SEO Guide
How Google Search Works: A Plain-English Guide for Business Owners
Most business owners meet search engine optimization as a sales pitch: someone promises page one, quotes a monthly fee and talks in acronyms. It is hard to judge any of that without knowing what Google actually does with a website. The good news is that the basics are not complicated, and once you have them, most SEO advice sorts itself into 'makes sense' and 'smells wrong.'
Google describes its own process in three stages: crawling, indexing and serving results. We add a step in front, discovery, because it is where a surprising number of small sites fall down. Every page on your site has to get through all four before a single customer can find it.
Stage one: Google has to find the page
Google does not know your page exists until something points to it. It finds new addresses mainly by following links from pages it already knows about, and from sitemaps, which are simple files listing the pages on a site. A brand-new business with no links pointing at it and no sitemap can sit unnoticed for a long time.
The fixes are ordinary. Make sure every page on your site is linked from at least one other page (an 'orphan' page that nothing links to is easy to miss). Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console, which is free and which we walk through in our Search Console guide. And get a few genuine links from elsewhere: your Google Business Profile, the local Chamber, the suppliers and trade associations you belong to.
Stage two: Googlebot has to be allowed in
Once Google knows an address, its crawler (Googlebot) visits and downloads the page. Two things commonly stop it. The first is a file called robots.txt, which tells crawlers which parts of a site to stay out of. It is useful for keeping them out of a shopping cart or an admin area, and disastrous when a developer leaves a 'block everything' rule in place after launch. It happens more often than you would think, usually because the rule was added while the site was being built and nobody removed it.
The second is a slow or unreliable server. Google adjusts how hard it crawls a site to how well the site copes. A cheap host that times out under load gets visited less, so changes take longer to show up.
Stage three: the page has to be worth keeping
Crawling is not the same as being in the index. After fetching a page, Google tries to understand it (the text, the headings, the images, any structured data) and decides whether to store it. This is the stage where a lot of small-business pages quietly drop out, and the reasons are worth knowing:
- A 'noindex' tag. A line of code that tells Google not to keep the page. Like the robots.txt rule, it is often left over from a staging site.
- Duplicates. If ten pages say almost the same thing (common with copy-pasted town pages), Google picks one to keep and treats the rest as copies. Our article on local landing pages covers how to avoid that.
- Thin content. A page with a heading, a stock photo and two sentences gives Google little reason to keep it when better answers exist.
- Content Google can't see. Text baked into an image, or a menu that only exists as a PDF, is much harder to read than plain text on the page.
One small but important detail: a page blocked in robots.txt can't be crawled, so Google never sees a noindex tag on it. If you want a page kept out of search results, let it be crawled and tell it 'noindex.' If you just want crawlers to stay out, use robots.txt. Mixing the two up is a classic mistake.
Stage four: ranking happens fresh for every search
When someone types a search, Google pulls the pages from its index that might answer it and puts them in order. There is no fixed 'rank' your site holds; the order is worked out for that search, by that person, in that place, at that moment. Google says the main things it weighs are the meaning of the search, how relevant each page is, the quality of the content, how usable the page is, and the searcher's context, such as their location.
For local businesses the location part matters a great deal. For map results, Google names three factors: relevance (does your business match the search?), distance (how far are you from the searcher, or from the place they named?) and prominence (how well known and well reviewed are you?). You can't move your shop, but you can influence the other two, which is what our Google Business Profile checklist is for.
This is also why two people searching the same words can see different results, and why checking your own ranking from your office tells you little. Search Console shows how you actually appear across all the real searches you were shown for, which is far more useful.
What this means for your website
Put the four stages together and most of what matters for a small business is not mysterious at all:
- Make every page findable: linked from your menu or another page, listed in a sitemap, submitted in Search Console.
- Make sure nothing is blocking Google: check robots.txt and noindex tags after every launch or redesign.
- Give each page a clear, distinct job, written in plain text, so Google can tell what it is for and why it differs from the page next to it.
- Answer the search better than the alternatives: specific services, real places, real photos, real prices or price guides, and a fast page that works on a phone.
Notice that none of those involve tricks. Search engines have spent decades getting better at ignoring tricks, and the remaining 'secrets' mostly come down to doing the basics thoroughly. The work is in the thoroughness.
Questions to ask anyone selling you SEO
Now that you know the stages, you can ask better questions. Ask which stage the work is aimed at. Ask what they will check in Search Console, and whether you will have access to it yourself (you should, and it should be in your name). Be wary of anyone who guarantees a position on page one: Google itself says nobody can guarantee a top ranking. And ask what happens to the work if you stop paying. Good SEO leaves behind pages, fixes and content that you keep.
If you would like to see where your own site stands, our free website audit checks the technical basics, and every ZONA package includes the on-page setup described here. Or send us a note and we will look at it with you.
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