Most business owners have a vague sense that Google “reads” their website and decides where it should appear. That’s roughly right, but the vague version leads to expensive mistakes: paying for things that don’t matter, and ignoring the things that do. Understanding how Google search works, in plain terms, fixes most of that.
You don’t need to understand search engines like an engineer. You do need a working model of how Google search works, because every SEO decision you’ll ever make fits into one of its three jobs.
So, as we start the year, here’s that model in plain English.
How Google search works: the three jobs it does
Job one: finding your pages
Google uses automated programs, usually called crawlers, to discover pages on the web. They find new pages mostly by following links, from other websites and from within your own site. They also use sitemaps, which are simple files listing the pages you want found.
If a page has no links pointing to it and isn’t in your sitemap, Google may never find it. This is more common than you’d think. Landing pages built for an old campaign, services added in a hurry, blog posts that were never linked from anywhere: they all end up stranded.
What this means for you: every important page should be reachable through normal links on your site, ideally within a few clicks of the homepage.
Job two: understanding and storing them
Once a page is found, Google tries to work out what it’s about and decides whether to add it to its index, the enormous library it pulls search results from. Not every page makes it in. Google may skip pages it sees as duplicates, very thin, blocked by a technical setting, or simply not useful enough to store.
Being crawled is not the same as being indexed. And being indexed is not the same as ranking. Plenty of sites have pages Google knows about but has chosen not to show anyone.
What this means for you: pages need clear, specific content that says what the page is for. A service page with two sentences and a stock photo gives Google very little to work with.
Job three: ranking them for a search
When someone searches, Google looks through its index and orders the results it thinks will best answer that query. It uses a very large number of signals to do this, and it doesn’t publish the full recipe. Anyone who tells you they know exactly how Google search works at that level is overselling.
What Google has been fairly open about is the broad shape of what it looks for:
- Relevance. Does the page actually match what the person is looking for, in the words they’d use?
- Quality and trust. Is the content genuinely helpful, and is there evidence the business behind it is real and credible?
- Usability. Does the page load reasonably quickly, work on a phone and let people do what they came to do?
- Context. Where is the searcher, what device are they on, and what have similar searchers found useful?
- Reputation. What does the rest of the web say about you, through links, mentions and reviews?
Location matters a lot for local businesses. Someone searching “emergency electrician” in Bootle will see different results from someone searching the same thing in Chester, which is why a national-style SEO approach often misses the point for a local firm.
Why results keep changing
How Google search works isn’t fixed. Google adjusts its systems constantly, with occasional larger updates that shuffle results more noticeably. Your competitors are also changing their sites, earning reviews and publishing content. So rankings move, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with anything you did.
This is why no honest agency guarantees a position. They can improve the odds. They can’t control the outcome.
Google has three jobs: find your pages, understand them, and decide whether they deserve to be shown. Most SEO problems are a failure at one of those three stages.
What the search results page actually looks like now
The classic “ten blue links” is rarely what people see. Depending on the search, a results page can include ads at the top, a map with three local businesses, a panel of questions people also ask, shopping listings, videos, and AI-generated summaries. The organic listings you’re competing for might start quite a way down the screen.
That has two practical consequences. First, for local service businesses, the map listings (driven largely by your Google Business Profile) can matter as much as your website ranking. Second, a first-page ranking doesn’t always mean much traffic if the page is crowded with other features. It’s worth searching your own key terms, on your phone, logged out, to see what a customer actually sees.
Five things to do this month
- Search your three most important services plus your town on your phone. Note who appears in the map and in the organic results.
- Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google to get a rough sense of which pages are indexed. It’s not an exact count, but missing pages will stand out.
- Check each key service has its own page, linked from your main menu.
- Set up Google Search Console if you haven’t. It’s free and it’s Google telling you directly how it sees your site.
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile if you serve customers locally.
Where to go from here
Once you know how Google search works and which of the three jobs is letting you down, the fix is usually much clearer. Sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it’s thin content, sometimes it’s that nobody outside your business has ever mentioned you online.
If you’d like a hand working out which it is, our SEO service starts with exactly that kind of diagnosis, in plain English, before anyone recommends spending money on fixes.
