How Does Google Rank Websites?

Trying to rank on Google can feel like playing a game for which you don’t know the rules. Contrary to what you might expect, writing an article so people will find your website isn’t just about sharing what you know. While writing from a place of expertise will help, Google’s criteria for ranking highly considers much more than that.

Whether you’re deep diving into SEO for your tech company or just looking to rank as a service-based or local business, this is your guide to learn to rank on Google. From keywords and page load time to accessibility and much more, this article will go through the main factors Google grades websites on to rank them.

First, let’s talk about why ranking is necessary.

Why Google Ranks Websites

What Google and any other search engine wants is for its users to get what they’re looking for quickly and for the experience of finding it to be efficient and satisfactory.
Think about a world where you go to the library, but there’s no system to organize books. You browse the shelves for a specific book but quickly realize that wading through the stacks could take hours.

If Google didn’t rank websites, its search results would likely feel similar. Its ranking system prioritizes websites that provide information matching the keyword and the topics associated with it.

Let’s look at this more in depth by learning about the algorithm the Google search engine uses.

The Google Algorithm

An algorithm is a complex system that analyzes hundreds of factors. It’s proprietary, so we can’t be sure exactly how many or what they are. However, this mathematical system decides what pages are most relevant and authoritative for a query (search).

To determine whether a website meets the criteria, Google “crawls” it by sending bots to discover pages on your site and “reads” the content using natural language processing (NLP). Then, the algorithm evaluates that content to rate its value based on specific criteria.

Notable Google Updates

Unlike an encyclopedia on the shelf, the internet is as dynamic as we are, and the online experience changes with the times. To continue being helpful, Google evolves its algorithms often.

There have been several updates accompanied by respective names, and after each of them, there is a wave of changes to results and expectations from websites to rank (or continue ranking).

Here are some notable updates and their changes through the years:

• Florida (2003): Combated keyword stuffing and link spam, which marketers had implemented to manipulate results
• Hummingbird (2013): Improved the language model to better understand search intent, moving from a keyword focus to a semantic search — matching with the meaning of words and phrases in a user’s search query
• Medic (2018): Focused on sites in legal, medical, and financial fields that affected users’ well-being or financial health to emphasize E-A-T content: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness
• SpamBrain (2022): Used machine learning to detect and penalize spammy content, preventing low-quality content from ranking

These algorithm updates focus on small, major, core, and systems updates to target both what’s changed in the way people create content for Google and how the algorithm perceives that content. It’s a complex system that aims to keep search results relevant and helpful.

How Does Google Rank Websites?

Despite all of these updates, many of Google’s ranking factors remain the same as before. If you put effort into your website and have good content that prioritizes reader experience and learning, you have a chance at ranking after a period of time.

Here are some of the most important factors to keep in mind when you create content:

Crawling and Indexing

You may have the most incredible health care, SaaS, or e-commerce website, but if you don’t ask Google to crawl and index it, it might not show up on the search engine.

To request a crawl is completely free. You submit your site to the search engine you’re interested in, which can be Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or Yandex, among others.

To submit your site to Google, follow these instructions:

1. Find your XML sitemap, a URL with a list of the pages on your site that looks something like yoursite.com/sitemal.xml or yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml.
2. Go to Google Search Console and connect it to your website. Go to Sitemaps on the left sidebar and type your sitemap URL into the “Add new sitemap” section.
3. Submit and wait for the status to say “success.”

Core Web Vitals

The “health” of your website, or how your page performs for the user, is extremely important. Why? Well, nobody wants to find the perfect headline, promising a full guide to answer their question, just to click on it and find the page no longer exists.

If users have that bad experience with a search engine enough times, they’ll quickly conclude it’s not updating regularly and isn’t so useful at all.

To protect its performance and reputation, Google prioritizes a few key things like:

• Page speed: How long it takes to load
• Mobile-friendliness: Ensuring no elements overlap awkwardly or stop working on smaller devices
• Accessibility: How people with disabilities are able to perceive and navigate the site and even how people with other limitations like age, injury, or a slow internet connection can use it
• Broken links: Whether your site has old links that no longer work and lead to error pages

Search Intent

With some of the algorithm updates over the years, Google has moved from prioritizing just keywords to looking for content that satisfies search intent.

Let’s look at this from the user perspective. As a searcher, if you type a question into Google, you probably don’t want to see a map in the top result, right? Or if you’re desperate to buy toilet paper, you certainly don’t need a definition or history of it.

Google now better understands what you want with your query, or search, and offers the relevant content. The main search intent categories are:

• Navigational: The searcher knows the website they want to visit and are just looking for a specific page within it, like a login page.
• Informational: The searcher is looking to answer a question.
• Commercial or purchase: The searcher is looking to buy something in the near future but may want to look at listicles, reviews, and other content now.
• Transactional: The searcher is ready to make a purchase.

Not only does this enable users to get the content they need listed on Google results, it also allows websites to be ranked multiple times for several related keywords. If you’re an education business, you can rank for, say, “top administrative assistant courses” and also for “buy administrative assistant certification” with two of the pages on your site, reaching a potential lead at multiple points of their buyer’s journey.

Quality and Freshness

There was a time when just writing about a topic and throwing in the keyword a certain number of times would get you in one of Google’s top results pages, but those days are over.

Your content needs to be of high quality, offering answers to the search intent and providing that extra touch of information that the current search results don’t have.

For inspiration, look up the keyword or query that you’re targeting and browse through the results. The “People also ask” section offers great insights as to what people want to know when searching this keyword, too.

On the other hand, writing one article on the topic and forgetting about it will have you slipping down the rankings over the years. Just because you ranked once for that coveted top spot on results doesn’t mean it’s yours to keep.

Go back every year or so to freshen up sources and update information. This will also keep you top of mind for people who want to link to that post as a reference on their website, improving your reputation online.

E-A-T

E-A-T or, updated in 2022, E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) content is also related to content quality. To write an article that meets these guidelines you’ll want to follow these steps:

1. Write from a place of experience

Firsthand accounts are important as Google knows readers rely heavily on personal opinion or experience with products, processes, and other solutions they’re reading about.

Knowing the person who wrote an article or review has personally been through the tips they’re giving and has even altered or advised against some commonly mentioned tips is huge. Some tech reviewers build their whole platform on this trust, and readers adore them for it.

2. Ask a subject-matter expert to provide content for you

When writing about medical, legal, or other high-stakes content, Google wants an expert behind that keyboard. This helps ensure that the reader gets reliable information straight from the source.

To show Google that you’re the go-to knowledge base on a topic, make sure it’s relevant to the rest of your site, showing that you’re sharing high-level information in your field and improving the quality, freshness, and helpfulness of what’s already out there.

3. Become the go-to for your customers

Writing a solid amount of quality content around your business’s main topics is what will make you the go-to source for people seeking that information online.

This, of course, will make you a trusted source from which to purchase products or services, but to Google it will improve your authority or reputation. Think here of any influencer online and how they start by focusing on one topic, whether it’s marketing strategies, debunking business myths, or any other niche.

4. Build a site your users trust

It’s hard enough as it is to compete with other websites. The last thing you need is for site visitors to get a warning message when they click on your site saying it’s not secure.

Build your site on a secure domain, add contact information and privacy and return policies, and implement secure payment methods. This way, users get reassured of your commitment to their security at every step.

Off-Page SEO

These are all important guidelines for your business site, but it doesn’t stop there. Google also understands that external sources point to you positively or negatively. There are a variety of strategies to get your business name out there, even if your website is relatively new, but be careful to always do it ethically. Cutting corners can backfire on your online authority score.

Create a Google Business Profile

If your company relies on local business, this profile is great for getting your name out into your community. It also allows Google to get to know key information like hours, location, and even some photos of your business to show you’re a real place.

Domain and Page Authority

Domain and page authority measure how your website relates to other sources online. More importantly, how your site influences others in your industry (and others) and whether you really are an authority in your field.

Domain authority measures the overall score while page authority looks at individual URLs and how they perform.

To get ethically sourced backlinks — links that point to your site from high-authority sources — try the following:

• Focus on publishing great content that other sites will find valuable, like conducting and publishing studies.
• Collaborate with popular content creators through guest posts, social media, and education campaigns to bring new knowledge to related topic experts.
• Make visual content that condenses information for readers and makes it easier to approach.
• Write and publish press releases to stay top-of-mind for reporters and get news mentions.

Looking to get quality backlinks as a lawyer? We have a guide for that.

Start by Creating an On-Page and Off-Page SEO Plan

Now that you understand how Google crawls and indexes your site, you can follow guidelines to help it understand your business better.

Take action into your own hands and create a solid plan to tackle your SEO plan on- and off-page. Focus on user experience, search intent, and content quality, and you’ll give readers something to learn from, trust, and share with others.

This will help you stay competitive by understanding what readers want as well as what works well on search engines.

To really succeed in Google search, partner with us at Single Origin Media, and we’ll work with you to expertly craft an SEO plan for your business that earns top results. Get in touch today.