Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) -What is it?
Ask five people what the first step in SEO is and you'll get three answers. Here's what SEO actually is, how engines decide, and where to start.
What Is SEO? How Search Optimisation Actually Works
Ask five people in this industry what the first step in SEO is and you will get three different answers. One will say keyword research. One will say a technical audit. One will start talking about backlinks.
None of them are lying. The disagreement is the most useful thing about the question, and we will come back to it.
Short answer: SEO is the work of making a website the obvious answer to a search. Engines decide by weighing three things: whether the page matches what was asked, whether the source seems credible, and whether the page can be read properly by a machine. Everything called an SEO tactic is one of those three in disguise.
How do search engines actually decide?
Nobody outside Google knows the full mechanism, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. But the shape of it is not secret, and it has stayed remarkably stable.
Relevance. Does this page answer the thing that was typed? Engines read the words on the page and the words in the links pointing at it, and increasingly they read the meaning behind those words instead of matching the exact phrasing.
Credibility. Is there any reason to trust this source over the other nine? Links from other sites still count as votes. So does a named author with a real history, a page kept current, and consistency between what different sources say about you. Google's own guidance frames this as experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Accessibility. Can a machine get in, read the page, and work out what it is about? Speed, crawlability, structure, working links. This is the least glamorous part and the one most often broken.
That is it. Every technique with a name attached sits inside one of those three. When you read a list of forty SEO tactics, you are reading forty ways of doing three things.
What is the first step in SEO?
Back to the disagreement, because the honest answer is more useful than picking a side.
The first step depends on what is broken.
If nobody can find your site because it is slow, blocked, or built in a way machines cannot read, keyword research is pointless. You would be choosing which race to enter while your engine is in pieces. Start technical.
If your site works fine and simply talks about the wrong things, the technical audit will come back clean and tell you nothing. Start with what your customers actually search for.
If both are in order and you are still invisible, you are probably up against sites with far more authority, and the answer is to aim narrower instead of pushing harder on the same terms.
Anyone who tells you the first step without looking at your site is describing their own process, not your problem. That is why we start every engagement by finding out which of the three is the bottleneck, and it is usually obvious within an afternoon.
What is a keyword, and how do you pick one?
A keyword is what somebody types. That is the whole definition, and the jargon does more harm than good here.
What matters is the difference between two kinds.
Broad keywords have big numbers next to them and attract people who are curious. "Marketing" gets searched constantly by students, competitors and people with no intention of buying anything.
Specific keywords have small numbers and attract people about to spend money. "Marketing agency for restaurants in Faro" gets searched rarely and by exactly one type of person.
The small number is worth more. We have watched businesses chase the impressive figure for months, rank for nothing, and then win the boring phrase in weeks and get actual enquiries from it.
One piece of old advice worth retiring: keyword density. The idea that a phrase should appear in some percentage of your text was never good practice and has not been for a long time. Write the sentence a person would say. If the phrase belongs there, it will appear on its own.
The three kinds of SEO work
What it means | When it's the priority | |
|---|---|---|
Technical | Speed, crawlability, structure, working links, clean URLs | Nothing else works until this does |
On-page | The words, headings and structure of each page, answering a real question | Once machines can read you, this is where most gains sit |
Off-page | Links and mentions from elsewhere, and being cited as a source | Last, and mostly a by-product of being worth citing |
The order is not arbitrary. Off-page is the one everybody wants to buy and the one that works least well when bought. Technical is the one nobody finds interesting and the one that unblocks everything else.
Not sure which of the three is your bottleneck? That's the first thing an audit answers, and it's usually clear quickly. Talk to us.
What changed: search now answers instead of sending
Here is the part that most SEO explainers skip, and it changes what success looks like.
A growing share of searches get resolved on the results page or inside an AI assistant. The question gets answered, and nobody clicks. So a page can gain visibility while losing visits, which reads as failure on a traffic graph and is not always a problem you caused. We went through the diagnosis of that in our piece on falling website traffic.
The strategic consequence is that being cited now has value even without a click. If an AI answer names your business, that is worth something. Which means the target widened: you want to rank, and you also want to be the source the answer was built from. We covered how those systems choose in our guide to showing up in AI search.
The reassuring part is that the work barely changed. Clear answers to real questions, from a named human, on a fast page. That earned rankings before and it earns citations now.
What SEO cannot do
Worth saying plainly, because the expectation gap causes most of the disappointment.
SEO cannot create demand. If nobody is searching for what you sell, there is nothing to capture and the answer is a different channel entirely.
It cannot fix a weak offer. Ranking first for a service people do not want produces traffic and no revenue, and the traffic will make the problem harder to see.
It cannot work quickly. Anyone promising fast organic results is describing paid ads or describing nothing.
And it cannot be finished. Competitors move, engines change, pages go stale. SEO behaves like maintenance, not like a project with an end date.
Where to start if you're starting from nothing
Four things, in this order, and none of them require a tool subscription.
Check you can be read. Open your site on a phone on mobile data. If it is slow or awkward, that is the first job and everything else waits.
Write down the questions customers ask you every week. Those are your pages. Most businesses have four or five, not forty.
Answer each one on its own page, in plain language, with your name on it. Question as the heading, the answer immediately underneath, detail below that.
Open Search Console and look. Not for rankings. For which queries you already appear on, because that tells you what you are nearly winning.
That fourth one is the step almost nobody takes, and it is free. Most sites are already visible for something they never intended, and that something is usually the fastest thing to win properly.
Is SEO worth it?
For a business whose customers search before they buy, yes, and the reason is arithmetic and not enthusiasm. Paid traffic stops the day you stop paying. Organic positions keep producing after the work is done, which means the cost per enquiry falls over time instead of rising.
For a business whose customers arrive by referral, footfall or word of mouth, SEO is a slow second priority behind the channels that already work.
Knowing which of those two you are is worth more than any tactic in this article.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SEO in simple terms?
The work of making a website the obvious answer to a search. It covers the words on your pages, the technical health of the site, and whether other sources treat you as credible.
What is the first step in SEO?
It depends on what is broken. If machines cannot read your site properly, start technical. If the site is healthy but talks about the wrong things, start with what customers actually search for. Anyone who answers this without looking at your site is describing their own process, not your problem.
What is a keyword?
What somebody types into a search box. The useful distinction is between broad phrases with big search numbers and little buying intent, and specific phrases with small numbers and a lot of it. The specific ones are usually worth more.
How long does SEO take?
Months before anything meaningful, and the first stretch feels like nothing is happening. Technical fixes can show up within weeks. Content and authority work on a scale of quarters, then compound.
Is SEO dead now that people use AI?
No, though the goal widened. Being cited by an AI answer has value even when nobody clicks, and the work that earns those citations is largely the work that earned rankings: clear answers, a named author, a fast page.
Can I do SEO myself?
The first three steps, yes, and they are the ones with the most value. Checking your site loads properly, writing the answers to questions you already answer on the phone, and putting your name on them needs no specialist. The technical depth and the competitive analysis are where outside help starts paying for itself.