If you want to understand how Google decides which page to show first, forget the algorithm for a second and think about how you’d recommend a mentor to a friend. The criteria you’d use are the same ones Google uses to rank search results, and they explain why some sites rank and others don’t. Most of what gets called “SEO” is just the digital version of building a reputation good enough to get recommended.

Main Takeaways

  • Relevance and authority are the two factors that move rankings. Everything else supports them.
  • Relevance is the first filter. If your page isn’t about what someone searched for, no amount of optimization fixes that.
  • Authority is the tiebreaker. Among relevant pages, Google picks the one with the strongest reputation: mentions, links, brand searches, citations.
  • User experience and technical SEO matter, but mostly as ways to refine the order or remove blockers, not as primary boosts.

The Setup: Recommending a Mentor

Imagine I came to you and said, “I’m a law student. I’m looking for career advice from someone who can help me think through law school and what comes after. Can you connect me with a few people in your network?”

You’re now responsible for finding me a handful of people to talk to. I’m trusting you. I don’t know anyone myself. Your reputation is on the line because you’re the one making the recommendation. So how do you choose who to send my way?

That’s the same problem Google solves every time someone types a query. The search engine is recommending pages the way you’d recommend mentors. Its reputation is on the line, so it has to apply criteria that make sense.

Relevance Comes First: Are They Even a Lawyer?

The first thing you’d do is filter for lawyers.

Your smartest friend who happens to be a doctor or a teacher might be brilliant, and if I asked for general career advice, they’d be on the list. But I asked about law school. So you’d skip past everyone in your network who isn’t a lawyer and focus on the ones who are.

That’s relevance. It’s the first filter, and there’s no shortcut around it.

In SEO terms: there are plenty of websites with good content, good structure, and good design. None of that matters if the content isn’t about what people are searching for. You can’t pull traffic to a page that isn’t relevant to anyone’s query, no matter how polished it is. Relevance is measurable, it’s the floor, and if you don’t clear it, nothing else matters. Google’s own ranking systems documentation describes the goal as presenting the most relevant, useful results from across hundreds of billions of pages. That phrase order matters: relevance comes first.

Authority Decides the Tiebreaker: Which Lawyer Do You Recommend?

Now say you have five or six lawyers in your network. They all clear the relevance bar. How do you pick which one to send me to first?

You wouldn’t pick the one who happens to be a lawyer but has a bad reputation. The one you’ve heard is flaky. The one who lost cases. The one who screwed over your cousin. Putting that person in front of me would reflect poorly on you.

You’d go with the lawyer who has the best reputation. The one your family talks about. The one you’ve worked with personally. The one other people in your circle vouch for. And probably the one who’s actively practicing, in the prime of their career, racking up cases and reviews. Not the person who graduated last year and doesn’t have the experience yet, and not the one who’s been retired for fifteen years and is out of touch.

That’s authority. And when you delivered the list, you’d probably write something like: “Here are six people, but start with so-and-so. They’re the best.”

Google works the same way. After filtering for relevance, it has to break ties. The tiebreakers come from reputation:

  • How many other sites cite you and link to you
  • Whether you’re mentioned in the news, in press releases, in industry conversations
  • Whether people search for your brand name alongside the topic you care about
  • Whether you’re so associated with your category that you’ve become the default. The Kleenex. The Velcro. The Xerox. That kind of brand-category fusion is the goal, because then search engines can be confident recommending you first. Everyone else is already searching for you that way.

Authority is what separates the lawyer Google sends to the top of page one from the four others who could have technically answered the query. Google has its own framework for this: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, or E-E-A-T. Different name, same idea. The signals it relies on are the same ones you’d use when vouching for someone in your network.

User Experience: How the Conversation Actually Goes

Beyond relevance and authority, there’s user experience. In the analogy, this is what the conversation is like once the connection is made.

Was it enjoyable? Did the mentor give off good vibes? Did the law student walk away with the information they needed? Was it the kind of interaction that makes you glad you made the recommendation in the first place?

For websites, this maps to whether the page feels good to use. Search engines try to predict this, partly through machine learning algorithms and partly through user behavior data. They look at past patterns and try to figure out which pages are the kind that satisfy people. It’s how they take a thousand candidate pages and narrow them down to a smaller pool before ranking them in order. Google’s page experience documentation describes it almost exactly this way: search will always show the most relevant content even if the page experience is sub-par, but for queries where lots of helpful content is available, page experience can contribute to which page wins.

UX matters. But it doesn’t replace relevance and authority. It refines them.

Technical SEO: Just Making Sure the Call Connects

Technical SEO is the part most people overweight. In the analogy, it’s whether the Zoom call connects.

If the wifi cuts out, if the link doesn’t work, if the meeting never happens, the conversation never happens. The mentor’s reputation doesn’t matter. Their expertise doesn’t matter. The connection failed.

Same with a website. If pages won’t load, if crawlers can’t access them, if the site is broken on mobile, none of the other stuff has a chance to help you. Technical SEO won’t boost you. It removes hurdles that would otherwise keep your content from being found and read.

You can also imagine a version where the mentor is the right person, has the right reputation, and keeps flaking. Missing calls. Showing up late. Never confirming. After a while, you stop recommending them, even though they’re brilliant on paper. Same idea: technical issues do make a difference, but the difference is way smaller than getting the relevance and authority right in the first place.

Technical is table stakes. Get it right so it doesn’t hold you back, but don’t expect it to push you to the top.

Why Relevance and Authority Are the Two That Actually Move the Needle

Search engines are trying to recommend the best answer, and they’re putting their reputation on the line every time they do. That means they care most about the same things you’d care about if a friend asked you for a recommendation.

Are you the right kind of source? That’s relevance.

Are you the source other people trust most? That’s authority.

Everything else, UX, technical, design, all of it, supports those two. It either refines the order or removes blockers that would prevent you from being chosen at all.

If you want to rank, the work is exactly what the analogy suggests. Build pages that are about what people are searching for. Earn a reputation good enough that people, journalists, and other websites talk about you, link to you, and search for your brand name when they want answers in your category. The rest either takes care of itself, or it didn’t matter as much as you thought.