SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

What SEO means

SEO, short for search engine optimisation, is the work of making your website easier for search engines to find, understand and trust, so it shows up in the unpaid results when people search for what you offer. It covers three broad areas: the technical health of the site, the content and structure of each page, and the reputation your business has across the web. Google's own SEO Starter Guide is a good plain-English starting point.

Seen in practice

A bakery in Leeds writes a clear page about its celebration cakes, adds prices, real photos and an order form, and makes sure the page title says "Celebration cakes in Leeds". Over a few months it starts appearing when people nearby search for birthday cakes, and orders follow. Nothing clever happened. The page just answered the search better than before.

Why it matters for your content

Paid ads stop the moment you stop paying. Organic visibility keeps working while you're busy with customers. For a local trade or a small online shop, a handful of pages ranking well for the right searches can bring a steady flow of enquiries without a per-click cost.

Traps to avoid

• Expecting results in weeks. SEO usually takes months, and nobody can guarantee rankings.
• Chasing traffic instead of customers. A thousand visits from the wrong people are worth less than ten from the right ones.
• Buying "SEO packages" that promise hundreds of links. Those tactics break Google's spam policies.
• Treating it as a one-off job. Sites drift, competitors improve and search keeps changing.

Related content terms

• SERP: Search engine results page: the page of results a search engine shows for a query.
• Search intent: The likely goal behind a query: learn, navigate, compare or buy.
• Technical SEO: Making a site crawlable, indexable, fast and structured so search engines can understand it.
• On-page SEO: Optimising titles, headings, content, internal links and HTML on your own pages.