If you’ve just set up your business’s website, but you’re not sure how you’re going to drive people to it without spending thousands on ads, then it’s time to explore the world of SEO. If you’re new to SEO, or you’re looking for a refresher, this guide will help you gain a foundational knowledge of basic SEO tactics.
We will cover:
- What is SEO
- What are the different types of SEO?
- On-page SEO basics
- Technical SEO basics
- Off-page SEO basics
- SEO basics: FAQ
What is SEO and why is it important?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s the practice of improving your website’s relevance, quality, performance, and user experience so it can be easily discovered across modern search experiences, from traditional search results to AI-powered answers and summaries.
At its core, SEO helps search engines and AI systems understand your content, trust it, and surface it when users are looking for information, products, or solutions.
Key benefits of SEO include:
- Increased visibility: Strong SEO improves your chances of appearing prominently across search results and AI-driven features, making it more likely that your target audience sees your brand.
- More qualified traffic: When your content aligns with real search intent, it attracts users who are actively looking for answers, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
- Credibility and trust: Search engines and AI tools tend to surface content from sources they view as authoritative and reliable. Higher visibility reinforces trust and brand credibility.
- Cost-effectiveness: Unlike paid media, SEO delivers compounding returns over time. While it requires upfront investment, the long-term value often outweighs ongoing ad spend.
- Market research: SEO data reveals what your audience cares about, the language they use, and the problems they’re trying to solve.
How is AI search changing SEO?
Traditionally, SEO strategies focused on ranking for certain keywords and ensuring that your website was featured at the top of page one of the search results.
However, in recent years SEO has become more complex. Visibility is no longer defined by rankings and organic traffic alone.
Why? Well, AI-powered search is now built directly into many search experiences. Features such as Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode summarise information on the results page itself, often answering questions without requiring a click.
In the past, someone searching “What is SEO?” would typically scan the results and click through to one or more websites to find an answer. Today, Google can deliver that answer instantly, while also suggesting follow-up questions that allow users to explore a topic in depth before ever visiting a site.
Alongside this, platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot are now widely used for research, allowing users to explore topics, compare products, and evaluate brands without relying on traditional search results pages. While the interface has changed, many of the same SEO fundamentals still influence whether a business is mentioned or cited in AI-generated responses.
This shift is convenient for users, but it poses a new set of problems for businesses. Many websites are seeing a decline in traffic as fewer users need to click through to get information. At the same time, teams are finding it harder to understand and prove how visible their brand is when answers are generated by AI rather than delivered through traditional listings.
Does SEO still matter?
Absolutely. Arguably, good SEO is more important than ever before. AI-generated responses are competitive and will only surface relevant, genuinely helpful content. Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms and going its best to crackdown on spammy content or clickbait-style articles.
Acquiring a good foundational knowledge of basic SEO is the first step in ensuring your business is going to be visible in those AI-powered search tools. You’ll also want to make sure you understand Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines as these are still relevant and will help you create content that both users and search engines favour.
What is E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are the four core qualities Google uses to assess your content and rank it. And should be considered whenever you’re creating new content for your website.
What are the different types of SEO?
With search engines and AI powered search tools looking at intent, content quality and overall user experience, SEO is no longer a one size fits all process. Each type of SEO needs to work together to prove your expertise and make your website easy to understand for both people and search engines.
Here are the main types of SEO you can use.
On page SEO
On page SEO focuses on optimising each individual webpage to improve its search ranking and attract more visitors. Common tasks typically associated with on page SEO include internal links, title tags, images, headings, meta descriptions, keyword optimised content, page speed, URLs and alt text.
Search engines are content matchmakers: they tend to match users with the content that best suits their query. By ensuring that all your webpages are up to date in terms of the latest on page SEO standards and meet the needs of your target audience, you increase your chances of search engines prioritising your site as suggested content.
Off page SEO
Off page SEO is all about the activities carried out away from your website that still improve its search engine rankings. Building relationships with other website owners, promoting your website on social media, getting a PR company on board to promote your business, managing your online reputation, listing your business on online directories, and earning backlinks are all off page SEO tactics that can impact your rankings and traffic.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO deals with the technical aspects of your website to improve the experience of your users while they’re on it. You could have the best content in the world, but who wants to visit a slow or glitchy website?
Technical SEO basics include optimising site speed, mobile responsiveness, URL structure, breadcrumbs, XML sitemaps and site architecture, to name a few. Having these basic SEO elements sorted ensures search engines can easily crawl and index your website, improving visibility and rankings.
Local SEO
If your business operates in a specific location or region, then local SEO should be an integral part of your basic SEO setup. Local SEO involves optimising your online presence so your business is more visible in local search results.
Search engines like Google use a local search algorithm that prioritises businesses located in or near the area a user is searching from. By setting up and optimising a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), including location oriented keywords in your content, building citations and managing reviews, you can increase your visibility in your area and ultimately drive more local (online and in store) footfall thanks to SEO.
What are the basics of SEO? How to get started
Now we’ve established the different types of SEO, we can start to explore their fundamental principles.
On page SEO basics
The goal of modern on page SEO is to make sure your content is easy to understand, showcases your experience and expertise, and matches search intent. Well structured headings, concise summaries and clear answers to common questions make it easier for both traditional search engines and AI powered search tools to recognise your pages as helpful results.
Keyword research
Keyword research involves examining and identifying which specific words and phrases your target audience uses when looking for information on topics related to your products or services. This includes using tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs or Semrush to learn more about a keyword’s search volume (the number of times people search for that keyword), what long tail keywords you can use, adjacent keywords and estimated competition.
Through these tools, you can also analyse which keywords your competitors are using and identify gaps in their content strategy that you can then leverage. Most importantly, by doing this research, you identify the pain points and needs of your target audience, enabling you to align your content with the right topics and search intent.
Content creation
Content creation is part and parcel of any basic SEO strategy. Once you’ve identified the relevant keywords you want to target, you need to build a content strategy that makes the most of these keywords and answers your target audience’s queries.
Content comes in different shapes and sizes, including long form articles, shorter blog posts, videos, infographics and more. The most important thing is that each piece of content is high quality: informative, well written, relevant and offering a unique perspective. Adding clear author information and “last updated” dates on key pages can also help demonstrate expertise and freshness.
Meta descriptions
The meta description provides a brief summary of what your webpage is about. It appears in search engine results below the URL and page title. While meta descriptions don’t directly influence search engine rankings, they do play a role in attracting website visitors and often appear as preview snippets across search and social.
The best meta descriptions are between 155 and 160 characters, informative but straight to the point. When users see that the meta description responds to their query, they’re more likely to click on your result, which can drive more traffic to your site.
Headings
Headings are an important component of any on page SEO strategy. They provide readers with information about the next few paragraphs and give structure and hierarchy to your content. This helps both your readers and search engine crawlers understand what your page is about.
It’s important to maintain a logical hierarchy to your content. The main title of the page should be set as H1, while subsequent headings (H2, H3, etc.) should follow. These should represent distinct sections and subsections of the main topic. Make sure you also include relevant keywords in headings where it feels natural to reinforce topical relevance – but don’t overdo it, as keyword stuffing can harm, rather than help, your SEO.
Technical SEO basics
Website crawlability and indexability
Ensuring your website can be crawled and indexed by search engines is crucial to guarantee that all your SEO efforts aren’t in vain. This includes configuring the website’s robots.txt file.
By doing this, you’ll pinpoint which pages the search engine crawlers should crawl and index, and prevent the indexing of pages with irrelevant content. In addition, it’s also good practice to implement canonical tags to consolidate duplicate or similar content into a single preferred version. In this way, Google will not penalise you for duplicate content.
It’s also important to test how search engines render your pages, especially if you rely heavily on JavaScript, to ensure key content and links are visible to crawlers.
Loading speed
Loading speed is not only essential to provide a great user experience, but it makes a world of difference when it comes to search engine rankings. Google, in particular, considers page speed to be a ranking factor. It prioritises faster-loading sites over slower ones.
To boost your website’s loading times, leverage browser caching, minimise server response times, and compress all your images and videos. You can also use content delivery networks, such as CDNs, to distribute website resources across multiple servers. This reduces latency and improves loading speeds for people who access your website from different geographical locations.
These improvements support Google’s Core Web Vitals, which look at loading speed, interactivity and visual stability as part of the overall page experience.
Mobile-friendly design
A mobile friendly, responsive design is now the default expectation for both users and search engines, so it should be baked into every new page you publish.
According to a study by SEMRush, “visitors on mobile devices accounted for 233% more unique visits than those on desktops.” Therefore, ensuring mobile-friendliness is crucial to any SEO strategy.
With Google’s mobile-first indexing approach – where the mobile version of a website takes precedence in both indexing and ranking) – a mobile-friendly and responsive design is a non-negotiable. This includes optimising elements such as font sizes and button spacing and ensuring that your website adapts to different screen sizes.
Off-page SEO basics
Backlinks
Backlinks are essentially links from other websites that link to your website. They’re one of the most important SEO ranking factors. Why? They serve as a vote of confidence in your website as they show that your content is of a certain quality and reliable.
As search algorithms have evolved, the emphasis has shifted towards fewer, higher‑quality backlinks and genuine brand mentions on relevant, trustworthy sites, rather than chasing large volumes of low‑quality links.
This is because multiple backlinks from websites that look spammy/have low domain authority can actually be more harmful than helpful. These types of backlinks send a signal to Google that your content is also of low quality You really want to aim for backlinks from relevant, quality websites, these are much more likely to have a positive impact on your rankings.
So how can you get those quality websites to link to your content? An email goes a long way, but high-quality content goes even further. Building relationships with website owners is a good way to build high-quality backlinks. However, putting the effort into creating high-quality content that offers value to your readers is a sure-fire way to cement a long-term natural link building (where other websites link to your website based on your high-quality content) strategy.
Social media strategy
Social media is not a direct ranking factor, but it can still play a valuable role in supporting your SEO efforts. It helps more people discover your content, learn about your brand, and visit your website, which can all contribute to stronger overall search performance.
When you share useful and engaging content on social platforms, you increase the chances of it being seen, shared, and talked about. This can lead to more website traffic, more branded searches, and even natural backlinks from people who discover your content through social media.
For example, if a video or post gains traction, it can drive a spike in visits to your site and raise awareness of your brand. Over time, this increased visibility can support your performance in search results.
That is why it is important to think about your social media and SEO strategies together. They may be different channels, but they work best when they support one another.
Online reputation management
Online reputation management involves monitoring and managing your brand’s online presence. This includes client reviews and feedback. Negative comments can harm your brand’s reputation and undermine your SEO efforts. Therefore, thanking customers and immediately dealing with negative feedback cultivates an image of an active brand that cares about its customers.
SEO Basics: Wrapping up
SEO can often seem like an overwhelming task, however, when done correctly, it can lead to massive long-term results and, most importantly, sustainable growth.
By focusing on the SEO areas that make the most sense for your business, you can rest assured that your target audience WILL find you – without feeling overwhelmed by trying too many things at once. Need help identifying which SEO areas you should focus on? Get in touch!
SEO Basics: FAQ
How does SEO work?
SEO works by helping search engines understand what your website is about and why it should be shown to users. Search engines crawl and index your content, then evaluate it based on relevance, quality, usability, and authority. In AI powered search, systems may also summarise or reference your content in generated answers. Clear structure, helpful information, and strong topical coverage make it easier for both search engines and AI systems to surface your content.
Why is SEO important for websites?
SEO is important because it helps your website appear when people are searching for information, products, or services you offer. This visibility can come through traditional search listings or AI generated responses. Strong SEO increases your chances of being discovered, building trust, and driving consistent traffic without relying only on paid ads.
How long does SEO take to show results?
SEO is a long-term strategy. You may see small improvements within a few months, but more meaningful results often take three to six months or longer. This is because search engines and AI systems need time to crawl, understand, and trust your content. Consistency and quality are key to long term growth.
What are keywords and why do they matter?
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines. They help search systems understand what your content is about. Today, it is not just about exact keyword matches, but also about search intent and covering a topic clearly and thoroughly. Using relevant keywords naturally in high quality content increases your chances of appearing in both standard results and AI powered answers.
What’s the difference between on-page and technical SEO?
On-page SEO focuses on the content and elements visible on your pages, such as headings, keywords, internal links, and meta descriptions. Technical SEO focuses on how your website functions behind the scenes, including site speed, mobile friendliness, and crawlability. Both are essential for helping search engines and AI systems properly access, understand, and trust your site.
Do I need to create content regularly for SEO?
Regular content creation can support SEO, especially when it answers common questions or addresses important topics in your industry. Fresh, useful content gives search engines more pages to index and increases your chances of being referenced in AI generated responses. However, quality is more important than quantity. Helpful, well structured content will always perform better than frequent but low value posts.
Is SEO still effective with AI powered search?
Yes, SEO is still highly effective. While AI is changing how results are presented, the fundamentals remain the same. Search systems still rely on relevant, trustworthy, and well structured content. In fact, strong SEO foundations can improve your chances of being included in AI summaries, featured answers, and other enhanced search experiences.
How do I measure basic SEO success?
Traditional SEO performance tracking usually involves monitoring organic traffic, keyword visibility, click through rates, and conversions from search. However, AI-powered search has meant that SEO performance-tracking has evolved beyond those metrics. For businesses to get an accurate picture of their SEO performance, they can choose to monitor additional metrics, such as mention rate and AI referral traffic. If you’d’ like to learn more about tracking SEO performance across AI-powered search, we’ve created a guide to five metrics you can start tracking now.
