Decoded: What is SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful marketing capability to ensure your brand is properly represented and found online. While SEO is not an exact science due to the secretive ranking factors that search engines use - much of SEO is based on incorporating best practices from a technical and content perspective. This makes SEO not only an important capability to increase your share of search traffic but also an effective way to optimize the quality and user experience of your site as a whole. 

Search has become an integral part of our increasingly digital lives. In fact over 93% of all engagements with the web start on a search engine. This accounts for more than 5.6 billion searches per day just on Google alone, and your brand is represented within some of these search results in many different ways. What if you could maximize your visibility for these search results and increase engagement with your audience? This is what SEO is all about.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing the visibility of your brand within the search results of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It involves optimizing your web pages (on-page factors) and external factors (off-page) to increase your visibility on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and attract organic (non-paid) traffic to your website. But SEO isn't just about search keywords and rankings — it encompasses a broad range of strategies that protect brand positioning, improve user experience, boost credibility, and ensure content relevance - even in unexpected places.

With search driving an average of 53.7% of all web traffic for any given website, SEO could be considered mission-critical for any serious online brand. From e-commerce websites to online blogs - local businesses to large enterprises, they all benefit from organic search. Because of its broad scope of ranking factors, SEO tends to touch most areas of your digital capabilities that influence them. Whether it's marketing teams looking to reach potential customers, content creators aiming for more visibility, or development teams ensuring the technical SEO aspects of your website are robust. Many roles within an organization impact SEO-related factors.

Optimized or not, search engines will list any publicly accessible website within their search results for relevant searches. If your brand engages in these results you get to partially shape how it’s represented. Every search engine has its unique ranking algorithm to determine the relevance of your web pages, and while they generally follow many of the same principles, the website might rank differently in each. Search results are also personalized to some extent, meaning that your results will likely look different from those of someone on a different device sitting next to you. Geographically speaking, western businesses tend to focus their SEO efforts on Google because it holds 90% of the market share globally. But Google is not the primary search engine everywhere - some exceptions include China (Baidu 73%), Russia (Yandex 62% ), Japan (Yahoo 51%), and South Korea (Naver 45%).

When thinking about SEO, it's also good to understand that not only general web search engines (so-called horizontal search engines) need to be considered. There are vertical search engines like image search and many other services on the internet that rely on organic search mechanisms with ranking factors that your business can actively influence. Did you know that the second biggest search engine in the world is YouTube, with over 3 billion monthly searches? Ever looked up a business in Google Maps? Amazon allows you to sell your products on their e-commerce platform and optimize your product content to be more visible across the website. In China, the so-called “everything app” WeChat is so prevalent in people's everyday lives that it can be considered their main entry point to the internet over Baidu. All these touch-points are possible connections to your audience and could be viewed as part of your digital strategy.

The importance of SEO for any online business cannot be overstated - and should be considered a cornerstone for comprehensive digital strategy. 

A higher visibility within the SERPs means more eyes on your content, which translates to higher web traffic. Apart from generally being the biggest source of web traffic, search engines push for relevance and a smooth user experience which is in many cases increases the overall impact you have on your audience once they land on your website. 

SEO also enables you to actively manage your brand's representation within search results and the broader web, managing the narrative and building user trust. Additionally, users trust search engines to deliver reputable results, and therefore, ranking on the first page is often taken as a signal that your brand is reliable and authoritative.

While other digital strategies can have more immediate results, SEO delivers sustainable growth over time without fixed ongoing expenses. It’s often misinterpreted when people say  SEO is free. Compared to online ads you don’t pay to be in the organic search results, but you will still need to invest in time and resources to implement SEO. Still, these costs are flexible and can be adjusted according to your capacity and needs.

Additionally, SEO delivers secondary benefits that are often overlooked. Good SEO allows you to shape the context in which search engines (and, these days, AI) understand your brand and how it relates to other topics and entities - often referred to as the knowledge graph. In other words, you get to shape your story on the internet, affecting in what contexts your brand might appear. Another benefit of good SEO is that some advertisement platforms, such as Google AdWords, are more cost-effective when advertising on categories and audiences that are more relevant to your brand - based on the aforementioned SEO factors and brand context.

So how does SEO work? On a high level, SEO is a digital capability that is often implemented by a single (full stack) SEO expert or a team of SEO experts that cover one or more specific pillars of SEO. Some pillars are more mainstream and accessible to the average marketeer, while others are highly technical and often require a completely different skill set. 

To better understand how organizations apply SEO let's break it down into a few key components:

On-page SEO covers everything related to the structure and content of your website. It involved optimizing content, meta tags, images, and internal links to make the website more accessible to search engines. One of the main focuses of on-page SEO is to ensure valuable, informative content that meets user intent and integrates keywords naturally. Content should address your audience's needs. Google, for example, measures this by looking if users re-engage with the search results after visiting your site. Google's algorithms increasingly focus on user-centric content, rewarding depth, engagement, and relevance.

Other ranking factors include how many authoritative websites link back to the pages of your websites in relevance to specific topics. Off-page SEO focuses on actively building up this kind of backlinks by collaborating with other websites. This can be a challenging effort because such links should ideally come from websites that have a good standing and are relevant to the context of your website. If done well, off-page SEO will foster your online presence and boost your credibility within these topic categories.

Technical SEO is an acquired skill that ensures all areas of a website's technical capabilities (think UX, loading speed, mobile-friendliness, secure connections) align with search engine best practices. This involves deep knowledge of how different technical choices impact website performance and accessibility - as well as a deep understanding of technologies that expose enhancing signals to search engines, such as sitemaps, schema, and product feeds.

Local SEO covers how your business’s locations (Brick and Mortar), like retail stores and offices, are presented on the Internet. For example, Google Maps, Yelp, and other websites. But local SEO also covers search results. Search engines prioritize local search results when a search query is clearly targeting a specific area or location.

The above three pillars represent the most important aspects of SEO for your website, but they are not holistic. There are other specialist capabilities that manage brand reputation, local business listings, and more.  

Now, let's say you have a website that is up and running and you want to enhance your SEO to boost the inflow of relevant traffic on your website. What should you consider? 

If you have not already done so, ensure your platform (often a CMS or commerce platform) is capable and SEO-enabled in the context of your objectives. If you encounter any issues on this front, you might require an expert - and consider a change of platform at this stage to avoid an uphill battle and cumbersome transition in the future.

Secondly, you’ll need an SEO strategy. SEO is a long-term strategy that involves ongoing efforts and a long-term vision. To create an impactful strategy, you will need to look at the current state of your SEO and your website, relevant trends in your industry and online, and what works or doesn’t work for your competition. Combine this with your differentiating factors and overall strategy for your brand to create a solid SEO strategy that includes actions, priorities, and objectives for your SEO efforts In the coming year.

SEO does not work in isolation. SEO affects many aspects of your digital presence and the other way around. Ensure that you consider SEO in every aspect of your digital activities. When you plan for new pages or enhancements, consider the SEO impact. When users find your website in the search results, ensure those pages align with what they responded to in the search results and carry them to the next desired step of the funnel. 

SEO is a continuously evolving field, complex and not without its hurdles. Here are common pitfalls and challenges businesses face:

SEO and ranking factors like the ones pushed by Google’s algorithm are always evolving and can impact established rankings overnight if you follow outdated practices. To stay prepared, follow trusted SEO news sources and adapt when needed.

In highly competitive industries, it can be difficult to stand out. Unique, expert-driven content and multimedia elements can enhance differentiation. Look at what works for competitors or even highly unusual sites and experiment. Explore niches where it's often easier to outrank the competition and find users who are much more likely to convert compared to the less specific and highly competitive category keywords. Interview users to understand what content would speak to them and solve actual user needs. 

Poor site structure or slow load times can negatively affect SEO and user experiences. Regular audits help identify and rectify issues. For small teams or large sites, this can be difficult and time-consuming, but this is where automation helps to optimize efficiency and response time.  Tools like Pingdom can help you automate regular scans and report performance issues. Dedicated SEO tools like DeepCrawl and SemRush can help to analyze and report structural SEO problems. Ensure your team has access to the required expertise to solve and avoid these issues.

Many businesses think of SEO as the icing on, while it's more akin to the baking powder that makes your cake rise. SEO needs to be involved in any digital effort to ensure best practices are followed and avoid negative SEO fallout. Case and point: in 2008, the e-commerce giant ASOS launched its new website without taking the appropriate steps to safeguard SEO. Even though the new website had many enhancements - the failure to implement redirects to old URLs and other SEO factors resulted in a nearly immediate drop f in 48% search visibility and an 87% drop in revenue within the following year - a misstep that ASOS was still recovering from 4 years later.

There is such a thing as bad SEO, and it can be extremely hard and time-consuming to recover from the impacts of SEO malpractices. Search engines don't only increase rankings for optimized websites; they also penalize websites that seemingly try to game the system (Black-Hat SEO), risk user safety by getting hacked, or otherwise interfere with good practices. 

Is SEO still relevant for your business and what does SEO look like five years from now? 

The future of SEO is intertwined with technological advancements and shifting user expectations. Search Engines like Google have been evolving and experimenting continuously throughout the years. Search algorithm updates introduce changes to the ranking factors and enable new types of search results that appease the increasing expectations of their users. But nothing has stirred the industry as much as the advancement in AI. 

Search has always been a 2-step process, and while this might be desirable when exploring the web,  quick answers or targeted searches often only require a single simple result. Search engines already try to cater to this by showing answers and interactive results directly on their SERPs, but it will be interesting to see how this develops into the future as AI enables new types of services and becomes more closely integrated into our daily lives. It's early days, and SEO is not going anywhere anytime soon. After all, even most AI's heavily rely on well-optimized data on the web to build their knowledge. But we’ll likely see one of the most dynamic periods for search since its inception. SEO strategies will blend more deeply with content marketing, AI-driven solutions, voice search, multimedia, and personalization. Organizations that adapt quickly to these changes will be most likely to maintain a competitive edge.