How Search Works for You

I think it’s helpful to point out that even though the inner workings of search can seem complex, when you’re learning, you can always go back to the so-called “user experience”. That is, what your own experience of a given tool or process is.

Without thinking about it, you are probably regularly engaged in the Google ecosystem of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. In fact, if you ever type in anything on Google, you’re there.

For example, here is a slightly “older” view of Google, which I think serves our purposes:

This is from around 2010, so the search page looks similar but some things have changed. If we run this same search today, it would look something like this:

It looks a little more elegant, easier on the eyes, and has more whitespace.

The ads and “organic search results” are delineated a bit differently. In the next image, the ads, driven by the Google AdWords platform, are highlighted with boxes, and the arrow is pointing at the organic search result.

One way to think of it is kind of like a library, except Google is a for-profit library.

If you walk into a typical library, they’ll have all kinds of free guides that list resources in your communities. But if they were a for-profit library, they sell advertising, and advertisers might compete with each other to get the prominent position for their ads. It’s the same thing on Google—there’s a space where you compete with other advertisers for paid ads that are driven by AdWords (see www.google.com/adwords ).

But in a library, there are the free resources, and how are they typically organized? Probably neutrally—that is, using some kind of system that allows you to find what you’re looking for, such as alphabetically, or some kind of searchable system. They might also curate things, such as organize them, or feature them, for browsing and exploring.

What Google, or any other search system for that matter, tries to do is guess what would be the most relevant result based on what you search for. Then, in the paid advertising space, companies compete to get the top spot, and in the unpaid, organic search results, Google will also list things based on relevance and popularity.

To get technical about it, there are several hundred known and theoretical ranking factors, and they affect “position” on Google. They determine how high your web site or article will rank on Google—the search engine optimization community is constantly trying to figure everything out. Google is public with some things and transparent with others.

But in the end, Google tries to keep things relevant and calculate a rank based on a variety of factors, including how popular material is. The more people who visit a site, the higher it will rank on a particular topic.

Google also takes into account other sites that link to yours, and the “authority” of those sites. For example, if you get a news article written about your site, media sources often have a lot of authority, because Google basically figures that if they cover something (depending on the site), it has a higher chance of being newsworthy. Since some legitimate human has made the choice to highlight it, Google pays more attention.

It All Comes Down to Quality Content

What I’ve seen in search engine optimization is that it has grown as an industry as Google has grown, and in the field of digital marketing, it seems to be the most constantly changing area. Best practices mean companies have to constantly react to what Google does, where they constantly seek to expand and improve how search results appear (and to impact their own profitability).

Naturally, marketing agencies, experts, workshops, and entire conferences and publications have arisen to address the area, and a great variety of techniques and philosophies and best practices have converged. A great number of people have also tried to game Google, by trying all kinds of tricks to get higher ranking in search results for their web sites and clients.

What I tell my students, and what I find constantly reinforced by the industry and by Google itself, is that in the end, it pretty much all comes down to quality of the content.

For example, if you did nothing other than write high quality, compelling, relevant articles on topics related to your business and organization, Google will find them, and more importantly, people will find them. If they’re relevant and interesting, meaningful or helpful, more people will share them with other people. If this happens, they will climb higher in rankings.

I feel like the 90% figure is fair—if you spend 90% of your time on developing quality content (which could include video, of course), that’s the biggest battle of search engine optimization. I’ve definitely witnessed efforts to master all the supposed “best practices” but which end up short changing the content itself.

Remember what I called the core areas of digital marketing? Content, AdWords, Social, and Analytics (CASA). The largest components of the field of digital marketing can basically be reduced to these parts—notice that it all begins with Content:

You need content to deploy on the social networks and messaging apps where people spend increasing amounts of time. For the time being, for the foreseeable future, people are using search engines to find information. What you want to determine is how did it all perform?

Not the Only Game in Town

This book focuses on Google, google.com in particular, but it’s fair to say that it’s not the only game in town. There are other search engines. As people’s preferences shift and evolve, there will be other ways people search the Internet .

YouTube

For example, YouTube is technically, actually the second most popular search engine. People increasingly turn to it, not only for entertainment, but also to become more informed. This is especially true for people who prefer to learn from video rather than reading an article. Video content is definitely on the rise.

How does search work on YouTube? Similar principles apply.

For example, what follows is a silly music project I did in my past life in rock ‘n’ roll. The “real” band I was in didn’t have a hit radio single, so I got together with some friends and made a joke, but we also made a few videos.

If you type the name of the project—“Gerbil Liberation Front”—into YouTube, at least at the moment, the top result is by someone who copied the video and uploaded it themselves. The reason it appears at the top is because they included the name of the project in the title of the video. (In “conventional” search engines, it’s worth remembering that the title of an article is important.)

Whereas the second result (shown with an arrow) is a YouTube channel, so it doesn’t rank as high:

Then, very recently, the album was added to a site called CD Baby, which offers artists the ability to be included in a kind of automatic video that people can watch to get exposed to the music, so that shows up third.

All the way in fourth place is the original video upload, simply titled “Chew”. In order to increase the rank, I could change the title to Gerbil Liberation Front. I could also try to write Google and ask them to remove the unauthorized content. Then, just as with any other search engine, I could try to get more traffic to the video—for example, by mentioning it in a book.

What’s Next?

Not only does Google constantly evolve, but the entire industry of how people get information and media changes. For example, around the time of this writing, Apple introduced a new version of its operating system for iPhones, which has a feature that allows developers to more easily write “ad blockers”. Guess what is the core of Google’s 60 billion dollars a year in revenue? Ads.

If you consider how many people have iPhones out there (bajillions), then something like being able to remove ads could have a significant impact on Google. At the moment, pundits say various things—some tout doomsday, others say that not everyone will even be aware or run the ad blockers. Plus some ad blockers distinguish between “unobtrusive” ads like Google’s. (Try searching on google.com—it appears really simple—then try visiting a page like cnn.com and notice the obtrusive ads.) Then there’s evidence to suggest that Google might make deals with some of the ad blockers to let at least Google’s ads through.

Apple is not the only game in town—the other half or so of the market for mobile phone operating systems is Android, which is a Google project.

But just sayin’—things change.

It wouldn’t shock me if Apple and Google merged, or Google bought Facebook, or Google bought Twitter; but there’s still a need for search engines, and I don’t think they will go away. The search experience for some people probably started in libraries, looking for books on a computer system, or even a pre-computer card system. And then there is just browsing! Through books, video, music. Libraries have evolved and people don’t visit traditional physical libraries as much as they used to. The search experience is there, and for most people, it begins on Google, YouTube, or Amazon.

Conclusion

Thanks for taking a look at this chapter, where we’ve scratched the surface of the nature of search, and considered where it’s been, what it does, and where it’s going.

In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at an important toolbox for working with search engine optimization. You guessed it—Content!