To understand how SEO works, you must first understand how search engines work to find and categorize the extensive amounts of data throughout the World Wide Web. All done through dynamic algorithms and AI, there are three main ways that this happens:

1. Crawling (Discovery Stage): Search engines send out crawlers to find new pages and record information about them. They also periodically check the content of previously known pages to make sure no major changes have occurred.
2. Indexing (Filing Stage): Once a search engine has crawled content, it must decide whether or not to index it. Indexing is the process of filing and storing web pages and other pieces of content into a database so that they can be readily accessed when needed.
3. Ranking (Retrieval Stage): The final stage, ranking refers to a website’s position in the SERP based on popularity, importance, and relevance of web pages to search queries. There are more than 200 ranking signals that search engines use to sort and rank content. All in order to provide users with the most accurate results.

How does SEO work? If your business wants to be found when searchers are looking for your products or services, SEO makes it easier for search engines to find your product or service webpage.

Simply put, SEO works by putting relevant words and phrases in parts of a web page (links, metadata, keywords, headers, etc.) where search engines will find them. Then, as search engines crawl the internet looking for the most relevant results to the queries they process, they can pull information from your SEO markup and match you to potential customers.

Don’t forget though, it’s not all about content and keywords. The algorithms also aim to match searchers with good experiences. Therefore, UI/UX is also important as it does impact ranking. For example, having fast load times and being mobile-friendly.