Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website to make it appear in search engines’ organic (unpaid) search results. When done well, this cost-effective marketing strategy helps to increase the online visibility of a business. Furthermore, it sets the foundation to get cited on AI tools.
Maybe you have a blog or website that gets a lot of traffic everyday thanks to paid advertising or social media efforts. But these strategies come with disadvantages. As for paid advertising, studies show that people tend to skip sponsored search results (NN / Group, 202). And as for social media, constant updates to algorithms, the intense competition, and occasional outages can reduce your online visibility.
However, applying SEO techniques to your site can help achieve higher search rankings — leading to more credibility and potential customers. Furthermore, AI-generated answers (like Google’s AI Overviews) often cite pages ranking in the top 10 results on search engines (SE Ranking, 2025).
Recommended read: How GenAI is changing users’ search behavior.
Applying SEO to your website requires technical skills that you can do yourself or hire an specialist to do so. Whichever of the two, it will be a good long term investment.
Let’s take a look at some basic concepts on SEO.
Why is SEO important for businesses?
Because while paid advertising, social media or other platforms can bring traffic to your website, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. According to MOZ.com, “SEO is one of the the only online marketing channels that when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. Whereas, advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your website.”
How Google decides what pages to show?
Search engines like Google, go around the Internet 24/7 and read (or crawl) every content they find, saving an HTML version of it in their database (called “the index”). From the moment your site is in Google’s index, it can appear in its search results.
In other words, Google reads what it’s available, adds it to its database and sorts it according to the relevance to search queries.
As for the order in which a site appears, Google has an algorithm that decides what pages will be shown. Although this algorithm is a secret, there are Google’s known ranking factors that help a site rank in a high position on the Search Results Page (SERP).
Word of advice: write useful content and optimize for search engines
When producing content, focus first on delivering high-quality answers to your customers’ most frequent questions. Then, perform proper SEO to that content so search engines — and AI tools — can understand it and present it to people’s queries.
Conclusion
Whether you decide to optimize your website for search engines by yourself or to hire a professional, this cost effective marketing strategy will help to increase your online visibility.
Essential SEO Reads
If you want to learn more about search engine optimization, take a look at the following resources:
- “SEO 2024: Learn Search Engine Optimization” by Adam Clarke
- Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
- Google’s SEO Starter Guide: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
- Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
- Ahrefs Blog: https://ahrefs.com/blog/
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