Why not just pay to appear in the ads section?

The answer is simple. The vast majority of people just ignore ads and click on the organic results instead.

Yes, SEO takes more time, effort, and—although it focuses on “free” organic traffic—resources. 

But once you rank for your target keywords, you can reach more people and generate “passive” traffic that doesn’t disappear the moment you stop paying.

Note: Need to set up a Google Ads campaign? Our PPC Keyword Tool offers a quick and easy way to set up a campaign, organize keywords, set negative keywords, and export everything into the Google Ads editor. 

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How Do Search Engines Work?

The ultimate goal of any search engine is to make searchers happy with the results they find.

To achieve this, search engines need to find the best pages. And serve them as the top search results.

Note: Google is not the only search engine. But it is by far the most popular one. That’s why we refer to Google most times we talk about search engines. Besides, SEO fundamentals are fairly similar across most search engines.

Google uses the following stages to find and rank content:

Crawling: Google uses “bots,” or computer programs, to crawl the web and look for new or updated pages. In order for Google to find a page, the page should have at least one link pointing to it. 

Indexing: Next, Google analyzes each page and tries to make sense of what the page is about. Then, it may store this information in the Google Index—a huge database of webpages.

Serving results: When a user enters a query, Google determines which pages are the best, in terms of both quality and relevance, and ranks them in the SERP.

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