In a SB (Small Business) Authority Market Sentiment Survey conducted by The Small Business Authority, in 2015 that surveyed close to 1,000 business owners revealed that 45% of the business owners acknowledged that search engine optimization plays a vital role in throwing open new business venues.
President and CEO of The Small Business Authority, Barry Sloane said that only a very small number of small business entrepreneurs are using their website as a vital marketing tool. There are many who have not exploited the power of the search engine in optimizing their websites. He also added that it could be because of the constant changes in the search engine algorithms the small business owners are finding constant monitoring and optimizing the website painful. He wants the small business owners to pay attention to their Internet presence to increase the revenue.
Many small businesses who have their websites are not aware of how Google search engine works to rank their pages. Here we made it simpler for the small businesses to understand how google works and also why it’s necessary to optimize the company website.
Google, the search engine runs over a distributed of network across thousands of computers that have the capability to carry out parallel data processing very quickly and also display the search results on the results page. To make this possible, google has three unique parts such as
- A crawler is also known as Googlebot. The web crawlers are software programs that look into the webpages and keep track of the links on the webpages. These programs help to send the data into the google’ servers. The websites owners have control over how Google crawls and indexes their site. There exists a set of Webmaster Tools and also a file known as robot.txt. The site owners can make changes to this file. They can give specific instructions on how to process the content of each page of their website
- An Indexer indexes each and every word on all the web pages of the website and stores the results in a huge database. Google’s Index is similar to that of the index of a book. The data is gathered at the time of crawling. When a user searches for an information, Google’s algorithms look into the index database to retrieve the appropriate pages. The search engine’s indexing takes into account many aspects of the webpages such as the content of page, whether it contains pictures as well as videos, when it was published, appended and modified and many more.
- The query processors then compare the search query with the words in the index and displays the relevant content from the websites that matches with the search word. The query processor has several parts. To make it simpler, let’s see how it works. When the user keys in the search word in the search box it is then send to the webservers and this in turn is send to the index servers. After tracking the relevant indexes, the index server sends the data to the document server. From the document server, the data is retrieved and snippets of each website that is displayed on the results pages are also generated. All this happens within fraction of a second. Google matches multi-word phrases as well as sentences in a webpage and also indexes the html code along with the text on the webpage. Therefore, the users can decide where to place the keywords.
How Google Search Works
There are mainly three types of searches. They are as follows:
- Paid Search results- It’s also known as Adwords and it is usually shown on the top of the page and are highlighted. Here the companies have paid Google for specific keywords and they would be display their sites on the top when that keyword is searched for.
- Organic Search- The search results that show up directly below the paid search. It is the search engine that determines the order and the page rank of the sites.
- Local Search Results- When a user is searching for an organization or a specific industry, Google will return these pages between the organic pages with the google map and the address and telephone numbers.
On Page and Off Page Ranking factors
When the website of a small business is displayed in the local search and organic search positions, it means that the traffic comes to the website free of costs and is of great significance. Two primary factors that Google uses to determine which sites should show up in local and organic search results are the –
- On Page ranking factors where the contents of the website, the domain name, the words included in the link of a specific page, title of the page are taken into consideration by the search engine. Here the small business owner is in control of what contents goes into the website pages. That is keywords if used wisely and strategically will help to rank the pages higher.
- Off Page ranking factors are determined solely by Google and is not in the direct control of the website owners. There are many factors that are considered in off page optimization. However, the most import factor is the websites that are linked to your site, the relevance as well as the quality of the linked sites are also considered by Google. For instance, for a small business would be ranked highly if its site is linked to the CitySearch or similar websites that have the address, phone number and the reviews of the business. This will help google determine that it can rank the business in the local search ranking.
Three strong reasons why small businesses should optimize their websites for local results
If a small business has a local presence, it needs to try to rank high in Google’s local search results first. There are three strong reasons for this.
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If the business is not showing up in the local search results and the competitor businesses are, then chances are you are losing customers.
Any effort to help your business rank better in Google’s local search result will lead to better ranking in the organic results. - Several of the sites that businesses add for ranking better in the local search results will themselves feature in the organic results when folk search for the small business or similar businesses.
Watch out this space for more articles on how to rank your small business’ website on Google’s local search results.
