When looking for a good place to eat or the closest store that sells the product you’re looking for, the vast majority of people turn straight to Google. The days of scrolling through page after page of addresses and numbers in a phone are swiftly coming to an end. In fact, an estimated 54% of people in the United States have completely substituted internet and local searches for phone books.

Now that most most queries are immediately directed to search engines, the traffic these engines receive has skyrocketed in recent years. Currently, there are an average of around 12 billion searches per month on the web just in the United States. Because of this, the best method for reaching consumers is now ranking high on search results.

In order to rank highly, search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool. By understanding the mechanics of Google’s Algorithm, search engine optimization techniques involve adding content to a site that include specific keywords and phrases that not only correlate to a company’s products or services, but will likely be queried by consumers.

Because technology improves so fast, SEO companies must make a point to keep advancing as well. One mechanism recently developed and added to Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is RankBrain. This program is a machine learning artificial intelligence that can actually understand relationships between words rather than just specific strings of text.

RankBrain has become so reliable for Google, that out of the hundreds of signals used in their algorithm, it is now the third-most important mechanism. SEO companies will be more effective if they can cater to RankBrain as well as original search engine optimization basics.

As Google’s search algorithm continues to evolve, SEO companies will develop new ways to continue offering high leads to organization’s websites. Currently 85% of retailers surveyed have stated that search marketing, whether it be paid or from SEO services, is the most effective customer acquisition tactic. This number could soon reach close to 100%.