Are you at the start of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) journey? Maybe you’ve heard that SEO can help drive traffic to your website and get you higher rankings on search engines.
We’re here to remove any confusion or complications around SEO – with some insight on how AI fits into the picture. Once you understand the fundamentals, you can learn how to leverage SEO to drive traffic and generate quality leads.
The Key Elements of SEO
So, let’s get started to see how SEO works. What you’ll learn in this blog is:
- What is SEO?
- What are the three pillars of SEO?
- Paid search vs. organic search – the differences and similarities
- How do search engines work?
- How does Google order and rank search results (and how to optimize for RankBrain)?
- What is an SEO strategy?
- How to set objectives for your SEO strategy
- 3 examples of SEO objectives
- How to set objectives for different business types
- How to become an SEO specialist
- What skills do you need to become an SEO specialist?
- What can you earn as an SEO specialist?
- AI and SEO – what’s coming?
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Let’s start by asking an obvious question: what exactly is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’, which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position in search results pages (SERPs). Remember, the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.
There’s a great graphic created by Rand Fiskin, co-founder of Moz, that takes from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ pyramid. Fishkin’s ‘Mozlow’s Hierarchy of SEO Needs’ looks at how people should execute SEO.
Top tip: SEO is no longer confined to search engines like Google or Bing. It’s also important for social networks such as YouTube and TikTok as people turn to social media to find information.
What are the three pillars of SEO?
As a digital marketer, knowing how to get your brand, website, or company found by searchers is a core skill, and understanding how SEO is evolving will keep you at the top of your game.
While SEO changes frequently in small ways, its key principles do not. We can break SEO into three core components or pillars that you need to be familiar with – and action regularly:
Technical Optimization: Technical Optimization is the process of completing activities on your site that are designed to improve SEO but are not related to content. It often happens behind the scenes. A simple example of technical optimization is submitting your sitemap to Google.
On-Page Optimization: On-Page Optimization is the process of ensuring the content on your site is relevant and provides a great user experience. It includes targeting the right keywords within your content and can be done through a content management system like WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, or Shopify.
Off-Page Optimization: Off-Page Optimization is the process of enhancing your site’s search engine rankings through activities outside of the site. This is largely driven by high-quality backlinks, which help to build the site’s reputation.
Join for FREE to access this video
Paid search vs. organic search – the differences and similarities
From the outset, it’s important that you understand the differences and similarities between the organic, natural search synonymous with SEO and paid search.
What are the differences between paid and organic search?
There are five key differences between paid and organic search. Let’s look at each one of them.
Position
The first difference is that paid search results appear at the top of search engine results pages, and organic results appear beneath them.
Here’s an example from searching ‘best water bottle’. The paid ads or sponsored posts come up as images while the organic results are below it.
Be aware that the arrival of Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) is changing display advertising all the time using AI. So it’s important to keep on top of developments for your SEO activities.
Time
Another key difference between paid and organic search is time. With paid search, you can get results quickly whereas, with organic search, results take more time – often weeks, months, and even years. So you have to play the medium to long-term game with organic search.
Payment
As the name suggests, you pay for paid search traffic, with pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
What that means is, you pay a fee every time a user clicks on your ad. So instead of relying on organic traffic to your website, you buy traffic for your page by paying Google to show your ad when your visitor searches for your keyword.
For organic search, traffic is free, although it does require an investment of both resources and time.
ROI
In terms of the return on investment (ROI), it’s much easier to measure paid search. That’s partly because Google provides more keyword data that you can capture in Google Analytics (GA4).
However, with paid search, ROI can stagnate or decline over time. With organic search, ROI is a little bit harder to measure, but it often improves over time. Over the long term, organic search can offer a very good return on investment.
Share of traffic
When it comes to traffic share, research from BrightEdge found that organic search is responsible for 53% of all site traffic compared to paid at 15%. So the lion’s share of clicks are actually on the organic results.
It’s not all about differences – there are also similarities between paid and organic search:
Keyword research: You use a search engine for both paid and organic search, and both require a user to enter a keyword. So you need to do keyword research for organic search and paid search.
Landing pages: Both types of search require you to create great landing pages. For SEO, the landing page needs to be connected to your website. For paid search, it can be the exact same landing page you use for organic, or it can be a completely separate stand-alone page that sits on your website.
Traffic: Generating traffic is a major goal of both paid and organic search. Most importantly, both paid and organic search traffic include user intent. That is, someone is asking Google a question or searching for information – they are in an active mindset and as a result they are more likely to take action once they find this information.
Join for FREE to access this video
How do search engines actually work?
Search engines are used by people when they have a query and are searching online for the answer.
Search engine algorithms are computer programmes that look for clues to give searchers the exact results they are looking for. Search engines rely on algorithms to find web pages and decide which ones to rank for any given keyword. Remember there’s also social media algorithms to consider for search.
There are three steps to how search engines work: crawling, indexing and ranking.
Step 1: Search Engine Crawling
The first step is crawling. Search engines send out web crawlers to find new pages and record information about them. We sometimes call these web crawlers ‘spiders’,‘robots’ or Googlebots.
Their purpose is to discover new web pages that exist, and to periodically check the content on pages they’ve previously visited to see whether they’ve changed or been updated.
Search engines crawl web pages by following links they’ve already discovered. So if you have a blog and it’s linked from your homepage, when a search engine crawls your homepage, it will then look for another link and may follow the link to your new blog post.
Step 2: Search Engine Indexing
The second step is indexing. Indexing is when a search engine decides whether or not it is going to use the content that it has crawled. If a crawled web page is deemed worthy by a search engine, it will be added to its index.
This index is used at the final ranking stage. When a web page or piece of content is indexed, it is filed and stored in a database where it can later be retrieved. Most web pages that offer unique and valuable content are placed into the index. A web page might not be placed in the index if:
- The content is considered duplicate
- The content is considered low value or spammy
- It couldn’t be crawled
- The page or domain lacked inbound links
Top tip: You can check your indexed pages by typing ‘site:yourdomain.com’ in the search bar (see our example below). This will show you the pages showing up on Google. For a more detailed report you can look at the ‘Index Coverage report’ in Google Search Console.
