DM1: How search engines find and rank pages
Search as a channel
🎯You'll be able to
Explain the difference between organic and paid search results, what SEO can and can't do, and where technical SEO fits.
🏠The everyday picture
A new shop in a market needs a sign people can read from the road, an open door and goods arranged so customers find them. It can't force people to walk in, but a locked door or a missing sign loses them for certain.
📘What it really is
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A search engine (Google, Bing and others) keeps an index of pages it has visited, and answers each search with the pages it judges most useful for that query, in that place, on that device.
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Organic results are the unpaid listings. Paid results are ads, marked "Sponsored" or "Ad", bought through an ad platform (DM8).
- SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of making pages easy to find, read and trust, so they can earn organic visits:
- technical SEO: can the pages be crawled, indexed and loaded quickly? (DM1 and DM3)
- on-page SEO: does each page clearly answer what people search for? (DM2)
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reputation: do other sites link to it and mention it?
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What SEO can't do: promise a position. Rankings change with competitors, the search engine's own updates and the season. Honest SEO reports changes and their likely causes, not promises.
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The funnel: search brings people to a page; the page and the shop must still convert them (DM6). A top position on a slow, confusing page is wasted.
📝A worked example
Input: MittiMart's first page of results for "clay water bottle" in Bhubaneswar.
| Position | Type | Page |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Paid (Sponsored) | Two marketplaces |
| 3 | Organic | A marketplace category page |
| 4 | Organic | A blog: "Are clay bottles safe?" |
| 5 | Organic | A competitor's product page |
| — | — | MittiMart's bottle page: not listed |
Expected output: a note that MittiMart's page can't compete until it is crawlable and indexed (Lesson 2 and 3), and that the blog result shows people also want safety and care information (DM2).
🌍Where it's used
- E-commerce teams track organic visits and revenue by landing page.
- News publishers depend on search and on news surfaces for daily traffic.
- Government portals need citizens to find the official page, not a look-alike site charging fees.
📝Case scenario
A furniture shop launched a new site and its organic visits halved within a week. The developers had copied the staging site's
robots.txt, which blocked everything. Fixing one line restored crawling; rankings took several weeks to recover.
🖱️Try it
Search for a product you'd buy online. Mark each result on the first page as paid or organic, and note what kind of page it is (product, category, article, video). Success: at least two different kinds of organic page.
⚠️Common mistakes
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Promising rankings. Sign: "We'll get you to number one." Fix: commit to fixes and measured changes, and explain what else affects rankings.
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Treating SEO as keywords only. Sign: lists of keywords but pages that can't be crawled. Fix: check technical basics first.
- Ignoring what happens after the click. Sign: more visits, no more orders. Fix: measure conversions from organic visits (DM6).
🛠️For your project
Project 3 is MittiMart's technical SEO audit: you'll fix crawling, indexing and page problems and report the change in search traffic honestly.
✅Quick check
What's the difference between an organic and a paid search result?
Show the answer
Organic results are unpaid and chosen by the search engine; paid results are ads, labelled as sponsored.
Can SEO promise a ranking?
Show the answer
No. It can remove obstacles and improve pages; the search engine, competitors and demand decide the rest.