How do search results pages rank content?

Improve your company's digital visibility through the discovery, relevance, and authority stages.

Search engine optimization is a valuable asset to your company and its online presence. To establish a company website with a lot of digital traffic, you need to know how to optimize your content for search engines. You can improve your company’s website and its visibility in three simple stages: discoverability, relevance, and authority.

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1. Discovery Stage (Crawling)

The first stage of the SEO process is the discovery stage, where search engine bots “crawl” your website to find content. These bots then search the internet to discover websites, web pages, and more, noting what content is being shown where and how often. To check if your site is being crawled or discovered, use the "site:" operator in Google Search followed by your domain name. If none of your pages appear, it means they aren’t being discovered, and you need to take action.

2. Relevance Stage

Once your content is discovered, the search engine bots determine the relevance of your company's online content by indexing. To see whether your page is being indexed, insert “site:[yourcompany.com]” into Google’s search bar. The number of pages of indexed content will appear above the first search result. The relevance stage decides how relevant your content is against other similar content based on keywords, which is why ensuring your website and online content align with keywords relevant to your company and industry is important. It’s how search engine bots determine your content relevance and ultimately affect how often your content is shown in search results. 

3. Authority Stage

The last stage is the authority stage, which is also referred to as ranking. This involves search engine bots ranking content based on your site’s SEO authority, which is determined by backlinks –– links to your content from other websites. You want high authority as it directly impacts your company’s ranking strength.The more authority you have, the more likely your website and content will appear in search engine results. 

To optimize your SEO strategy, consider which stages above need more work and focus on improving them. For example, do you have great content going out but not many leads from them? You should focus on getting your content to rank and improving your authority. 

You should also establish SMART goals for SEO and your KPIsso you can measure your efforts and see what practices work best for your company. Last but not least, make sure you optimize your content to help your users find the information they are looking for, not just to check off a box on the SEO master guide. 

If you're still struggling with optimizing your company’s content, let us help by using our certifications and SEO industry best practices to attract leads through fresh, frequent, and expert blog content and story-offering topics, tips, and trends.