Lesson 4 of 1915 minBeginner
How search engines work
Ranking signals that actually move the needle
For a new site, four things dominate: matching intent, covering the topic properly, being technically reachable and earning a handful of real links. Everything else is a rounding error until those are in place.
Why this lesson matters
This lesson belongs to How search engines work, the part of SEO Foundations where the goal is: build the mental model everything else in seo sits on.
Read it once, then do it straight away on a real site inside RankAudit. Nothing here is theory for its own sake — every step produces something you can show a client.
Do it now
- 1Open RankAudit with sample data already loaded, so you are not stuck on setup.
- 2Crawl a site and triage the issue list.
- 3Open RankAudit, crawl your own domain and compare the discovered URL count with the URL count in your sitemap. Every gap is a discovery problem worth writing down.