Back to Basics: What is SEO?

Being visible online is more important than ever, and that’s why investing your time in SEO is also more important than ever. But what exactly is SEO and why should you care about it? From what it is, to how it works, the benefits of it and what you need to do, we discuss all you need to know to improve your website’s performance so you can get the results you’re after.  

What does SEO stand for?

SEO is short for search engine optimisation, the process of optimising a website to appear organically in search engines.  

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving website visibility and driving organic traffic from search engines by optimising various aspects of the website. 

How does SEO work?

SEO works by helping search engines understand, evaluate, and rank your website so it appears higher in search results. Each page on your website will be crawled by search engines to understand how relevant it is to a user’s search. There are three key pillars to SEO; technical, content and offsite brand signals – and you have to optimise all aspects to build a good site that search engines deem useful to users.  

Because search algorithms constantly evolve, SEO is an ongoing process of refining your site to stay relevant and competitive. 

What is an organic listing?

Organic listings are what appear underneath the paid results in the search engine results page (SERP) and can’t be influenced by your advertising budget, but instead by how Google rates your website vs a given search term.​ 

There are many different types of organic listings that your site can appear in such as: 

• Main “blue link” listing 

• People also ask​ 

• Images​ 

• Videos​ 

• Maps​ 

• Featured snippets​ 

• AI Overviews​ 

Why is SEO important?

It’s important because it helps users find your site. Optimising your site with relevant, useful and quality content will help increase your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs for a user’s search, resulting in an increase in, essentially, free traffic.  

What are the Benefits of SEO?

There are many benefits of SEO, with some including: 

• Increases your website’s visibility and organic traffic 

• Builds trust with both search engines and users 

• Improves user experience through better site structure and content 

• Reduced cost compared to paid advertising 

• Helps you stay competitive in your industry 

• Supports overall brand awareness and authority 

• Satisfies users by giving them the desired content they were searching for  

What are the core components of SEO?

The main components you should focus on for SEO are your on-page content, technical SEO and offsite brand signals. These three main pillars include several key elements you should work on. 

What is on page content?

On page content is, quite literally, every bit of content that are on the pages of your website whether it’s product listing pages, the homepage or blogs. This content needs to be relevant, high-quality, and useful to the user. It should also contain the keywords you want to target.  

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is all about the infrastructure of your website. This is a huge aspect of SEO to ensure search engines can find, crawl and index your site efficiently. There are several key elements that sit under technical SEO including: 

• Site speed / Core Web Vitals – Fast loading, responsive interaction, visual stability. 

• Mobile-friendly design – Responsive layout and usability. 

• Secure site (HTTPS) – Encryption and trust signals. 

• XML sitemaps – Helping crawlers understand your site structure. 

• Robots.txt – Controlling what search engines should/shouldn’t crawl. 

• Structured data / Schema markup – Enhancing understanding for rich results. 

• Canonical tags – Preventing duplicate content issues. 

• Clean site architecture – Logical navigation and URL hierarchy. 

What are offsite brand signals?

Offsite brand signals are indicators that show search engines how strong, trusted and well-known your brand is outside of your own website. All of these signals can help search engines understand your brand’s authority and relevance and whether to rank you higher for a user’s search.  

Offsite brand signals include: 

• Backlinks 

• Brand mentions 

• Social presence 

• Reviews & ratings 

• Press coverage  

What are keywords in SEO?

Keywords are search questions, queries or terms that searchers use to reach their desired content. By researching keywords that are relevant to your site, and including them within your content, you can improve the chances of ranking in search engines when a customer is searching for them. Keyword rankings can fluctuate over the course of time, meaning it’s important to track their performance and apply optimisations where necessary.  

How to choose keywords for SEO

When choosing which keywords to target in your content, you need to be looking at what users are searching and what’s relevant to your site. You need to understand your audience and carry out keyword research to find out what users are searching for in relation to your site’s services or products. There are a number of tools available to assist you with your keyword research such as SEMrush which can give you the average monthly search volume of keywords, and Google Search Console which can inform you of the searches users are making when landing on your site.  

What are SEO tools?

SEO tools are platforms that can help you analyse, optimise, and track your website’s performance in search engines. They will also help by providing useful insights and data. There are many well rated SEO tools available to use such as:  

• Google Search Console 

• SEMrush 

• Ahrefs  

• Moz 

• Screaming Frog 

• Sitebulb  

How to improve your SEO

There are 100s of signals to take into consideration when wanting to improve your SEO work, but the main thing to bear in mind is that improving customer experience should be at the forefront of your strategy. The simplest way to optimise this is by:  

• Writing up to date, high quality and useful content that satisfies a user’s needs 

• Having a good technical infrastructure of your site  

• Enhancing user experience by having clear navigations and readable content 

How long does it take for SEO to work?

How long is a piece of string? There’s no definitive answer for this one. As long as you keep writing good quality content that is useful to the user and continue to have a good technical site structure, Google should reward you with better rankings. However, it’s important to know there are so many ranking factors that Google analyses to deem whether your site is the right result for a user. SEO is a long-term strategy, but the results build over time and can create lasting growth. 

What is an SEO agency?

An SEO agency is a company that specialises in SEO who will help a business improve visibility and increase organic traffic to their site. Here at Summit, we have our own SEO team who can help you by prioritising the technical infrastructure of your website, the quality and relevancy of your content, and the authority of your brand.  

How do I do SEO for my website?

There are so many things for you to do when starting to consider working on SEO for your website. You need to make sure you have a good technical set up of your site and that you’re writing high quality, helpful content that will satisfy your user’s needs.  

This article contains tips and the main things you need to consider, but if you would like to find out how we can help with SEO for your business, get in touch with the team today.  

AEO, GEO and LLM

We can’t finish up without touching on AEO, GEO and LLM. As search behaviour is ever evolving, we’re seeing a rise in these optimisation strategies within SEO, but what do they actually mean?  

• GEO – Generative Engine Optimisation is about optimising your content for AI-driven search engines that generate results based on user intent, context, and quality 

• AEO – Answer Engine Optimisation is about optimising your content so that search engines and AI systems can understand your information and provide direct, accurate answers to users’ questions in areas of the SERP such as AI Overviews.  

• LLM – Large Language Models are AI systems that can understand, generate, and interpret human language. With the increase of people using these systems, it’s important your optimising content to be clear, helpful, and aligned with real user intent. 

There’s so much more we can discuss on these, so keep an eye out for our upcoming blog where we dig into each of them a little deeper.