How Google’s Algorithm Works: A Deep Dive

We have all used Google search to look up information on various topics. We type our query, press the search button, and then get links to various relevant websites. While we may not put much thought into the process involved in deciding which websites appear at the top of the page, if you are investing in digital marketing for your brand and want to increase the amount of visitors your website gets, you will be interested in knowing how search works.

You may have spoken to a company that specialises in digital marketing Sri Lanka and may have heard the term SEO being used a lot. Search engine optimization or SEO is a way of making your website appear at the top of the search results.

Why is it important that your webpage appears at the top of the list? Well, when you search for something online, how far down a page do you scroll? Do you even bother going to the second or third result pages? It’s quite likely that you change the wording of your query if you don’t find what you are looking for at the top of the results page. Thus, if you want more people to visit your website, that’s where you’d want it to be and this is why SEO is important.

In order to understand why you should invest in high quality SEO services Sri Lanka, you may want to know how search works and how a skilled and experienced team will know how to use SEO to boost your web presence.

Google search is based on algorithms that aim at providing users with the most relevant and timely information. According to Google, these algorithms consider many factors like the way your query is worded, relevance and usability of pages, and your location. The nature of your query will decide the prominence given to each factor. This is why, if you search for restaurants in Colombo, you won’t get directed to a page last updated in 2015.

There are five factors that play a key role in determining the results presented to you. A digital marketing company tasked with improving your SEO will look into these five factors.

Meaning

If you are looking for the best hotels in London when travelling on a budget, you may type “best London hotels budget” in the search bar. The basics that go into understanding the intent or purpose of the query will check for spelling mistakes and synonyms, which means that results may include motels, homestays, rentals, etc. Google search also uses freshness algorithms, where, if you search for an ongoing cricket match, the results will include the current score of the match. A SEO company Sri Lanka will cater to these algorithms and create content for your website so that it appears at the top of the search results when a query is made.

Relevance

If we take the previous example of hotels in London, you wouldn’t want the search results to include a webpage that poses the same question but doesn’t contain any answers. You also wouldn’t want the webpage to include information from ten years ago. This is why the search algorithms look for websites that have the relevant information. This is done by looking at the keywords used in the webpage, an area digital marketing Sri Lanka focuses on.

Quality

If you are searching for recipes, you wouldn’t want recipes that have low ratings or are badly written. The quality of the content matters and this is why search uses PageRank, search quality evaluation, and spam algorithms to ensure the quality of the content presented to the user.

Usability

There are times when we visit a website and find that it isn’t at all user-friendly. Search uses an algorithm to promote easy-to-use websites, looking at factors like if it appears correctly in different browsers, if it is designed for all types of devices, and page loading times. A digital marketing company specialising in SEO services Sri Lanka will look at ways to improve the usability of a website so that it appears at the top of the search results.

Context and settings

This factor ensures that search results are personalised, taking into consideration the location, settings, and search history of the user. This means that the search results you get match your interests and also take into account what you have searched for in the past.