The owner of the party is google
I like to think I have a pretty good analogy for SEO. I like to say that imagine you are at a party. It is a group of all friends and the owner of the house. At the party there are many different conversations going on but you only want to talk about your HVAC business. You want people to agree that your HVAC business is the best. So what do you do to get the conversation flowing that way? You start introducing the topic to one person and hope it spreads. Sometimes you might slip a $5 to a buddy to chat about your HVAC business with his friends. You try get multiple people agreeing that your HVAC business is a good business. If enough people are talking about it, the owner of the party declares it to be true. But, what if there is someone at the party he doesn’t trust talking about the HVAC business? That is when you get bounced from the party. Slipping a buddy a $5 is SEM that you might do for your business. This is a paid ad for the HVAC company. Introducing the topic to friends is how the website ranks better on google. The talk is actually things like targeting keywords, an optimized website or good content. With all those factors you get more and more traffic to the site. The owner of the party is google. If google sees all that traffic and good things associated, you get the number one spot. Getting bounced is getting pushed to web page two on google. That is where your keywords or link building strategy did not work.