What The Hell Are You Doing Google? – Episode 63

What I thought we would do in this podcast is talk a little bit around the subject of a Google search ranking it only to try and demystify it, debunk some of the myths and the anatomy of a Google search ranking. First of all, what is Google trying to do when somebody types in a search.

Find the most relevant content that answers the question.

And it's looking for authority signals, which might be the site's been around for a long time. It's linked to by lots of other people. It's got tons of content on it. The list goes on. And there's tons of stuff which Google will never tell us that it's measuring. In order to figure that out, Google rankings are a black art.

Yeah.

So far as understanding exactly how the works concerned, but that applies to us as well. Google gives us what are called guidelines and says, do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that. And if you do all that, there's a good chance your page, you'll get found in a search engine when somebody carries out a search. Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And I'm back in the office. Not in a caravan. In a.

Field.

Yeah, not a caravan. I said caravan, I haven't got a caravan. You've got a campervan. Actually got a motorhome.

What's the.

Difference? A difference, yeah. As you can probably hear, it's, uh, Alex and I who are on this one and haven't done a podcast with Alex for a while. So there's probably, there's a lot of piss taking been building up inside and yeah.

So it.

Could, could turn. I mean, I've started straight away because Alex is sat there and hasn't got a clue what this podcast is about. And now I don't do this to be cute. Um, I do it because I like podcasts to be, to have some structure clearly. But I also like.

Only if you're in control of the structure.

Well, I mean, I don't mind, I would be quite happy if you think of a really good subject for next time. Don't tell me what it is. I'll introduce the podcast. Then you can tell me what we're going to talk about and we'll go for it. I'm happy to do that. But anyway, the the sort of working title of this one, I might change it for the actual, um, when I, when I put it into, uh, into the ether, um, is the anatomy of a Google search ranking.

Oh, I like that.

Yeah, I quite liked it as well. I haven't got anything else. So off you go. I'll be back in a minute. I'm going to get a cup of tea. No. When we're speaking to people about digital marketing, there's still this idea. And it came up in a meeting, uh, a discovery session actually yesterday with a fantastic company, uh, who hopefully are going to become customers, clients. Um, there's still this idea that what we do is a black art and in some respects, Google rankings the anatomy of a Google ranking. Google rankings are a black art. They are a dark art.

Yeah.

So far as understanding exactly how the works concerned. But that applies to us as well because Google doesn't tell us. Right, exactly. Google gives us what are called guidelines and says, do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that. And if you do all that, then there's a good chance your page you'll get found in a search engine when somebody carries out a search.

Yes. Do we believe them?

No, of course we don't believe them.

No. I mean.

We know it's like we've we've done things where Google have said, don't do something. And I'm not talking about like Google said, don't hack into somebody else's website and build links because clearly we wouldn't do that. But Google have spoken about certain aspects of rankings. And, you know, we've gone well, we'll just test that. And actually, you know, if we'd followed Google's advice, we wouldn't have got the ranking. So most people involved in this industry know that there's a sort of level of experimentation is worthwhile, often compare dividends. So what I thought we would do in this podcast is talk a little bit around the subject of a Google search ranking, only to try and demystify it, debunk some of the myths, and try and communicate to people. exactly what's going on. And I'm not talking about at a data science level, I'm not talking because I frankly don't understand that nonsense anyway. You know, I'm talking I'm talking at an an easily digestible or rather an easily digestible language.

Yeah, a kind of no bullshit approach to because because I think just to pick up on one of the things you were saying, one of the main problems with this, right, is that Google don't publish set rules. They give vague guidelines. It leaves everybody free to kind of make up, I guess, their own. And it's not even a case of like kind of maliciously making up, is it? Sometimes you can do stuff that works once and you think, okay, that's the formula. That's how you that's how it works. I understand it now. I've figured it all out and then it doesn't work the second time. And you kind of. Yeah, I think people are free to kind of make up their own rules really. And you do get a lot of people who claim to have this kind of secret sauce. You know, they've worked it out. They've figured out a foolproof way of ranking content. And yeah, it is all a bit like you say, the only real approach is to experiment and see what works.

Well, that's the sort of nonsense that, you know, we often find ourselves picking up the pieces because they've been people have been or businesses have been spun a line by, um, some snake oil salesmen who claim they've got this secret sauce, as you rightly call it. They've figured out how Google works and they can do X, Y, and Z and they can kill it in search. And I mean, nine times out of ten, what they've done is they've built a private blog network. They can build you a load of links. And until Google finds out and it will find out, then your, your website might rank quite well for a while before it falls off a cliff. But let's not go down that route. Let's concentrate on the anatomy of a Google search ranking. Do you want me to kick things off?

Yeah, go for it.

If you think about the web, uh, it was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It's rooted in academia.

Um.

We maybe have covered we may have covered this in a previous, in a previous podcast. It's going to say incarnation. Maybe we have, But we may have covered this in a previous podcast. Um, so effectively in the world of academia, academics, um, live and die by their research output.

Mhm.

Fair enough. So they research subjects and they create papers.

Papers.

They write papers, they write books, theses, they write, uh, presentations for um, seminars and the like, but effectively they create content. Mhm. And often when academics are writing content, just go and close the window. It's fine. Often when academics are writing content, they are building on previous research that another academic has done, or at the very least referencing. Mhm. And, and Tim Berners-Lee apparently recognised that it was a bit of a nuisance if you were reading a paper. So Doctor Smith has written a paper about a particular subject and referenced Doctor Jones's paper on a similar subject that supports Doctor Smith's hypothesis. For example. So you were reading that? Well, that sounds really interesting, right? I'll now need to go to the library, and I now need to go and search for and find that other paper in order to join the dots. So Tim Berners-Lee thought, well, what if you could just like click something and be taken to that other paper? And hence.

Hypertext.

Was was born, right. So that's like the first piece of the jigsaw, what the Google boys did.

Larry Page and.

Sergey Brin, Larry and Sergey. Sergey, Sergey, is he Russian?

Someone will correct us, I'm sure.

Is he Russian? Are we giving Russian people money when we use Google now?

Don't look at who owns SEMrush. Whatever you do. No.

Oh, no. Right. So fast forward to the Google guys. And what they figured out was that the information on the web was growing exponentially. And although organisations like I suppose, yahoo and Help me Out, AltaVista and all these people.

Yandex.

I don't know if they were doing it manually, but they were figuring out they were trying to index all of these pages, all of this, all of this content that was appearing and somehow putting it in order. Now, you know, in a library, a librarian follows a system to put things in order. So we know where to find things, but the web doesn't work that way. So it was all starting to get a bit messy. And what Google figured out was that this linking from one thing to another, that was the whole reason that Tim Berners-Lee created hypertext and the web. Um, maybe that could be used to organise information in a meaningful way as, as in Put the good stuff at the top and the bad stuff at the bottom.

Yeah, I think that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, certainly in academia, research that is cited more frequently is regarded as more trustworthy. Right. That's the whole idea. It's like, if you're gonna refer back to a paper or you're going to look at something as proof or evidence, you want something that has been frequently cited that lots of people have read and looked at and thought, yeah, this is a trustworthy and useful resource.

So you would I always think about this by flipping it on its head as well, because if you were writing a paper to debunk Doctor Smith's paper where he claimed or she claimed that something, you know, A plus B equals C, and actually you'd figured out that A plus B didn't equal C at all. You would still reference that paper even if it was to say Doctor Smith did this, and it's absolute nonsense. But that aside, it's still credible content. It was done in good faith. They were, you know, researching. So so what I guess the Google people decided was that if lots of academics were linking to Doctor Smith's paper on the subject, then that suggests or suggested that that paper was authoritative. Yep. So if lots of credible resources linked to it and, um, they themselves had some credibility, then again, that credibility filters through.

Yeah.

So effectively, it's, it's almost like a voting system.

Yeah. Or a popularity contest, a popularity contest. Yeah. Yeah. But that's not I mean, it's fair to say that in its first incarnation, that was mainly what was deciding where things ranked right was just how often a page was cited.

I'm not sure. Um, I think where the content was being held. So if a piece of content was on a server at MIT or Oxford.

It was better than a piece of Robert.

Gordon University to use a local to local organisation. If a piece of content was was being hosted by them, then it's possible that the location itself had a certain amount of gravitas.

Yeah.

And obviously the content itself matters because effectively, you know, Google's software can like look at a piece of content and a look in air quotes, looking in inverted commas, it can look at a piece of content and index it and look at the words that are being used and decide if you like what it's about. I mean, we're kind of anthropomorphising a data science process here, but I think that's okay for the point of view of making it digestible. So the content itself matters. What's linking to that content to give it this authority matters.

And also, like you say, where it's hosted matters. And you can see this because, you know, if you if you Google something that's happening right now in the world or recent development, it'll always be like BBC at the top of the page. You know, the, the Google does definitely prefer domains that, like you say, are kind of authoritative, established, well known. I mean, I guess that's a safety net, right? It's like, we know that everybody reads the BBC, therefore what they put out is probably trustworthy and reliable.

Yeah. That's right. Okay, so just for my, uh, just to help me, just for my benefit, just recap on what we've been over so far in your words, in your language.

Uh, so, so yeah, basically the internet is a big kind of interconnected mass of, of content. Um, it all sites and refers to itself to each other. And Google is looking at who is kind of citing which bits of content to work out how trustworthy and authoritative things are. So I guess the point being that if your website or your content is frequently cited by other websites that Google thinks are It thinks of as authoritative or trustworthy. That's better for you. But that's not, I guess, the whole picture, is it? That's not when we when we I mean, we're talking about a Google ranking for any old search phrase. It's not just how authoritative or trustworthy your website is. That depends where you're going to sit on that ranking on that list.

Maybe not. Um, but before we move on from that, what, what is quite obviously leaving this system open to abuse?

Well, I guess the fact that you can just go away and pay people to link to your website or cite it frequently.

And what does Google tell you not to do?

Yeah, I mean, exactly that. Right. It says you shouldn't offer paid links and that it'll it'll beat you up in a dark alley if you dare to try it.

But but why is Google doing that?

Well, because once people start gaming the search results page, they're not authoritative anymore, are they? I mean, people only go to Google because it reliably gives them the best possible answer to their questions. And if you can game that system, it's just not going to work properly anymore.

I'm going to go back to Mrs. Merton's question to, um, Debbie McGee. What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels? What is Google's driving force for telling people don't buy links?

Yeah.

Is it because they're a good guys and they want the internet to be lovely? And.

Absolutely. Their motto is do no evil Google.

Are not anymore. Not since I started doing evil. I mean, basically I use the term evil loosely. I mean, I'm talking about the way that they're moving away from letting us create fantastic apps and, and they automate.

It and slightly annoyed us to their evil.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. No, but what I'm driving at is you have to be somewhat cynical about this stuff because Google is telling us not to buy links, not to game the search engines because Google wants Google to be good. Google wants Google results to be great. And if people on mass game the search engine, then clearly good search results.

Will have no control anymore.

Will they have no control?

The people at the top of the rankings won't be the people. The best content will be.

And if people stop using Google because it's unreliable, they stop clicking Google ads and suddenly Google doesn't make any money. Because that's where it makes most money. What was driving at was, you've got to look at this and recognise that Google is an amazingly wealthy business. You know, we sometimes, I think, think of Google as being like the arbiter of all things good. And, you know, they've brought us these, these wonderful tools which help us find stuff. And they do, but they've made phenomenal amounts of money out of doing it. And good luck to them. I don't have an issue with that at all. But I guess where I'm going with this is, is that don't game the search engines in my view, don't do it because you will probably get found out eventually. And we are going off topic a little bit. I'll drag us back kicking and screaming on the topic just now, but um, at the same time, I mean, I mean, a lot of people would, with some justification, argue that ignore everything that Google says, do whatever you need to do to get rankings and get people on your website and sell stuff.

Well, I mean, look, there's, you know, I know people, um, who quite famously set up a new website every three to six months and, you know, kind of, you know, they'll do all the dirty, underhand tricks that Google will eventually find out, but it doesn't matter. They've got their website up there. It's ranking. They sell a few things. They close it down, they start the next one. It's a working model. Um, it's just if you want the longevity of your website, if you want it to be there in ten years and functioning well, you do have to, like you say, avoid all of that stuff and, and play by Google's rules really, don't you?

Yeah. Okay. So getting back onto the anatomy of a Google search ranking, let's have, um, let's have Acme engineering.

Um, an original and, uh.

Yeah, the.

Groundbreaking.

Acme engineering and, uh, give me another engineering company with widgets, arrows. Yeah. So we've got, and they both build, um, widgets. They both produce something which is the same thing. But when you go into Google and type for that thing, we find Acme Engineering on page one at the top, and they're getting loads of traffic and selling loads of products as a result of that. But actually the widgets are rows. I've forgotten the name already.

Widgets. Widgets.

Widgets. Arrows. Their product is is equally as good, if not better than Acme. Good luck. They're actually better. The. They're made out of better material. They last longer.

What materials that.

They made out of titanium instead of. Instead of some kind of lightweight alloy. Um, and they're just better, but their website doesn't appear sure, even though they talk about the widgets on the page. So this is a situation that a lot of our customers find themselves in. Like, why, why are they on page one for this search? And we're not, I mean, when we're better than they are, we've been around for longer. We've been doing this since God was in short pants, but they get found and we don't. What's going on there? You know, thinking about what we've just been talking about and trying to, excuse me, trying to understand this. The anatomy of a Google search ranking. Why are Acme killing it and getting loads of traffic and making loads of sales and widgets? Arrows are not getting found.

So I suppose the path here. I feel like you're trying to steer me down. Is that. Yeah. So essentially the first thing you'd want to check is how authoritative the two domains compared to each other, right? So if Acme Engineering are linked to by every major newspaper in the UK, they're constantly in the news. People are always referring to their articles or linking to their website. Then naturally they're going to have a lot more what we call domain authority, which is admittedly not like a super useful metric anymore, but proprietary third party programs like Mars or SEMrush often kind of try and work out how authoritative a site is based on how many people are linking to it. And that tells us how we think. Google will look at the site and think about it too, right? So a site with a high domain authority probably is well regarded by Google.

Okay, well I'm going to put some more meat on the bones. Um Acme Engineering's website has got around about three hundred pages in total. They've got product pages which say basically this is the stuff that we.

Sell.

Buy from us. And then they've got a load of information like blog posts and things explaining how their product works and talking around the subject of that, their products, the problems that their product solves, etc., etc.. And the website has been there because they recognise that the web is a potentially powerful tool for them. It's been there for about ten years, and it's been cited, linked to from quite a few other companies over the years, sometimes from a press release, sometimes from, you know, maybe somebody else was, was writing about a particular subject and they said, oh, by the way, you can buy these widgets from Acme widgets R us. I've been around for fifty years, but they kind of just didn't bother with the whole web thing. They've been around for fifty years. They were killing it. Everybody knew who they were. So their websites been around for eighteen months and you know, they paid websites hours, um, for their website. It's got ten pages.

Widgets are went to websites yesterday.

They did. And then all, all the websites got is ten pages. It's got like about us, it's got, uh, product pages and it's got a contact us page. Sure. So there's some meat on the bones. Tell me what's going on.

Yeah. So there's a few things to unpack there, isn't there? First thing again, you know, like I say, a website that's been there for longer that has lots of good content, it's more likely to attract links from other websites, well-cited websites, more authoritative, blah, blah, blah. The other thing though, I think that's really important to point out is that when Google is looking at a web page in isolation, I might articulate this horribly, so pull me back. If I do.

Oh, I'll pull you back.

It's often really tempting to think about ranking a website. You're actually trying to rank a specific web page, right? So in this instance, we're trying to rank Acme Engineering's page about titanium widgets. Say you've got to think how many times is that page linked to by other websites, but also by Acme Engineering's website? So if they've got sixty blog posts talking around the subject of titanium widgets, and they all point back to this product page, that page has a lot of what we call internal links. And if you're comparing that to a website, like what do you call them, engineering? Are US widgets. Widgets are US engineering. Widgets are us. There are no internal links. There's no content on their site pointing to that page. That's another big ranking factor, right? The fact that Google's looking at this page from widgets R us and it's saying, well, they're not even talking about this in their own content. You know, this isn't a priority for this domain. This isn't something they care about very much. Whereas the one on Acme engineering, you know, it's got sixty, seventy, eighty inbound links pointing to it, plus all the links from external websites. That paints a much clearer picture to Google. It says this page is important. This page is referred to often. Um, I mean, there's obviously other factors which I'm sure we'll cover off, but I just think that's quite an important one, right? People get very hung up on this idea of external citations, building links from other domains. But a lot of the times the most powerful links are the links you can build yourself, you know, just by going through your own content and thinking, okay, I can point to this page here.

And yeah, and the easy way to think about that is if you put yourself in the position of a user, if somebody's on a particular web page, does it make sense in the content to put in links to other content on your website that might help them, that might be useful for them? Yeah. Okay. So we've, I think what we're saying is because Acme Engineering recognised ten years ago that the web might be quite powerful, and they've gone about this in a serious way. And they've built not only content pages which talk about the stuff that they sell, but content pages that they that genuinely, genuinely helps people who might be in the market for buying what they sell by providing advice and thought leadership and all the stuff, which I'm sure a lot of people have been, you know, heard about until, till they're, you know, fed up with it. And widgets r us. I've got a quite rubbishy little website, ten pages all about them. Yeah. Okay. So again, going back to this anatomy of a web search, what I called it anatomy of a web search ranking. Uh, I think we've painted a fairly clear picture for people as to why Acme Engineering's page is ranking and why widgets are us isn't ranking right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think that's fair enough. Right. So moving on. And both Acme Engineering and Widgets R us recognise that there's another product which they're not making. Um, neither of them are making it, but there's a market for it. They realise that there's, there's a, there's, you know, it's a slightly different version or there's something that they're more than capable of producing. And so at the same time, um, widgets R Us and Acme Engineering Limited put some content on their website about this new product. Okay. And let's just assume for argument's sake, they both use the same number of photographs and they both put on the same number of words. They both put five hundred words on a brand new web page. Who's, who's getting onto page one of Google.

So it depends. So it's interesting that you said they put the the same number of words on, because I think that's the first thing to pick up on, right? It's really important. The Google uses lots of signals to work out how to rank a page. One of them is links, which we've already talked about. The other is obviously what is on the page. Google is looking to serve up relevant content that answers the questions that people are asking. So when they're evaluating two pages, if one of them is two hundred words long and the other is three thousand words long, chances are that Google is going to assume the one that's three thousand words long. Better answers the question.

Seems to me like a blunt instrument.

Yeah. Yeah.

I pride myself in being able to write concise content. So you're saying Google's going to punish.

Me if it doesn't work.

For giving people everything they need in two hundred words, whereas you might waffle on for two thousand words and you're going to get all the traffic.

It depends. I mean, and it's important as well to note that Google kind of differentiates between different kinds of content. So if it thinks people are typing something in where they want a quick answer, they want something succinct and concise, then yeah, it might prefer shorter articles. If it thinks that it's a subject that needs unpacking in detail, it might prefer longer articles. The point is that the length of content is important. It is a ranking factor. You have to try and match what you think Google is going to want to serve for a given.

So here's another curveball. The content, as I've already said, is exactly the same length, and the content says exactly the same thing in a different way. It's not. It's not the same words. The quality of the content, the information in it. They've used the right words in it. Everything about those two pieces of content means that there's nothing really to distinguish them. Which of those two sites is going to get most of that traffic?

Well, I suppose it's still going to be Acme engineering, right? Because they're still going to have the higher overall domain authority.

Yeah. And I think this is what people often miss, is that building out a website and putting lots of genuinely useful content. We're not talking about machine, machine written garbage. We're talking about proper thought leadership, really genuinely good content, and building out the overall authority of your site. Yeah, right. Here's an example. I'm not going to talk about the specifics, but we've got good authority at evolution dot com. We've got good authority. And if we find a search term that's not massively competitive. Yes. Then I'm not talking about, you know, like search engine optimisation expert Aboyne because like, well, we're the only ones in Aboyne. You know, it's not going to be difficult to rank for that. And we would never even try. But if it's something that is quite niche and it's, it's easy to rank for because it's not being chased by many other people.

Mhm.

Then our authority more or less guarantees that we can rank for it really quickly.

Yeah.

Purely that purely our authority, not because the page, it's because the page itself has got no authority. It's brand new. Sure.

But the the domain has authority. Yeah. That said, it is possible to outmaneuver very high domain authority websites that are considered very authoritative and outrank them for semi-competitive search terms just by creating better content. I think that is a kind of important caveat to that, right? It's like domain authority is important, but it will not make up for a shit page. You cannot just be. I don't know, I'm trying to think of like a a global engineering company that everybody would recognise. And I'm coming up short, I don't know, total BP.

Shell b e e system.

Sure you can't write a three hundred word page for something and hope just because you've got a domain authority of ninety, that it's gonna outrank somebody, you know, four page thesis on the subject. If that thesis genuinely provides better information. And I think, you know, when you whenever we're coming across a website that doesn't have great domain authority, but we do still want to rank content, it is then a game of like, let's find out how to outrank this authoritative website by producing better content than them.

Yeah. Okay. So, so is it about then based on what you were just saying and something I'd scribbled down, is it about picking fights, picking the right fights when it comes to trying to get a page to appear on page one, preferably at the top of page one for a specific Google search. In order to get clicks, in order to get eyeballs on your products and your business and generate leads enquiries.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of the time, a lot of the time, you will not be able to outdo the entrenched player who's produced fantastic content and has a really authoritative domain. It's a waste of time to try that. You can, though, always find keywords that they haven't gone for. You can find content of theirs that's weak and create something better than it for specific search terms. It's about being agile and about being smart, right? It's about not just kind of wading in and being like, well, we sell widgets. I want to be on page one for widgets, full stop, and trying to outrank somebody who's been there for thirty years who has, you know, six thousand inbound links to their widget page, who is absolutely killing it, who has reams of content about widgets. It's just not worth it.

Is there a quick and dirty way of figuring out whether a keyword, a search term that you think will generate leads for you? Is there a quick and dirty way of finding out Whether or not it's going to be difficult or easy to rank for.

So we've been doing a thing. There's a thing, I think. I think it's your technique really that I stole that I really like, where whenever we're looking at a search term that we think is going to be quite competitive, or we're not sure whether or not we can rank for it, I'll just take the top five current ranking domains and open all of the pages that they've got up for that search term. And actually look at, you know, how many inbound links they've got, how many words are on the page, how often are they using the keyword, how focused is the page? How useful is it? How authoritative is it? Yeah, exactly. And try and just kind of profile them. And if we find that we're coming up a lot against a lot of sites with a domain authority of eighty with a five thousand word article on the subject, we just think, well, that's, that's not going to happen. But sometimes you spot opportunities. Yeah, you spot the person in position number two actually only has a domain authority of twenty. And, you know, they haven't written a very good article and you think, okay, well, that's a that's a fight I can pick. Yeah.

Okay. What if you can't be arsed with all that? Is there an even easier way?

Uh.

Keyword difficulty.

Oh, yeah. I guess so. I don't know why I just never I mean, it's there. So SEMrush has a keyword difficulty feature.

And if you're not sure what that is, go to s e m I u s h dot com. SEMrush, semrush dot com. Sign up for a free trial. Play with the tool. It gives you all kinds of fantastic information about keywords, about your competitors, websites, what they rank for, just. It's just a great.

Yeah, it's a really great tool and it has a keyword difficulty feature. So when you type in a keyword, it'll tell you, you know, kind of how hard it thinks it's going to be for you to rank for that keyword. And I think to be fair to it, it is kind of considering a lot of those factors that I just mentioned, domain authority, keyword density, like how good the article is, that kind of stuff. I, I don't know if I ever trust automated tools. I think that might just be a me problem.

No, it isn't, it isn't a you problem at all. Because I think if you just trust it, you could look at a key term and think, well, that's impossible. It's, you know, unless you're Wikipedia or I don't know, something more credible than that, you're just never going to rank when in actual fact, if you dig a bit deeper, you think, actually, if we write a really stonking piece of content, we've got decent site authority. We can probably chase this. We can probably go after it.

Yeah, there have been definitely examples of that. Like I know of in the past where I've tried to rank content for a search term that it says is insanely competitive and won't happen. And it's actually been surprisingly easy. But I guess as a barometer, you know, like you say, if you can't be bothered to, to go and work out exactly what Google is trying to rank. I mean, I would caveat though with that, though, with the fact that Google is getting a lot smarter over time. And one of the things I think one of the things I think I see a lot more now is content that is geared towards a very specific kind of user experience or user expectation, where Google thinks the kind of content that people want to see for the search term is, I don't know, a twenty word summary or a video or, or a podcast. And, you know, SEMrush and tools like that haven't really kind of like caught up with that yet. So still, a lot of the time they're saying this keyword is really difficult. Whereas if you produced a video for it, it would rank immediately and be absolutely no trouble at all.

So yeah. So the way to do that is to carry out a specific search and look at the type of content that Google's putting on page one, because it's figured out this is what people are looking for.

Yeah. And I think also just to be aware that that that will change over time, right? It's like, none of this is static. Google will change the rules in another three months, and we'll all be rushing back out there to work out what to try and rank for what search terms and that sort of thing. So yeah.

Do you think Google considers external factors? I mean, if a business has been around forever and they're fantastic at what they do and they just haven't done any web stuff, it doesn't seem right that if somebody's looking for an organisation to help them, that that company doesn't show up just because they haven't put massive effort into their website, if they are actually the best people for the job. The problem is there a way around that? Does Google take any notice of that stuff at all?

I don't I think, well, I think it's tough because it speaks to that problem that you were saying earlier, right, which is that nobody is manually reviewing this stuff. It's all done by algorithms like very complex algorithms. But I don't know. Could you teach a machine to consider the context? Could you teach a machine to kind of unpick the history of a company and find out that they're actually the biggest player in the industry? I think realistically, it can only use the signals that are available to it, right? Which is things like inbound links. And that is not an exact science. I mean, to be honest with you, I don't even think it's a particularly good science because like you say, somebody who's been around since eighteen twenty or whatever, making steam engines, who knows everything there is to know about making steam engines.

They're making a resurgence. Steam engines.

Yeah. It's a big, big industry. I mean, we're talking about widgets a minute ago. So you'd be attacking me. Um, but yeah, I mean, you know, that's the thing, isn't it? Like anything you do offline, I don't really think Google can consider. Mhm.

But and I think that's the thing that some organisations, certainly organisations we speak to who are maybe just getting going with digital marketing. I think that's something that they miss. They just don't get how Google can't possibly know that they are the go to people for this particular thing. And there should be at number one, it's almost like they they feel because, you know, some of them are sort of back, back, back to the TV industrial complex where you simply paid to get in front of people. Yeah. And they, and they kind of don't understand why, because even with paid search, um, it's not just about chucking money at it.

No, not at all. We still have all these same problems with relevance. And, you know, whether or not Google thinks that the search term you're advertising on is reflected in your content and that sort of thing. So yeah, I mean, absolutely, I think it just goes back to that problem you were talking about earlier, which is people have a tendency to kind of humanise Google and think of it as a as a person that's searching around the web, but it's not, it's a machine. And it can see, you know, exactly what's in your web code and nothing else. And it has to interpret that in a certain way, which is, to be fair, why it has been historically so easy to game and why you used to be able to do things like hiding white text on a white background and stuff like that.

Which we came up against against. We came across recently, we had an in quite a fantastic enquiry came in from the States, and by doing some sniffing around, we figured out we've got white text on the white background, which, yeah, Google's gonna be not too impressed to see, I imagine.

Yeah. But I mean, yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, I think there's a tendency as well. And I think to be fair, we're guilty of it in this industry. We like to think that Google is much smarter and more sophisticated than it actually is. Like, ultimately it is just looking at a web page and saying, what's this about? How trustworthy is it? Should I rank it yes or no?

And it's got to look for readily available readings.

See right there.

There's probably other things. I mean, one of the things that's been talked about in the industry for a long time is whether or not Google is measuring how long somebody stays on a website. So if somebody carries out a search and they click a search result, a link in the search result, they go to a web page and then they're back again within 10s is and that happens a lot. Is Google looking at that and saying, well, we're showing that search result, sending people to that website, they come back 10s later, something's not right there. We're going to penalise that website. We're going to move it down the rankings because it's clearly not relevant. It's making us look bad. Yeah. Do you think that's happening?

I mean, the thing is, you'd think it would be foolish to ignore user signals. Google is, like you said earlier, Google is in the business of making sure that the things it ranks are engaging, that people enjoy using them, that people enjoy looking at its results. That's why they keep coming back. So if they're ignoring those signals, then foolish. But yeah, I mean, but.

What does that mean just before you move on from it? What does it mean to the business owner? I mean, if Google is, you know, if again, going back to the the anatomy of a search, a Google search ranking, um, if Google is measuring dwell time, if it's measuring how long somebody spends on a website before appearing back in, you know, at Google looking, looking for and still looking for answers, what's it telling the site owners? What's it telling business owners if that's if that's true?

Well, I mean, I guess the first thing is it just goes back to Google's actual advice, right? Which is create engaging content for users. It means that you actually have to take care to ensure that your website's providing an engaging experience, that you're giving people something rich to dig into and and interact with. It's not just a case of slap some words on the page. There you go. It ranks in Google. That's all you've actually got to do the work of making sure that people stick around.

So are you suggesting that businesses who entrust their website to a clueless intern, because surely that's what young people do, and we haven't got a clue about it. And it doesn't matter anyway. It might actually get penalised.

It's a dangerous game, for sure. There's a and I think again, it just speaks to like how far we've come as an industry and how fast things evolve, because it used to be the case that, you know, you just just write content, put it on the web, you've got lots of content for the search term. You rank for it. Fantastic. Now we've got to go a step further, and we've got to actually make something that's interesting to people that people stick around for, that people want to share with their friends that people want to come back to in two days time and look at again. That is the kind of game now, I suppose.

Okay, let's just precis then just to get this thing wrapped up and the anatomy of a Google search ranking first. First of all, what is Google trying to do when somebody types in a search.

Find the most relevant content that answers the question best.

Could you use the word best? Yeah. Best answers. Best content. Yeah. Okay. And it's looking for authority signals, which might be the site's been around for a long time. It's linked to by lots of other people. It's got tons of content on it. The list goes on. And there's tons of stuff which Google will never tell us that it's measuring in order to figure that out. Social media links from social media traditionally were told links from social media don't carry any value. Um, Google ignores them. Does it really ignore them? I mean, who knows?

Well, I mean yeah, again, it can't hurt can it? But yeah.

And then there are also, um, a raft of technical considerations which we haven't touched on. Um, and we're not going to touch on in this particular podcast. So things like we've had websites that have been set up in such a way that they have what's called a noindex directive. So actually, without the business owner even knowing, the website is.

Telling.

Google, Google, please ignore me. Just go away. Don't. Don't index me. That's the worst kind of. That's the extreme end of that, of that. But there are also, I mean, page load speed. And again, looking at that potential, uh, customer in the States that contacted us, we, you know, it's what they sell is almost certainly a second screen activity. It's a sort of thing that in the evening, chilling out, glass of wine, watching the telly and making these discretionary purchases, these like.

Luxury items.

Luxury, you don't need.

To live.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a good chance you're on your iPad, you're on your smartphone. And guess what? Their website.

Is not mobile.

Friendly, isn't a mobile friendly website. It's like, for goodness sake.

So we're not we're not touching on these deliberately then.

But yeah, but the idea of mobile friendly, um, is important because Google is a mobile first index now. So when Google is looking at your website, Mr. business owner and, and ranking it and, you know, making lots of decisions, it's looking at the mobile version of it.

And this is why as well, this is one of the reasons why things like page load speeds are so important, right? And I know that like the jury's out on whether or not your website speed really matters all that much. But one thing we do see a lot is websites that score really badly on mobile for, for load speeds for pages, loading properly for things, not moving around all over the place. And that kind of stuff, again, is very technical, but it does have an impact on how well your website can rank for a search term.

Okay, okay. So if you're listening to this and you're still confused, um, that wouldn't surprise me at all. But if you've got any more questions around the subject of Google search rankings, search optimisation, or any other aspect of digital marketing, and you'd like Alex and I or the team to discuss them in future podcasts, then do get in touch. Got a revolution dot com? Send us a note and phone us. Email us, use one of the forms on the website. You can also get in touch via redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface where the podcast lives. Um, if you'd like to come on and talk about any aspect of digital marketing, we'd be delighted to hear from you if you, we seem to be getting a good listenership in the States. Yeah. according to our stats, which is, which is really good. Um, if you just drop us a line and tell us that you're enjoying the podcast and not even looking for like, I'm not saying like, you know...

And also why write a review?

You know, we would kind of like to know we've had feedback and we kind of, we've got a feel for what it is people want and why they like this podcast particularly, but I personally would be quite interested in getting some feedback, good or bad, to help us make the podcast more relevant, to help us make it better, or if we're doing a good job to keep doing a good job. So if you listen to this and you're somewhere in the States or in the UK, but quite interested in people in the States, um, because we didn't set out to try.

And not.

Because there's a lot of podcasts covering the subjects that we discuss, although maybe not in the way we discuss them. Uh, you know, please just drop us a line, just give us some feedback and we really appreciate it. In the meantime, Alex, are you going to go off and buy some more links for that website you're trying to rank?

Um. Yeah. No. Absolutely not. Shuffles papers nervously for now.