately, there is a method to notify both searchers and search engines that your website has relocated - the 301 (permanent) redirect.
Assume you change a page from example.com/young-dogs to example.com/puppies. Search engines and consumers alike require a bridge to connect the old and new URLs. A 301 redirect is used for that bridge.
You can also 302 redirect a page, although this should be saved for temporary movements and circumstances when conveying link equity isn't as important. 302s are similar to road detours. You are temporarily diverting traffic through a specific path, but this will not last.
After you've confirmed that your site is crawlable, the next step is to ensure that it can be indexed.
Indexing: How do search engines interpret and store your pages?
After you've confirmed that your site has been crawled, the next step is to ensure that it can be indexed. That's right – just because a search engine can find and crawl your site doesn't ensure it will be included in their index. We reviewed how search engines locate your web pages in the preceding section on crawling. Your discovered pages are saved in the index. When a crawler finds a page, the search engine renders it in the same way that a browser would. In the process, the search engine examines the page's content. All of that data is saved in the index.
Can I view what a Googlebot crawler thinks about my pages?
Yes, the cached version of your page will show the last time Googlebot crawled it.
Google crawls and caches web pages at varying intervals. More established, well-known sites that post regularly, such as https://www.nytimes.com, will get crawled more frequently than Roger the Mozbot's side hustle website, http://www.rogerlovescupcakes.... (if only it were true...)
You may see what your cached version of a page looks like by selecting "Cached" from the drop-down arrow next to the URL in the SERP:
You may also check the text-only version of your site to see if your critical material is being scanned and cached properly.
Is it possible to remove pages from the index?
Pages can, in fact, be deleted from the index! Some of the most common reasons for URL removal are:
- The URL is returning a "not found" or "server error" (4XX) - This could be inadvertent (the page was moved without a 301 redirect) or intentional (the page was deleted and 404ed to remove it from the index).
- The URL had a noindex meta tag, which site owners can use to encourage search engines to exclude the page from their index.
- The URL was manually penalized for breaking the search engine's Webmaster Guidelines and was removed from the index as a result.
- The URL has been restricted from crawling, and a password is now required before visitors can view the page.
If you feel a page on your website that was previously in Google's index is no longer visible, you can use the URL Inspection tool to learn the status of the page, or you can utilize Fetch as Google, which provides a "Request Indexing" capability to submit individual URLs to the index. (Bonus: GSC's "fetch" tool also offers a "render" option that allows you to examine if there are any issues with how Google is reading your page).
Inform search engines how to index your website.
Meta directives for robots
Meta directives (sometimes known as "meta tags") are instructions you can send to search engines about how your website should be treated.
You can instruct search engine crawlers to "not index this page in search results" or "do not pass any link equity to any on-page links." These instructions are carried out through the usage of Robots Meta Tags in the head> of your HTML pages (the most frequent method) or the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header.
The robots meta tag
The robots meta tag can be used within the head> of your webpage's HTML. It has the ability to exclude all or specified search engines. The most common meta directives are shown here, along with the scenarios in which they might be used.
index/noindex instructs search engines whether a page should be crawled and indexed for retrieval. If you use "noindex," you're telling crawlers that you don't want the page to appear in search results. Because search engines believe that they can index all sites by default, using the "index" parameter is unnecessary.
- When you could use: You may choose to label a page as "noindex" if you wish to remove thin pages from Google's index of your site (for example, user-generated profile pages) but still want them to be available to visitors.
Follow/nofollow tells search engines whether or not to follow links on a page. "Follow" causes bots to follow the links on your page and convey link equity to those URLs. Alternatively, if you use "nofollow," search engines will not follow or transmit any link equity through to the links on the page. All pages are presumed to have the "follow" property by default.
- When to use: nofollow is frequently used in conjunction with noindex when attempting to prevent a page from being indexed as well as preventing the crawler from following links on the page.
The noarchive attribute is used to prevent search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, search engines will keep viewable copies of all pages they have indexed, which searchers can access via the cached link in the search results.
- When to use it: If you run an e-commerce site and your prices change frequently, you should consider using the noarchive tag to prevent searchers from seeing outdated pricing.
Here's an example of a noindex, nofollow meta robots tag:
<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /></head><body>...</body></html>
This example prevents any and all search engines from indexing the page or following any on-page links. If you want to exclude numerous crawlers, such as Googlebot and Bing, you can use multiple robot exclusion tags.
Meta directives have an impact on indexing but not crawling.
Because Googlebot must visit your page in order to see its meta directives, meta directives are ineffective for preventing crawlers from accessing specific pages. To be respected, robots tags must be crawled.
X-Robots-Tag
Because you may use regular expressions, block non-HTML files, and apply sitewide noindex tags, the x-robots tag is used within the HTTP header of your URL, allowing more flexibility and capability than meta tags if you want to block search engines at scale.
You could, for example, easily omit entire folders or file types (such as moz.com/no-bake/old-recipes-to-noindex):
<Files ~ “\/?no\-bake\/.*”> Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow”</Files>
Or specific file types (like PDFs):
<Files ~ “\.pdf$”> Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow”</Files>
Understanding how to impact crawling and indexing can help you avoid typical pitfalls that can prevent your key pages from being found.
How are URLs ranked by search engines?
How can search engines ensure that when users enter a query into the search field, they receive relevant results? This is referred to as ranking, or the ordering of search results from most relevant to least relevant to a specific query.
Search engines utilize algorithms to determine relevance, which is a technique or formula for retrieving and organizing stored information in meaningful ways. These algorithms have undergone numerous adjustments over time in order to improve the quality of search results. Google, for example, makes algorithm changes every day; some are modest quality improvements, while others are core/broad algorithm upgrades deployed to combat a specific issue, such as Penguin to combat link spam. Check out our Google Algorithm Change History for a complete record of Google modifications, both official and unconfirmed, dating back to the year 2000.
Why is the algorithm changing so frequently? Is Google merely attempting to keep us guessing? While Google does not always explain why they do what they do, we do know that the goal of algorithm changes is to increase overall search quality. That's why, when asked about algorithm upgrades, Google will say something like, "We're making quality updates all the time." This means that if your site suffered as a result of an algorithm change, compare it to Google's Quality Guidelines or Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which are both highly telling in terms of what search engines want.
What are search engines looking for?
The goal of search engines has always been the same: to offer useful answers to searchers' requests in the most convenient formats. If that's the case, why does SEO appear to be different now than in previous years?
Consider someone who is learning a new language.
Their knowledge of the language is initially poor — "See Spot Run." Their knowledge deepens over time, and they learn semantics – the meaning of language and the relationship between words and sentences. With enough practice, the student will eventually know the language well enough to perceive nuance and deliver responses to even ambiguous or incomplete inquiries.
When search engines were first learning human language, it was far easier to scam the system by employing techniques and tactics that violated quality rules. Consider the practice of keyword stuffing. If you wanted to rank for a certain keyword, such as "funny jokes," you might add the phrases "funny jokes" to your website several times and make them bold in the hopes of increasing your rating for that term:
Welcome to the world of humorous jokes! We tell the world's best jokes. Funny jokes are both entertaining and bizarre. Your amusing joke is waiting for you. Sit back and read these humorous jokes because they might make you happy and laugh. Some of my favorite amusing jokes.
This strategy resulted in horrible user experiences, with individuals being assaulted with unpleasant, difficult-to-read material instead of laughing at hilarious jokes. It may have worked in the past, but this was never the intention of search engines.
Links have traditionally played an important part in SEO. Early on, search engines required assistance in determining which URLs were more trustworthy than others in order to establish how to rank search results. They were able to accomplish this by calculating the amount of links connecting to any specific site.
Backlinks function very similarly to WoM (Word-of-Mouth) referrals in real life. Consider the following hypothetical coffee store, Jenny's Coffee:
- Referrals from others are a good indicator of authority.
- Referrals from yourself are biased, thus they are not a good indicator of authority.
- Referrals from irrelevant or low-quality sites are not a good sign of authority and may result in your account being reported as spam.
- No referrals = ambiguous authority
PageRank was designed for this purpose. PageRank (a component of Google's core algorithm) is a link analysis algorithm named after Larry Page, one of Google's creators. PageRank calculates a web page's importance by analyzing the quality and amount of links referring to it. The premise is that the more relevant, important, and trustworthy a website is, the more links it will receive.
The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the more likely it is that you will rank higher in search results.
The significance of content in SEO
Links would be useless if they did not direct searchers to something. That something is called content! Content is more than just words; it is everything intended for searchers to consume – video content, graphic material, and, of course, text. If search engines are response machines, content is the way through which those answers are delivered.
When someone conducts a search, there are hundreds of possible results; how can search engines determine which pages the searcher will find valuable? How well your page's content matches the query's purpose is an important factor in deciding where your page will rank for a given query. In other words, does this website match the words that were searched and aid in the completion of the task that the searcher was attempting to complete?
Because of this emphasis on user happiness and task completion, there are no hard and fast rules on how long your content should be, how many times it should contain a keyword, or what you should put in your header tags. All of these factors can influence how well a page does in search, but the primary focus should be on the users who will read the content.
Despite the fact that there are hundreds or even thousands of ranking signals available today, the top three have been pretty consistent: connections to your website (which function as third-party credibility signals), on-page content (quality content that fulfills a searcher's purpose), and RankBrain.
What exactly is RankBrain?
The machine learning component of Google's main algorithm is known as RankBrain. Machine learning is a computer software that learns from new observations and training data to improve its predictions over time. In other words, it is continually learning, and because it is constantly learning, search results should improve over time.
If RankBrain observes that a lower ranked URL is offering a better result to users than a higher ranking URL, you can expect that RankBrain will change those results, putting the more relevant result higher and demoting the less relevant pages as a byproduct.
We don't know exactly what RankBrain is, as we don't know anything about the search engine, but apparently neither do the folks at Google.
What does this mean for SEO professionals?
Because Google will continue to employ RankBrain to promote the most relevant, useful information, we must focus more than ever on satisfying searcher intent. You've taken a huge first step toward performing well in a RankBrain environment if you provide the best possible information and experience for searchers who could land on your page.
Metrics of engagement: correlation, causation, or both?
When it comes to Google rankings, engagement measurements are most likely a mix of correlation and causation.
We mean data that indicates how searchers interact with your site from search results when we mention engagement metrics. This contains items such as:
- Clicks (search-related visits)
- Time on page (the amount of time spent on a page before abandoning it)
- Bounce rate (the proportion of all website sessions in which users only visited one page)
- Clicking on an organic result and then rapidly returning to the SERP to select another result is known as pogo-sticking.
What Google has to say
While Google has never used the term "direct ranking signal," they have made it apparent that they do use click data to adjust the SERP for specific queries.
According to Udi Manber, Google's former Chief of Search Quality:
"The click data affects the ranking itself. If we discover that 80% of people click on #2 and just 10% click on #1 for a specific query, we can conclude that #2 is definitely the one people prefer, therefore we'll change it."
This is supported by another comment from former Google employee Edmond Lau:
"Any reasonable search engine would use click data on their own results to feed back into ranking in order to improve the quality of search results." The mechanics of how click data is used are frequently confidential, although Google makes it clear that it uses click data through patents on systems such as rank-adjusted content items."
Because Google needs to maintain and improve search quality, it seems inevitable that engagement metrics are more than correlation. However, it appears that Google does not consider engagement metrics to be a "ranking signal" because those metrics are used to improve search quality, and the rank of individual URLs is merely a byproduct of that.
What testing have shown
Several tests have demonstrated that Google will change the order of SERPs in response to searcher engagement:
- Rand Fishkin's 2014 test resulted in a #7 result rising up to #1 after 200 individuals clicked on the URL from the SERP. Surprisingly, ranking increase appeared to be limited to the location of those who visited the link. The rank position increased in the United States, where many participants were located, but remained lower on the page in Google Canada, Google Australia, and so on.
- Larry Kim's analysis of top pages and their average stay time before and after RankBrain appeared to imply that Google's algorithm's machine-learning component degrades the rank position of pages that people don't spend as much time on.
- Darren Shaw's testing has revealed the impact of user activity on local search and map pack results.
Because user engagement data are obviously utilized to update the SERPs for quality, and rank position changes as a corollary, SEOs should optimize for engagement. Engagement has no effect on the objective quality of your web page, but it does increase your worth to searchers in comparison to other results for that query. As a result, even if no modifications are made to your page or its backlinks, it may fall in ranks if searchers' behavior suggests they prefer alternative pages.
Engagement metrics serve as a fact-checker when it comes to ranking web pages. Objective variables like links and content rank the page first, and engagement data help Google change if they get it wrong.
The development of search results
When search engines lacked much of its sophistication today, the term "10 blue links" was invented to describe the SERP's flat layout. When you ran a search, Google would return a page with 10 organic results, all in the same manner.
In this search scenario, being ranked number one was the holy grail of SEO. But then something strange happened. Google began incorporating additional types of search results onto their search result pages, dubbed SERP features. Among these SERP features are:
- Paid advertising
- Snippets of interest
- People also inquire about boxes.
- Knowledge panel
- Sitelinks
- Local (map) pack
And Google is always adding new ones. They even experimented with "zero-result SERPs," a situation in which only one Knowledge Graph result was presented on the SERP, with no results below it other than an opportunity to "view more results."
The installation of these functions prompted some concern at first for two reasons. For one thing, several of these features drove organic results down on the SERP. Another effect is that fewer searchers are clicking on organic results because more queries are addressed directly on the SERP.
So, why would Google do such a thing? Everything comes back to the search experience. According on user behavior, certain queries are better served by alternative content formats. Take note of how the various sorts of SERP features correspond to the various types of query intents.
We'll go into intent in greater detail in Chapter 3, but for now, know that answers can be presented to searchers in a variety of ways, and how you structure your content can influence how it appears in search.
Localized lookup
Google, for example, has its own proprietary index of local company listings from which it generates local search results.
If you are executing local SEO work for a business that has a physical location that clients may visit (for example, a dentist) or a business that travels to visit its customers (for example, a plumber), make sure that you claim, verify, and optimize a free Google My Business Listing.
Google employs three primary elements to influence ranking in localized search results:
- Relevance
- Distance
- Prominence
Relevance
Relevance refers to how effectively a local business matches the searcher's criteria. Make sure the business' information is thoroughly and accurately filled out to guarantee that it is doing everything possible to be relevant to searches.
Distance
Google uses your geolocation to show you more relevant local results. Local search results are particularly sensitive to proximity, which refers to the searcher's location and/or the location given in the query (if one was included by the searcher).
Organic search results are location-sensitive, though not as pronounced as local pack results.
Prominence
Google is attempting to reward firms that are well-known in the real world by using prominence as a criterion. In addition to a company's offline notoriety, Google considers various online characteristics when determining local ranking, such as:
Assessments
The quantity of Google reviews received by a local business, as well as the attitude of those reviews, have a significant impact on its ability to rank in local results.
References
A "business citation" or "business listing" on a localized platform (Yelp, Acxiom, YP, Infogroup, Localeze, etc.) is a web-based reference to a local business' "NAP" (name, address, phone number).
The volume and regularity of local company citations influence local rankings. Google regularly compiles its local business index using data from a wide range of sources. When Google discovers many consistent references to a business's name, location, and phone number, it increases Google's "trust" in the data's accuracy. As a result, Google will be able to show the business with greater confidence. Google also uses data from other websites, such as links and articles.
Organic positioning
Because Google evaluates a website's position in organic search results when determining local ranking, SEO best practices also apply to local SEO.
In the following chapter, you'll learn about on-page best practices that will help Google and users comprehend your content better.
[Bonus!] Participation at the local level
Although Google does not identify involvement as a local ranking element, its importance will only grow with time. Google strives to improve local search results by using real-world data such as popular times of day to visit and average duration of stay...
...as well as the possibility for searchers to ask the business questions!
Local findings are undoubtedly influenced by real-world data more than ever before. Rather than completely static (and game-able) information like links and citations, this interactivity is how searchers interact with and respond to local companies.
Because Google aims to give the greatest, most relevant local businesses to searchers, using real-time interaction measurements to determine quality and relevance makes perfect sense.
You don't have to understand the inner workings of Google's algorithm (that remains a mystery! ), but you should have a good understanding of how the search engine finds, interprets, saves, and ranks content by now. With that understanding, let's move on to Chapter 4 (Keyword Exploration) to learn about selecting the keywords your content will target!
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