Optimising for search engines
 "Zoran Artmagic")
Reviewed by Zoran Artmagic ·
What search engine optimisation is and which building blocks it consists of is explained in the entry on the SEO definition. This entry answers a question many merchants ask at some point: how do SEO professionals actually know what works if Google doesn’t reveal its algorithm? The answer helps to tell good recommendations from bad ones.
An algorithm nobody outside knows
At Google, the order of search results is determined not by a single program, but by the interplay of many ranking systems. They are a trade secret and are constantly adjusted, fundamentally several times a year through core updates. There are two reasons for this: Google wants to improve the results, and Google wants to prevent rankings from being manipulated. Anyone who knew the exact formula could exploit it.
For merchants, this means: every SEO recommendation is based on second-hand knowledge. What matters is where that knowledge comes from.
The sources of SEO knowledge and how reliable they are
Official statements from Google: Google Search Essentials, the documentation in Google Search Central, the quality rater guidelines and statements by Google employees such as John Mueller. These sources are reliable in what they say, but deliberately incomplete. Google explains principles, not weightings.
Court proceedings and documents: In the US antitrust case against Google, it was confirmed under oath in 2023 that Google feeds user interactions such as clicks into ranking systems, for example into a system called Navboost. In 2024, internal documentation also became public, listing thousands of attributes Google stores about pages. Both show what Google records. They don’t show how heavily it is weighted.
Patents: Google files patents for many methods. A patent proves that Google has thought about something, not that it is in use.
Correlation studies: Tool providers analyse millions of search results and look for common features of the pages in the top positions. This is insightful, but correlation is not causation. That well-ranking pages have many backlinks may also be because good pages both rank and get linked.
Own tests: SEO professionals change individual elements in a targeted way and observe the effect. Clean tests are difficult because competition and Google move at the same time. They are most meaningful on large websites with many similar pages, such as stores with thousands of categories.
Data from your own website: Search Console, web analytics and server logs show directly how Google and customers react to changes. For decisions in your own store, this is the most important source.
Experience across many projects: Anyone who supports dozens of stores over years recognises patterns that appear in no study, such as how category pages react after certain core updates. Experience is valuable as long as it can be checked against data.
Good search engine optimisation combines all these sources and weights them correctly. It relies on the official principles, checks assumptions with data and remains sceptical of simple explanations.
Why there is no template
The principles of optimisation are similar worldwide. But how strongly a measure works depends on the market, the industry, the website and the competition. What is enough in a small niche often falls short in a contested market. Link building alone shows this: a good link profile doesn’t depend on the number of links, but on their quality, the topical relevance of the linking sites, the context and other factors that play out differently from industry to industry. More on this under link building.
That is why general rankings of the “most important ranking factors” should be read with caution. They describe averages across very different websites, not your store in your market.
Telling good SEO information from bad
Five questions help to classify a recommendation. Where does the statement come from: Google itself, a study or one individual’s experience? Is it based on cause and effect or only on an observation of common features? Does it apply to online stores, or was it derived from blogs and news sites? Is it current, or does it date from before the last major updates? And does the person spreading it have an interest in it, for example because they sell a tool or a service?
Caution is advised when someone claims to know exactly how Google works, or when a single measure promises fast, guaranteed success. How to recognise professional work is described in the entry on professional search engine optimisation. What Google itself publishes is summarised in the entry on Google SEO.
What this means for your store
The most reliable source of knowledge for your store is your store. If you document changes with a date, you can later tell whether a decline comes from your own adjustment or from a core update. If you first implement measures on part of the pages, such as a group of categories, you see the effect before the whole store is switched over. And if you read Search Console and web analytics regularly rather than only when there are problems, you spot changes early.
This increasingly applies to AI search as well. How ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity select sources is even less documented than Google’s algorithm. Your own measurements count all the more here. More on this under Generative Engine Optimization.
How these principles become a strategy for Shopware and Shopify stores is shown on SEO for online stores.