Search Engine Optimisation – a rare business win-win-win

An Introduction to SEO

SEO is such a widely used term that even people with no digital marketing experience might guess what it stands for in a pub quiz. However, even those who’ve worked directly on Search Engine Optimisation can find that if they take a short break from it, they return to a landscape that has changed almost beyond recognition. The recent explosive growth of powerful AI tools has only accelerated a pace of change that was already manic.

At its core, one principle remains the same—and always will as long as search engines form the hub of most internet users’ experience. SEO is about visibility online, allowing businesses to connect with their audiences organically by ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). You can build a robust business, sell the best products and services, or create the best content—but if none of it finds its audience, the result is much like writing a perfect novel and then locking it in a drawer.

AI has had an impact on SEO, but hasn’t dislodged search engines from their centrality to the online experience. Global research by Datareportal recently found that search engines remain the most popular way that internet users find brands, products and services. 30.6 percent of internet users aged 16 to 64 cited search engines as their primary means of discovery, ahead of ads on television or social media or word-of-mouth. As Statista reports, Google continues to dominate the market, and is alone responsible for an astonishing 85.5 billion visits to its search home page every month.

The ultimate goal, as always, is to drive organic, unpaid traffic to a website by ensuring that it ranks higher in search results than competitors. Organic search remains the primary source of website traffic for most businesses, ahead of direct search or referrals and way, way ahead of paid search. This does vary by industry (40% of technology website traffic comes from organic search, compared to 55% of healthcare website traffic, according to Marketing Scoop), but SEO remains indispensable and a critical marketing investment.

What has changed are the skills needed to create a powerful SEO strategy. SEO may have begun as a primarily technical practice focused on keywords and backlinks but in 2024 it is a multidisciplinary approach which must incorporate understanding of user experience, the semantics of search, and wider marketing strategies. The most effective SEO strategies combine technical expertise with creativity and strategic thinking to ensure that a website passes the technical requirements of search engines, meets user’s needs by providing truly relevant and engaging content, and is part of an overall integrated marketing strategy that ensures your products or services are seen by the right people.

As this article will argue, SEO is also a rare example of a win-win-win business strategy. The best SEO creates a win for search engines by providing winning content that enriches users’ online experience, in turn helping a business win in the fierce competition for an audience and ultimate business success.

The Impact of AI on SEO

Before diving deeper into how SEO works, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room, which is the impact of AI. First, it’s worth noting that AI is in fact nothing new to the world of search, which was indeed one of its earliest adopters. As early as 2009, Microsoft was introducing AI to interpret queries and deliver improved search results.

Nonetheless, the explosive growth of ChatGPT has led to many questioning the future of search. In December 2022, the Guardian was writing about ChatGPT and speculating that it might be “an alternative to Google”. If that day will ever come, it still seems a long way off. A key factor here is trust. ChatGPT and other AI applications have become notorious for “hallucinations” and so, as a small study by Penn State University found, people “use [ChatGPT] to search for information, but they don’t trust the results.”

In addition, the major search engines have responded to the existential threat of AI by increasing their own use of the technology in their user interfaces. Search engines have also begun to prioritise content that demonstrates human expertise, originality, and relevance, in a way that offers value to users that AI competitors haven’t yet matched.

Ultimately, the impact of AI may be to improve the traditional search engines, rather than replace them. It is not for nothing that the two titans of search, Google and Microsoft, have invested so heavily in AI over decades. The goal is to make search engines more conversational, intuitive and personalised. Already, Google’s Gemini is moving away from providing only a list of links, instead offering direct and tailored answers that understand the context and intent behind complex queries.

No matter what the future holds, search engines look likely to remain at the heart of online interactions, and as long as they are, SEO will remain at the heart of digital marketing.

How Does SEO Work?

Getting an SEO strategy right is increasingly complex, but there are three fundamental principles that underpin it: relevance, authority, and technical performance. These are the key factors search engines assess when deciding what results to deliver to a query.

Relevance

Relevance is the foundation of all search. To state the obvious, users are asking questions when they go to a search engine, and if the results don’t answer those questions then the search engine has failed. However, this is not always as simple as it sounds, particularly given the unpredictable ways in which real humans actually enter their queries.

One of the most challenging tasks a search engine therefore faces is how to understand the intent behind a query, such as assessing whether the user is seeking informational, navigational, or transactional content. A user searching for “best quality audio speakers” is likely to want product recommendations, with a strong quantitative factor, while someone looking for a “history of audio speakers” is seeking results that offer more qualitative content, with greater context and expertise. Search engines therefore assess keywords, on-page content and tags to determine whether a page on a website matches user intent.

Authority

Authority also plays a crucial role in how search engines rank different websites. The concept was codified in Google’s PageRank algorithm, which uses the quality and quantity of links that point to a page as a key metric to assess credibility. When a trusted website links to content, PageRank counts this as a vote of confidence: the more such links from the more high quality pages, the higher the ranking.

While PageRank isn’t as important as it was in the past, its principles endure and backlinks continue to act as a critical signal of authority. What has changed is that search engines have evolved to prioritise quality over quantity, so that a few links from reputable, relevant sites carry more weight than a large number of low-quality links. These changes were put in place to discourage disreputable “black-hat” practices by SEO marketers that focused solely on placing links than improving quality of content.

Technical performance

While technical performance is last in this list, it is still fundamental to any successful SEO strategy. For a website to even feature in a search, it must be discovered by search engines through a process called crawling. To find results, search engine bots (sometimes called crawlers or spiders) systematically browse the internet, following links and cataloguing the content they find. Once a page has been crawled, it is added to a search engine’s index, which serves as a vast database of web pages. A reputable SEO partner will ensure that a website is fully optimised for this crawling process.

The ranking begins when a user submits a query. Search engines then scour their index to identify and rank pages based on several factors, with relevance and authority highest. The pages that align most closely with the query will then appear at the top of the organic results, leading to clicks and business success.

How to Improve A Website’s Rankings

Now we move onto the question that every good entrepreneur and digital marketer really wants to know the answer to. Given all of these factors, how can a business actually improve its rankings in searches?

In 2024, the answer is that it requires a comprehensive and integrated approach that encompasses—at a minimum—technical SEO work, optimisation of on-page content, and off-page marketing strategies. It’s only by addressing all these aspects of SEO that businesses can ensure their websites satisfy the requirements not only of search engines but also their users.

Technical SEO

Good technical SEO work focuses on the backend of a website, making it easy for search engines to crawl, index, and understand what they find. The win-win-win of technical SEO is that it not only ensures higher ranking but also provides a smoother experience for users, delivering sustainable growth.

For example, one of the most critical aspects of technical SEO is maximising the speed of a website. The more digitally connected consumers become, the less patient they are. Forbes Advisor recently found that an astonishing 47% of internet users will abandon a site if it takes longer than two seconds to load. For that reason, a search engine is letting its users down if it directs them to a slow website and all engines have measurements—such as Google’s Core Web Vitals, introduced in 2021— that emphasise the importance of speed, alongside other user-friendly aspects such as interactivity, and visual stability.

In an age when more than half of searches are conducted through mobile devices (58.67%, to be precise, according to Statista) mobile-friendliness is also of utmost importance to technical SEO work. With more than 60% of global searches conducted on mobile devices, mobile-responsiveness is no longer an additional consideration—it is a primary consideration. Indeed, Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it evaluates how a website works on mobile above how it works on desktops or tablets.

There are other technical elements that should always be considered in SEO optimisation, including the construction of a clear website structure, XML sitemaps, and a robust approach to fixing crawl errors. Only when all these practices are followed will search engines be able to easily navigate and understand a site.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is primarily about optimising different elements of individual pages to make them of maximum relevance to search queries. This starts, as it has for many years, with thorough keyword research. Tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush remain effective ways for businesses to identify high-value keywords that align with their target market’s needs.

Some less sophisticated SEO marketers will respond to these requirements by stuffing web pages full of these keywords, which often makes for a poor user experience. Not only that, but it is less and less effective, with search engines (aided by AI) getting better at prioritising quality over quantity. To be most effective, on-page content must be well-researched, engaging, and also aligned with Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) guidelines.

Use of multimedia elements such as videos, infographics and attractive visuals are further examples of on-page techniques that not only enhance user engagement but signal relevance to search engines and results. Meta tags (including title tags and meta descriptions) remain of high importance in signalling page contents to search engines and also drive higher click-through rates, meaning higher engagement and potential profits. That’s another win-win-win.

There are other more technical techniques to improve search performance, such as well-structured header tags and internal links which improve user experience and help guide search engines.

Off-Page SEO

On-page SEO is focused squarely on your website, while the final part of the puzzle—off-page SEO—roams further afield and focuses on building your brand’s reputation and your website’s visibility on the wider web. The cornerstone of off-page SEO remains link-building, the difficult, time-consuming but essential process of acquiring backlinks from other websites.

The most sophisticated and most effective link-building strategies focus on creating high-quality content that naturally attracts links, which usually requires a fully integrated marketing approach. If a website is home to interesting original research, engaging and insightful content such as a well-written blog, or added value content such as infographics, this will encourage other sites to link to your content. If you glance through this article, you’ll see several links to websites that have published valuable research, as an example.

There are other, more proactive, methods that can be used, dependent on resources. Guest blogging on reputable websites or securing external media coverage are other powerful ways to secure backlinks. They also showcase a brand’s expertise, another example of how good SEO marketing feeds into a wider, integrated marketing strategy.

Social media can also play an indirect role in off-page SEO. While social media metrics such as likes and shares don’t directly influence a brand’s rankings on a search engine, they will amplify the reach of content, and that in turn increases the chances of earning backlinks.

All reputable brands should avoid “black-hat” techniques, such as purchasing backlinks. These practices can yield short-term gains but may also result in severe penalties from search engines and are reputationally damaging when spotted by users. This inverts the win-win-win strategies listed above, and becomes a lose-lose-lose scenario.

Looking to the future

As an introduction to SEO, this article has had to take a “helicopter” view of the rich and complex digital landscape in which SEO takes place. It hasn’t explored more specialist areas of SEO such as voice search optimisation, for example. The rise of virtual assistants such as Siri has made it even more important that key words are conversational and mimic natural speech patterns, and this is likely to be a trend that accelerates as AI improves voice assistants and drives search engines into more natural, human-like text exchanges.

Similarly, video content features increasingly prominently in search results, with platforms like YouTube becoming ever more dominant. Forward-thinking businesses should already be creating video content that is not only engaging but also optimised through the use of titles, tags, and transcripts that are easily crawled by search engines. Although the future is difficult to predict with certainty, this again looks like a trend that will continue.

These are all opportunities for businesses to improve their SEO power, but there are also threats. The increasing capabilities and availability of AI tools may lead businesses to give in to the temptation to use them in content creation. Sometimes this may even happen without them knowing, if an outside agency employs AI. This approach may yield short-term results, just as “black-hat” techniques can, but are also likely to backfire in the long-term. Users are usually able to detect AI content and are not only less engaged by it but also likely to lose trust in the brand hosting it. It’s for this reason that search engines are working hard to enhance their scrutiny of content and exclude more AI-generated content. Digital marketers may find tools such as Originality.ai valuable in helping them to detect AI-generated material that could harm their SEO impact and credibility.

Despite all of these changes, one thing remains the same—SEO is a dynamic and indispensable component of digital marketing, and one of the most powerful and cost-effective tools available to help a business reach its audience or market. A business that understands how search engines work will also understand that creating a better user experience and richer content are the single most effective ways of ranking highly in their results. This is a win-win-win formula for increasing audience size, strengthening loyalty and achieving long-term, sustainable growth.