After years of conversations with senior SEO professionals, a surprising pattern keeps showing up.
People with eight, ten, even twelve years of experience often struggle with some of the most basic but deeply important questions about how search actually works.
Not because they are incompetent.
Not because they haven’t worked on large websites or competitive industries.
But because their knowledge is built around tactics rather than systems.
They know what to do.
They don’t always know why it works.
And that gap matters more now than it ever has.
The Difference Between Doing SEO and Understanding Search
SEO has always rewarded action.
Fix this.
Optimize that.
Add links here.
Publish content there.
For a long time, that was enough.
If you followed best practices and avoided obvious mistakes, results often followed.
But the search ecosystem has matured.
What used to be mechanical is now interpretive.
What used to be linear is now probabilistic.
What used to be about rules is now about understanding intent, context, and ambiguity.
This is why experience alone no longer guarantees competence.
How Google Decides What to Rank Step by Step
One of the most revealing interview questions is deceptively simple.
How does Google decide what to rank step by step?
Most answers jump straight to ranking factors.
Links. Content. Authority. Speed.
That’s not the process.
That’s the output.
The actual process is closer to this.
First, Google discovers content through crawling.
Then it tries to understand what that content is about.
Then it evaluates whether the content is eligible to be shown.
Then it compares that content against others competing for the same intent.
Then it decides which results are most likely to satisfy the user.
Ranking is the final expression of many upstream decisions.
If someone cannot explain that flow in simple language, they are often optimizing blindly.
What Actually Happens After Google Crawls a Page
Another common stopping point is indexing.
Most people say something like, “Google crawls it and then it gets indexed.”
That’s where the explanation ends.
But indexing is not a single moment.
It is a process.
Google parses the page.
Extracts signals.
Classifies content.
Evaluates quality thresholds.
Decides how and when the page should be retrieved.
Indexing does not mean the page is usable.
It means the page is stored.
That distinction is critical.
Indexing vs Being Retrievable
This is one of the most misunderstood concepts in SEO.
A page can be indexed and still never rank.
Being indexed means Google knows the page exists.
Being retrievable means Google is willing to surface it for queries.
Retrievability depends on confidence.
Confidence in relevance.
Confidence in quality.
Confidence in intent match.
Confidence in trust signals.
Many SEO problems are not indexing problems.
They are retrievability problems.
This is why “but it’s indexed” is rarely the solution.
How Google Understands Content Without Keywords
Ask a senior SEO how Google understands content without keywords and you’ll often hear one word.
Entities.
That answer is incomplete.
Entities are part of the system, but they are not magic.
Google understands content through a combination of language models, contextual relationships, document structure, and historical user interaction.
It evaluates how ideas relate to each other.
How concepts cluster.
How questions are resolved.
Keywords are no longer instructions.
They are hints.
When someone reduces content understanding to entity usage alone, it signals surface-level knowledge.
Why the Same Content Ranks on One Site but Not Another
This question exposes one of the biggest misconceptions in SEO.
Most people say authority.
Authority matters.
But it is not the full answer.
Context matters.
Trust history matters.
User expectations matter.
Site-level relevance matters.
A piece of content does not rank in isolation.
It inherits context from the environment it lives in.
This is why copying content between sites rarely works the same way.
Google is not ranking pages.
It is ranking answers within contexts.
What Problem Backlinks Actually Solve for Google
Ask what backlinks do and most people answer in terms of SEO benefit.
Authority. Trust. Rankings.
But backlinks are not for SEOs.
They are for Google.
Backlinks solve a fundamental problem.
They help Google determine which information is relied upon by others.
In a world where anyone can publish anything, links act as references.
They are not votes.
They are citations.
When SEOs chase links without understanding this, they often misunderstand why some links matter and others do not.
When Core Web Vitals Really Matter
Core Web Vitals are another area where surface knowledge dominates.
Many believe they are universal ranking levers.
They are not.
Core Web Vitals matter when performance becomes a differentiator.
When user experience drops below acceptable thresholds.
When competing results are otherwise equal.
For most sites, they are not the reason rankings fail.
They are multipliers, not foundations.
Understanding when something matters is more important than knowing that it exists.
What Makes Content Helpful in Algorithmic Terms
Google talks a lot about helpful content.
Most people translate that into vague advice.
Be useful. Be original. Be user-focused.
Algorithmically, helpfulness is about reducing ambiguity.
Does the content resolve uncertainty?
Does it answer the question fully?
Does it align with intent without distraction?
Does it prevent the user from needing to search again?
Helpfulness is not emotional.
It is functional.
This is why beautifully written content can still fail.
Why Some Sites Rank With Very Few Links
This question breaks many SEO belief systems.
If links are essential, how do some sites rank without many of them?
The answer lies in confidence and clarity.
When intent is narrow.
When competition is weak.
When relevance is high.
When user behavior reinforces satisfaction.
Links accelerate trust.
They are not the only way to earn it.
Understanding this prevents dogmatic SEO thinking.
If Backlinks Disappeared Tomorrow, What Would Replace Them
This question forces systems thinking.
The answer is not another tactic.
It would be behavior, satisfaction, brand recognition, and consistency.
Search engines would still need ways to measure trust.
They would simply rely more heavily on other signals.
This is why brand matters more than many SEOs want to admit.
The Real Divide in SEO Expertise
These questions do not test memory.
They test understanding.
They separate people who execute tasks
from people who understand systems.
Execution without understanding can still work.
But it does not scale.
And it does not adapt well to change.
Final Thoughts
SEO is no longer about tricks.
It is about reducing ambiguity.
Helping machines understand meaning.
Helping users find clarity.
Building trust over time.
If someone cannot explain these ideas simply, they likely do not fully understand them.
And that is the real test of expertise.
Understanding is not measured by years.
It is measured by depth.
