Search engines use robots that crawl webpages across the internet to determine what content they contain and, in turn, what the pages are about. These bots scan the code, picking up the written text, images, videos, and more that appear on web pages to gather all information possible. Once they’ve gathered enough intel about the type of information available on each page and determined that this content will be useful to their searchers, they add these pages to their index. The index is essentially all possible web results that a search engine stores to provide to a potential searcher.

Search engines assess what the best result is based on what searchers are looking for, as well as what other information already exists online. When someone searches, their algorithm matches the user’s search query to the relevant information in their index, providing searchers with an accurate answer to their query. The platforms then use hundreds of signals to determine the order in which the content will appear for each searcher. These signals are what SEO experts try to master.

It’s important to note that Google does not release specifics about its algorithm or process, so it’s impossible to know exactly what factors impact indexing and rankings. SEO, therefore, isn’t a perfect science, and even when it seems that all optimizations have been implemented, it often requires patience and continual tweaking to see results.