SEO

Google ranking

Position your site on Google and search engines!
With its jargon of insiders and its constant evolutions, the Google referencing is sometimes a very vague notion. Our agency specialized in natural referencing offers various services ranging from audit to support through the choice of a strategy or its implementation if necessary.

We explain here all the basics of referencing on the Google search engine and answer 10 essential questions that you may ask yourself on this subject:

What is natural Google ranking?

Search Engine Optimization is a specialized branch of digital marketing (or webmarketing). Also called SEO (search engine optimization), Google referencing consists in improving the position of a site and thus its visibility on the search engine. This visibility will depend on the keywords worked. To do this, it is necessary to optimize the text but also the structure of the html code that contains it through On-Page SEO techniques. The Google Pagerank algorithm being based on the links that sites make between them, the work of the SEO will also focus on netlinking or link building in order to obtain the precious backlinks that will reinforce and improve the work of content and technical optimization.

Is it possible to operate a website without working on its referencing on Google?

In order to answer this question, it is necessary to understand what the web or the internet is and how Google works.

1. The web, as its name indicates, is a huge canvas similar to the universe, your site is a star in the middle

Today anyone can create a website in a few clicks. According to the British company Netcraft, which has been monitoring the web for 25 years and is an authority in the field, as of 25/08/2021, there would be more than 1 billion 200 million websites (see their Web Server Survey).
Even if the numbers are not comparable, the idea is that the web is a bit like the universe of which we know only a small part. And your website is a small star lost among many others.

2. Google: the largest road map on the web to date

Google has therefore created an index or a catalog of all existing websites. For each website it will visit its different pages and record the content.
In its explanatory site, Google informs us that its index contains hundreds of billions of pages:

referencement Google - Net'Wash

So is it possible to operate a website without working on its SEO on Google? It all depends on your objectives.
If you operate a small association website which is only used by its members and you spread its address through word of mouth and email exchanges, the answer is probably yes.
If on the other hand your site is used to do business and you need it to bring you customers, then the answer is clearly no.

If you don’t work on your Google referencing, how will people know about you and come to your site?
Even for a small association that has no ambition, being listed and well positioned on Google will allow you to get known. Maybe there are people near you who would like to join but don’t because they don’t know you.

At Net-Wash we believe that being visible on Google is a necessity, whatever your goal is. And we will explain why in the next paragraph.

What is Google’s market share in France and in the world?

Many specialist sites put forward figures but without explaining the sources.
To date, the figures published by third-party sources suggest 40,000 to 60,000 searches per second on Google.

It is true that Google does not publish statistics on this subject. Nevertheless, some information is leaking out. In its video “Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers: A (home) movie about how Google Search works”, Google tells us this:

Net'Wash-referencement Google

This means that in just under 30 minutes, there are over 100,000 million searches on Google. This is equivalent to more than 3 million searches per minute, or more than 55,000 searches per second.
So the numbers look good. And we know where they come from.

If we take statcounter’s figures on the online search market, 92% of the searches are done on Google. That means that for every 10 people who do a search, 9 do it on Google. If you are using your site to do business, out of every 10 potential leads that are online, 9 will use Google to find you.

And the numbers are the same in the French market: 92% of searches in France are done on Google. The Ecosia and Qwant engines only manage to capture 1% and 0.92% of searches respectively.

Is it necessary to argue to make you understand the importance of being visible and well referenced on Google?

What immediate SEO tools can be activated?

Your website already appears on Google but you are not satisfied with its referencing. You wonder how to make it generate more visits quickly? We will try to give you some general advice knowing that to better understand the problem, an audit is sometimes (or even often) necessary.

First of all, as you will see in the next paragraph, natural referencing on Google takes time. There is, to date, no magic formula to get overnight qualified traffic in quantity.

But if you want relatively quick results, it may be worthwhile to review the optimization of your pages and the content you present on them.

  1. Start by making a list of keywords that match what your target would type. 
  2. Check that these keywords are present in your texts and that your texts are sufficiently worked out to be relevant on these keywords.
  3. Check the on page optimization of each of your pages
  4. Try to create more pages that would work on other keywords not yet present on your site

Optimization and adding new keywords are fast Google referencing methods that can give equally fast results.

For the rest (off page/off site optimization) commonly called netlinking, indeed it takes time (find the sites, publish on them, exchange articles, get interviewed, …).

Finally, there is a way to appear quickly at the top of Google results but it is a bidding system (Google adwords), therefore paying, which we will discuss in the last paragraph.

Finally, for physical businesses, the “local” referencing on the GoogleMap (also called GoogleMyBusiness referencing) can be a quick way to get visibility. If you don’t have too many competitors in your business on your sector.

How long does it take to get listed on Google?

The referencing on Google cannot be immediate and this for several reasons.

First of all because Google has to read the page. In the SEO jargon we call this “crawling” the page. Google has small robots that have a name: GoogleBot, which browse the web continuously to discover pages and read their content.
Then the algorithm will decide to keep or not the page: this is called “indexing”. There are several reasons why Google could decide not to index the page:

  • because the site owner asks him not to index the page
  • because the page is a copy of an existing page
  • because the content is considered too poor by Google to be worthwhile

Once the page is crawled and indexed, it is stored in a place. This is called “caching”. And regularly, Google will send a GoogleBot to crawl the page, check that it still exists and update the content of its cache.

Finally, the last step concomitant to its caching: its positioning in the search results. Again, this is automated and the algorithm will use the cached data to display it in a search. If the data you provide matches what the algorithm expects then you will be positioned correctly.

All this takes time and it is important to know that the GoogleBot spends more time on popular sites than on lesser known sites. So depending on your site, the changes you make may take a few days to a few weeks to be taken into account by Google.
There is also a lever that we haven’t talked about yet and that has much more inertia in terms of time: netlinking.

All the links that are made to your pages will influence their positioning. Unfortunately, when a link is made, the whole process is repeated: crawling, indexing, caching. Except that it is not this page that will be positioned but the destination page.

There is usually an additional delay between the moment when the link is detected by Google and the moment when it has a visible impact on the positioning of the destination page.

To summarize: SEO takes time. It requires patience and continuous work over the medium and long term.

Is it expensive to be well referenced on Google?

Before answering this question, it would be good to break it down into several other questions:

Is it expensive to appear on Google?

No. Being listed on Google is free. You just have to submit your site to Google.

Does natural ranking pay off?

No, Google does not charge to change the order of its search results. SEO is therefore a free process but most of the time the owner of a site pays a specialist (a seo agency) to do the work.

There is a referencing commonly called “paid” which is the Google Adwords program. It is textual advertising on Google that appears above the search results:

referencement Google

In red, these are Google Adwords paid ads. Advertisers pay per click according to a bidding system. The one who is ready to pay the most for each click will be positioned above the others.
In green are the so-called “natural” results of Google.
Adwords is paying, natural referencing is free.
To know how much would cost the natural referencing of your site on Google, do not hesitate to consult us, an estimate will be established after study of your project:

Resources:

  • Netcraft study on the total number of active websites:

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/

  • Google source on search engine index size:

https://www.google.com/intl/fr/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/

  • Vidéo Google “Des milliards de questions, pas de réponses faciles : Un film (amateur) sur le fonctionnement de la recherche Google” :

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pYW05TVxoQuXNEYIXqOBfLEFd_NuXmp3ZZYiB0GV23k/edit#

  • Global Online Search Market Share Statistics:

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

  • Statistics on the French online search market share:

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/france

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