How Google Works & The 4 Pillars of SEO

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show. Welcome to the SEO show for another week. I'm your host, Michael, and I'm joined by my co-host Arthur. Hey, how's it going? Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. Can't complain. Especially when we're talking about SEO, my favorite thing in the world to do.

ARTHUR: My favorite, sir.

MICHAEL: Oh, wow. What a pair of losers we are. Today we're going to be talking about SEO. how Google works, first and foremost, and then, I guess, how SEO works and the key principles of SEO. Now, when I say how Google works, no one knows how Google works, right? Do you know?

ARTHUR: No. And if they say they know, they're lying.

MICHAEL: Exactly. We'd be billionaires if we knew exactly how Google works. In fact, Google themselves come out often and say they don't know how it works. There's so many elements to the way they go about ranking sites that are controlled by computers and machine learning. is set on its merry way. And yeah, no one truly knows at its core exactly what Google's up to at any given point in time. But we do have a good understanding of first, how Google works in principle. And from our own experience doing SEO, what you need to focus on to try and influence how Google works. Would that be fair in saying, do you think, Arthur? Yeah, I think so. Cool. Awesome. Well, let's chat about how Google works. I guess for me the best way of thinking about it is like Google is the library of the internet. You know, it's their job to have every single website or every single webpage ready to go in their library and anyone that's using the internet can borrow from that library. Does that make sense?

ARTHUR: That makes perfect sense. Yeah. That's a good analogy, I guess. Okay.

MICHAEL: You guess. I think it is because like, right. You know, it basically, it goes out, finds everything, stores it. And if people search for it.

ARTHUR: It's just a massive database basically of website or web pages that returns a webpage based on the search query that someone puts in. Correct.

MICHAEL: So, you know, a library, if we think about library down the road, it might have 500 books in it. Mm. Google's got, I guess, an infinite number of books. So how's it going out and finding all of these books? When I say books, I mean webpages and websites. Well, basically what it does is it deploys crawlers or software known as crawlers or spiders. There's all sorts of ways you can refer to them. But this software basically moves across the web from page to page, just like you would when you're using the web. So you might go to a website, click a link, go through to the About page, and then go off somewhere to social media, and then go to a news site, and you're following links. Basically, these crawlers do the same thing, right? They go follow links and read everything on a page very quickly, much quicker than you and I can read. And it stores all of that information back on Google servers, back at Google's evil lair, back at HQ. And this index that they store it all in is massive. It's got literally billions and billions and billions of pages. So that's one thing. They've stored all of that information. So that's awesome. But how do they find what the searcher is looking for when they go in there? They're librarians. How do they go and find the book that someone's looking for out of hundreds of billions of books that they've got in their index? Their algorithm. That's correct. The algorithm is how they do it. The magical algorithm. And actually, the way Google works, it's not just one algorithm. It is multiple algorithm. Algorithmi. Not sure. Algorithms. Algorithms. That's the correct term. Yeah. Joined together, all doing different things. But really, I guess the principle of an algorithm is that it uses a range of different factors or sort of inputs to then determine what the most relevant outputs are. And so what you'll find is that Google's looking at things like keywords and the query that the person has searched, and is that relevant to the things that they're returning. And it looks at things like the usability of the website that they're going to return, and the expertise of the people that have written the thing that's going to be returned, and the location of the person, and technical things, and all sorts of different factors go into this algorithm. And you know, it's super fast in a blink of an eye, it's going to decide what it thinks the most relevant through to the least relevant pages to show, uh, for whatever you've typed into Google. So you with me still, does that all make sense? No. Yeah. It makes perfect sense. I'd hope so.

ARTHUR: Since we've been working, we've been doing it for a long time, so you don't need to explain SEO to me.

MICHAEL: Yes. Yes. But this isn't for you. This is for our loyal listeners after one episode. So basically, that's how Google works. It's a library, it's got a super smart librarian that can find things really quickly and give you what you're looking for. So with these algorithms… These are the areas that, or these are the factors that you can influence if you want to have some sort of an impact on what Google's showing in its search results. If it's looking at factors, and you really juice up your factors, or you really make them really appealing to Google, Google's crawlers really love it, and the algorithms really love it, it stands to reason that your site's going to move up in the rankings. So that's what SEO is, search engine optimization. Pretty simple. It's optimizing your website. to be like crack for Google. That's one way of putting it. That is one way of putting it. Probably not the best, but I think it works. It makes sense. Yeah. So how do you do that? Because, you know, there's a commonly bandied about thing that, um, or not thing of saying that there's over 200 different factors that you can optimize or that go into the Google ranking algorithm. Have you heard that before?

ARTHUR: I have, yeah. Some might say even more.

MICHAEL: I would definitely say even more. That's super old. I think someone said it once 15 years ago or something like that. And SEO community have sort of latched onto that and said, there's over 200 factors, and we'll optimize all of them. But really, Google themselves have said, within each factor, there could be 50 different variables. So really, it's super complex. And no one really knows all of the different things that you can optimize to give Google what it's looking for. And it's not like there's a blanket rule or sort of set of things that can be applied because each industry is different. Each keyword is different. The intent behind what people are searching for is different. So anyone that says they've got it all figured out, that's pretty much bullshit, right?

ARTHUR: They don't know.

MICHAEL: We can sometimes say we do, but we would never say we've got it all figured out. But look, what we do say is largely, Yes. There's a lot of different ranking factors, but they boil down into four main pillars, right? Yeah. What would the four main pillars be?

ARTHUR: Technical content on-site authority and UX, I'd say.

MICHAEL: Correct. So if you just think about your website through the lens of these pillars and optimize the important areas, you're going to do better than most people that aren't doing that. Definitely. So it's pretty simple. On-site pillar is basically what you can do to your actual website's content itself, right? So what would be some of the main things that you can do there?

ARTHUR: are just, I guess, basic on-site optimizing your page titles, your headings, making sure that all the content is optimized, you're targeting the right keywords for each page, targeting different variations of keywords. Yeah, basically just looking at the page and making sure the content in the page is relevant to the search term. Right.

MICHAEL: So coming back to our librarian analogy, that's like the pages in the book that Google's reading. So that's pretty straightforward. Now, the next pillar is the technical side of things. So that's really just the code and the CMS, the server, the nerdy stuff, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah. That's what I guess what a lot of people get confused and find a bit more tricky, a bit more hard to understand.

MICHAEL: It can be the daunting part where an SEO salesman is sort of dazzling you with jargon related to HTTPS, SSL, CSS, JavaScript. Your eyes sort of glaze over and then they'll say, listen, just pay us money and we'll fix it. A lot of the time with technical, it's just about making it easy for Google's crawlers to move through your site and find all of that content on the site. So most websites these days, if you're built on a good platform, WordPress or Shopify or something like that, most of the technical stuff is handled out of the box. But anyway, that's one area that you can focus on. The next one, we'll save the biggest to last, so we'll go on to UX next, user experience. So this is basically, are people enjoying using your site and finding it easy to use your site and is Google sort of seeing that people are using the site well. So an example of this might be if they, Google, serve up a search result, and someone clicks through to your site, but they very quickly bounce back to the search result because your site is slow or ugly or hard to use, that's a bad user experience.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think it's becoming more and more important these days, especially with these recent updates that are coming out. Google's focusing on user experience more than it ever has. So making sure that the site is appealing to the end user is crucial.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. Because Google, at its core, or as a business, they want to serve the most relevant, best experience to their customers or their users possible. So if they have a listing of search results where people find what they're looking for, that's a good experience, that means that Google continues to be a billion dollar business. If they're serving up trash, where the website's bad and the people aren't enjoying it, People might use Bing, they might move away and use Bing. Unlikely, but you know, as a business that's what Google's really caring about. They want a good experience for their customers. So the last pillar, the biggest pillar in SEO always has been, continues to be, doesn't matter what anyone might say to the contrary, this is the biggest aspect. What is it? It's link building. Link building, the off-site pillar. Why is it such an important part of SEO?

ARTHUR: It's also very controversial sometimes because I guess link building, when all things put together, when you're looking at a site, you have two sites identical. Both have perfect on-site, technically sound. It's going to be the site that has the most authoritative links pointing to it. That's going to outrank the other.

MICHAEL: Right. And so I guess a way that we like to explain it is that if you think of a link to a website, it's like a vote for the quality or the authority of that site. The more of those votes you have, the better you're going to do in the eyes of Google. That's right, yeah. So pretty simplified right there. Yeah. We are going to get into all of these pillars in subsequent episodes. But yeah, don't be dazzled by 200 ranking factors or 10,000 ranking factors or whatever the case may be, because they all neatly fit essentially into these main pillars. And like anything in life, the old 80-20 principle applies. If you get the key elements of all of these pillars done on your site, you're going to see good results. So that's what we're going to talk about in the next few episodes. That's about it from me for today. Did you have anything you wanted to chuck on the end of that?

ARTHUR: I actually have a question. What do you think is the most important pillar out of those four?

MICHAEL: I think link building is still the most important. Because let's say there's five websites competing for the term criminal lawyer Sydney. If they are all nailing it with their onsite and their technical and their UX, and it's just a really good experience there, the only way Google's going to be able to figure out who is the best site is by looking at their link profile or the authority of that domain.

ARTHUR: Why do you think that link building has such a bad rep sometimes? A lot of people are scared to do it. A lot of people think that it's black hat. or get you penalized maybe later on.

MICHAEL: Well, I think because it can, you know, you do it the wrong way, your site can be blown out of the search results rather than helping you, it can really hurt you and set you back. That has been the case since probably 2012 now, like it used to be the case, you could just build a ton of links and you would really do well. Google search results is volume one, one out every day. Yeah. Now Google, I guess if you take a step back, Google want people to pay them money to run ads on Google ads. They don't necessarily want people getting free traffic. No, of course not. A lot of people invested in SEO and invested in links because once they get there, the reward is a huge and they're not paying Google for those rewards. So Google were incentivized to crack down on that to sort of scare people from doing stuff that works. Link building works. It influences the algorithms. It helps sites move up in the rankings. Google want to disincentivize that sort of behavior. So that's why people can be scared about link building, because it can really drop a bomb on their website. But the fact of the matter remains that if you're in a competitive space, you need link building as part of your strategy, because your competitors are. They all will be. So I will be talking about all of these pillars in more detail. We're going to dedicate an episode to each pillar. We'll get really deep on link building on that pillar. But for now, that's about all we have for this episode. I hope to catch you in the next one. See ya. See ya.

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