Search Engines & Performance
01 / How Search works
Key question
How do people find you?
Most people start with a search, whether for a local joinery or a how-to guide. Those who understand how search engines work design websites that are found, understood, and clicked on.
Learning objective: You can explain how search engines find, understand, and rank pages, and specifically craft a search result with a title and description.
What is linked will be found.
1.1 / Find, understand, organise
Three steps to your result.
Search engines work in three steps. Understanding them helps you see where a website can get stuck.
01
Crawling
Programmes follow links and load pages. What isn't linked is hardly ever found.
02
Indexing
The content is read, understood and saved. Blocked or duplicate pages are excluded.
03
Ranking
For every search, the most suitable pages are ranked: by relevance, quality, and user experience.
In Google Search Console, you can see which of your pages are in the index and for which searches they appear. Setting this up is well worth it for any professional website.
First things first.
1.2 / Designing the search result
The title and description are your shop window.
Every word counts in search results. The title puts the most important information first, such as 'Bespoke furniture from Riehen', and the brand at the end. The description makes it clear in a single sentence what is on offer and what action to take.
Titles that are too long will be truncated, measured in pixels rather than characters. Search engines may replace the description with a text snippet if it is a better match for the search. However, a good description still increases the chances of being clicked.
Count pixels, not characters.
1.3 / Search in Transition
AI answers and zero-click.
Search engines answer many questions directly on the results page, using quick answers, maps, and increasingly AI summaries. Some searches end without a click. On top of that, chatbots use websites as their source.
What remains important: clear, high-quality content with a verifiable origin. Those who answer the question precisely, demonstrate their expertise and write in a structured manner are more likely to be cited as a source — in traditional search as well as in AI-generated answers.
Good answers will be quoted.
Exercise
A search result that works
Task: Design titles and descriptions for five pages for the Holzwerk joinery.
STEP 1
Search for 'Schreinerei Riehen' and note down what the first five results have in common.
STEP 2
Set a title for each of Home, Bespoke Furniture, Kitchens, Repairs, and Contact.
STEP 3
Write a description for each page including the benefit, location, and call to action.
STEP 4
Check everything in the tool on desktop and mobile.
Evaluation: Would you click on your own result? Why, or why not?