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How do search engines work?

One of the latest research studies conducted by BrandVerity shows that out of 1,000 United States consumers; many find that they still do not understand how search engines work. The United States consumers were all from different backgrounds, socioeconomic demographics, ages, genders and other demographics. 

Why is this important? This is important because there are over 75,000 new results that Google has to crawl every second each day. This means that companies are fighting for those top ranking positions that consumers are clicking on, and a majority of those searchers feel as if the information or first website takes them somewhere unexpected. 

This is scary to think about when it is estimated that retail e-commerce sales will surpass $6 trillion by 2023. Another scary factor, are you bringing in those quality leads? 

Here are the three main findings from this study. 

1. Consumers are confused how search engines work 

2. Consumers are more inclined to click on the first result

3. Consumers feel mislead by the website they find in search results

Our Denver SEO specialist is here to answer these three main results found within BrandVerity’s study! 

1. Consumers are confused how search engines work 

How does Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing or Yahoo! Understand what to give a searcher based on their search query. There are three primary focuses for a search engine, specifically we will be discussing Google, and how they find information. 

First, Google crawls the internet for content and answers to questions that are most related to the search query that has been entered. This is when Google discovers content and sends out their robots to find new content that should be ranking or make sure that updated content is ranking for a website. 

These spiders crawl a few hundred thousands of websites, pages, blogs and other sources of information to find the best result. 

Second, Google will index each page that it finds on the journey. When a Google spider indexes a page, it is “reading” that stored and organized content and finds the exact page to rank for that search query. This is where SERP comes into notion. 

Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are the relevant pages and content that appear when a search query is typed into Google. The ordering of this search query is based upon over 200 ranking factors that those Google spiders consider while they are crawling and making webs throughout the backend of Google! 

Third, is the rank. This is where a piece of content ranks based upon the information that was crawled, indexed and where it sits in importance of most relevant and least relevant. This is how a website can rank number one for the same content that other websites are ranking number six or even 50 for! The little Googlebots (our spiders) find the Robots.txt in URLs which are located in the root directory. This tells Google what to crawl on websites and what not to crawl. 

That last part was a bit dense, but essentially, a Denver SEO specialist tells Google exactly what pages to crawl and index based on the keyphrase on that page.

2. Consumers are more inclined to click on the first result

Without understanding why consumers click on the first result, consumers still click on it. This is because consumers believe since it is the first result it has to be the most relevant, right? Well, it depends because some of the first results are ads, but do you need an article instead. 54 percent of consumers trust a website depending on their ranking. SEOs know this and understand this and so do companies. 

3. Consumers feel mislead by the website they find in search results

However, while first page ranking is critical, the other nine rankings on the first page can be just as important. This is because the first ranking could be irrelevant to your search query, and because of this, Google released an update called BERT. 

BERT, also known as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is an update that learns natural language and search patterns. This helps to clarify and provide the best search results for each and every search query. With one in four searchers feeling mislead by the SERP results in Google, what can a company do? 

A Denver SEO specialist always recommends a company to create content that is relevant, answer a question or solves a problem. If a company shows results for “best pizza restaurant” and only serves other Italian food, these consumers will discredit this company before ever walking in. 

Another notion is searching “pizza restaurant” and a search result such as “the history of pizza” showing is also part of the mislead factor. 

As this study shows, consumers still do not understand how SEO works and even companies who profit millions of dollars a year are in the same situation.