How Google Decides

The previous part ended on this sentence: the patient types their question and Google decides which door, which entrance of the site, to show them. This part is about that decision.

Let us set aside a common assumption first. Google does not see a site as one single thing; it sees each entrance of the site separately. When somebody asks a question, Google does not choose between sites, it chooses between entrances. Which means it is entirely possible for one of your site’s entrances to sit at the top of the results while none of the others is seen anywhere. This is the same thing we said in part 3: every text has an independent entrance of its own.

Three Stages, Not One

What we see under the name “a Google result” is the end of a three-stage chain, and every stage can be the place where your site’s entrance drops out and is removed, so you need to know all three.

In the first stage, Google has to know this entrance exists at all. An automated program is constantly moving around the internet, opening every address it finds. If that program never reaches your site’s entrance, none of the rest begins. You may have written a perfectly good text and Google may still have no idea such a text exists. Later we will see how to let it know.

In the second stage, once it has reached the entrance, it reads the text and makes a note to itself about what this entrance is about, and it keeps that note. When a patient types their question later, that question is not sent to your site; it is sent to these notes.

In the third stage, when somebody types a question, Google searches through all of its notes, separates out the entrances that are relevant to this question, and decides their order. That is the decision we are talking about.

The important thing about this stage is that you are not competing with the whole internet; you are competing with the handful of entrances that answered the same question. For one specific question about one specific treatment in one specific city, that number is far smaller than you think.

On What Basis

Nobody outside Google knows exactly how much weight Google gives to each of these criteria, and the weighting keeps changing. But the principles were written and published by Google itself and have stayed the same for years. Put simply, Google asks four questions of every entrance.

The first question is whether this text answers the same question the patient typed. Answering that question is what matters, not merely having mentioned the name of the treatment. Somebody who typed “how many days does it hurt after a wisdom tooth extraction” does not get to their answer from a list headed “wisdom tooth surgery” that explains the technique, but does get there from a text that took that very question and answered it. Google understands this difference, because for years it has been watching which entrance people come back from to search again, and which entrance they stop searching after — which shows they got the answer to their question.

The second question is whether it is clear what this entrance is about. A text that has one subject and follows it from beginning to end gets a clear note. A text that said everything at once gets a vague note and is never the first choice for any question. We will see the details in chapter three, but the substance of it is already clear here: every entrance must have one subject.

The third question is whether this entrance is trustworthy. Google does not know whether you are a good dentist. It only sees the things that are visible from outside: how long this address has existed, whether other places have referred to it, whether its information agrees with other places, and whether there is a real person with a real practice behind it. A site that has stayed put for three years and whose text matches the address and phone number registered elsewhere is ahead of a site that went up last week, even if the second one’s text is better. That is not fair, but it is logical, and it favours whoever starts earlier.

The fourth question is where the person searching is. When a question is tied to a practice, Google takes into account the location of whoever typed it and puts the entrances nearest them first. The entrance of a practice in Tehran may come up for somebody searching in Ahvaz, but only as long as there is no suitable answer to that same question in Ahvaz. The moment one Ahvaz entrance answers that question, the Tehran one falls back, however much better its text is. Which means your real competition is the dentist in your own city, not the big sites — and if nobody in your city has answered a question yet, that entrance fills the gap from day one. Part 7 is entirely about this.

What Does Not Count

The beauty of the template does not count. The Instagram follower count does not count. How much you paid to have the site built, or how many times the practice’s name is repeated in the text, does not count either. None of these has any place in that note. Google reads text, and the text either answers the question or it does not.

Why It Is Not a Secret

All of this can be gathered into one sentence that Google itself has said in almost these same words: write for a person who has a question, write clearly, and be real. Anything sold under the name of a “trick” is either this same advice under another name, or something that works for a few months and then works against you.

And the Next Question

All four questions above start from one point: the question the patient types. If you guess it wrong, the best text in the world still becomes an entrance nobody stands in front of. And our guess is usually wrong, because we think in our own words and the patient searches in theirs. The next part is about exactly this.