The online marketing industry continues to grow as more businesses take to the internet to sell to a sea of potential online customers. But for any business to thrive, they must make themselves easy to find in a quick Google search (or Bing, Yahoo, etc.). Currently, there are more than 1 billion websites, and each of these must jockey for attention in the search engine results pages
Part of ensuring your web pages are optimized is understanding how search engines work. Search engines cater to users by listing the web pages that are the most relevant to the terms people are searching for.
There are multiple factors that search engines use to analyze and determine relevance for a given website. Google doesn’t often reveal these, but there are plenty that are widely known and used by marketers. An SEO expert should be aware of top ranking factors, and according to OptinMonster, the top SEO ranking factors in 2019 are:
Domain age, URL, and authority
Page speed (including mobile page speed)
Real business information
A secure and accessible website
User experience (Google RankBrain)
Websites are ranked primarily based on how well they meet the search engine’s ranking factors and best practices. The web pages that do this best will outrank others that don’t. Search engines generally follow three steps when ranking a website:
Google is fully-automated and uses web crawlers to traverse your website and add its pages to their index. The engine then stores those page addresses (i.e., URLs). Pages can be found by different methods, but the main one is following links from pages that have already been found elsewhere (such as other websites).
Once Google finds your pages, it attempts to analyze what each page is about. It looks at the content, images, and videos, and all of this is stored in the engine’s index, which is a huge database.
3. Serving Search Results
When someone performs a search on Google, the engine will determine the highest quality results. These results have many factors, including the user's location, language, device, and previous queries. Results are often personalized to the searcher. As an example, searching for "cloud computing company" would return different results to a user in Australia than it would to someone in the United States.
Differences between paid and organic search
From the outset, it’s important that you understand the differences between the organic, natural search synonymous with SEO and paid search. There are five key differences:
The first difference is that paid search results appear at the top of search engine results pages, and organic results appear beneath them.
Another key difference between paid and organic search is time. With paid search, you get near instant results, sometimes in minutes; whereas, with organic search, results take more time - often weeks, months, and even years. So you have to play the medium to long-term game with organic search.
When it comes to paying, well, as the name suggests, with paid search traffic is paid. You pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. What that means is, you pay a fee every time a user clicks on your ad. So instead of relying on organic traffic to your website, you buy traffic for your page by paying Google to show your ad when your visitor does a search for your keyword. For organic search, traffic is free, although it does require an investment of both resources and time.
In terms of the return on investment or ROI, it's actually much easier to measure with paid search. That's partly because Google provides more keyword data that you can capture in Google Analytics. However, with paid search, ROI can stagnate or decline over time. With organic search, ROI is a little bit harder to measure, but it often improves over time. Over the long term, organic search can offer a very good return on investment.
When it comes to the share of traffic, roughly 20% to 30% of searchers click on paid results, and 70% to 80% of searchers click on SEO results. So the lion’s share of clicks are actually on the organic results.
