
For most businesses, hiring a results-focused SEO agency in Auckland is the best approach to improve a website’s ranking in Google. There are things you can do, however, to ensure you get the best results from your SEO investment. This includes knowing how Google works.
With this knowledge, you will have a better understanding of what the SEO agency is doing for your business as well as what you are getting for your money.
So, let’s get right into it. Google and other search engines do three main things:
For Google, these are successful results, i.e. in both the examples above, it answers the searcher’s query. Without doing anything further, the searcher knows the time in Rome in the first example and gets a definition of the word “fugacious” in another.
For most searches, however, Google presents the user with a list of ranked web pages.
This is the part of how Google works that causes the most confusion – how does Google determine the ranking of pages for the billions of searches it processes every day?
It does this by first looking at relevance and then looking at popularity. This is where Google’s search algorithm comes in. It is essentially a computer programme which assesses the pages of your website to determine how relevant they are to the user’s search as well as how popular they are compared to all the other relevant pages it has in its index.
The only people who completely understand how the Google search algorithm works are the top engineers in the company. What we do know is that Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine a website page’s relevance and popularity.
What’s the Point of SEO if Google’s Search Algorithm is Secret?
While the inner workings of Google’s search algorithm are secret, the company does give us enough information to understand what it looks for. So, we can’t be sure we know every ranking factor that Google uses, and we don’t know the exact level of priority it places on each one, but we do have a good enough understanding of how it works to improve the ranking of a website page in Google.
You can even find this information yourself by researching on the internet. As with most things, however, it is usually best to use an expert SEO agency in Auckland.
That said, knowing how Google works will help you select the right SEO agency for your business, and it will ensure you get the best possible return on investment for SEO work done.
- Crawl the internet to find websites and web pages
- Build an index of the pages it finds
- Present its users with these pages in a list of ranked results

