Mateusz Makosiewicz
Marketing researcher and educator at Ahrefs. Mateusz has over 10 years of experience in marketing gained in agencies, SaaS and hardware businesses. When not writing, he's composing music or enjoying long walks.
Contents
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the process of improving a website’s visibility in search engines to get more traffic. For example, if you sell coffee, SEO can help your website show up in Google when people search for “buy coffee.” Most clicks in Google go to the top few organic results. Unless you rank there, you’re hardly going to get any traffic. SEO is how you getthere. For example, our blog ranks high for thousands of keywords and gets an estimated 654K monthly visits from organic search. Without SEO, we’d have to spend somewhere in the region of $728K per month on ads for that same traffic. Understanding this is key to understanding how SEO works, so here’s a brief crash course. Search engines have an index that stores copies of web pages. When you search, they look through all the pages in the index for relevant results. They then rank them using a computer program called an algorithm to put the best results at the top and display a search engine result page (SERP) to theuser. Further reading Given how search engines work, a web page will only rank high if it’s indexed and the search engine thinks it’s the best result for the search. It also needs to load fast and offer a good user experience. With that in mind, here’s the SEO process in a nutshell: Ranking for terms nobody searches for is pointless. You won’t get traffic even if you rank #1. To find what people are searching for, you’ll need a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Here’s the process: For example, if you enter “coffee” you’ll see 3,740,238 keywords containing that term sorted by their monthly search volumes. It’s then simply a case of plucking out the keywords with the most value foryou. For example, if you run a blog about coffee, you could get ideas for educational content by switching to the Questions tab to see only keywords posed as questions. Additionally, you could start with the low-hanging fruit by setting a low Keyword Difficulty (KD)score. Further reading Relevant content is whatever best matches what the searcher is looking for; the search intent. Understanding what this is and how to create it can get complicated, but half the battle is creating the right type of content. Here are a few popular content types: There’s no exact science to figuring out which one searchers are looking for, but the top-ranking results are usually a goodproxy. For example, interactive tools dominate the first page for “days between dates” whereas videos dominate for “excel for beginners.” This is a clear indication of what searchers want and the best type of content to create for each keyword. Relevant content is the foundation, but you also need to optimize your content by following SEO best practices. And this starts with making sure you cover the topic in full to give searchers what they expect. You can do that manually by looking at commonalities between the top-ranking pages, such as headings, FAQs, visual aid, how deep they go into the subject, etc. You can also use SEO tools like Ahrefs to find the keywords that top-ranking pages rank for. Some of the keywords point to good subtopics or points to include in your content. Here’s the process: Here’s an example for the query “content marketing.” It’s a hint that searchers may be looking for a definition and actionable advice for creating a strategy or aplan. Other best practices include: Further reading Backlinks are links from one website to another. They act as votes, and pages with more of those “votes” tend to rank higher. How do we know? We studied almost one billion web pages and found a clear correlation between referring domains (links from unique websites) and organic search traffic. Generally speaking, there are three ways to get backlinks: Building backlinks is something that preoccupies the SEO industry. In fact, many SEOs and agencies specialize in that alone. To give you an idea of how this works, here’s a quick overview of a few popular backlink building techniques. What you want, though, is not just any kind of backlinks. The consensus in the SEO community is that there are five factors that make up a backlink’s quality: We cover all of them in detail in our link building guide for beginners. But here’s the takeaway to remember: the best links come from relevant, authoritative websites and are placed within the main content. Since these kinds of links are so valuable, they became sort of the currency of the web. That’s why it’s so challenging to get good quality links. Further reading SEM (Search Engine Marketing) has the broadest scope of those three, encompassing generating traffic from organic search (SEO) and paying for traffic with PPC search ads. Learn more about the difference in our guide to SEO vs. SEM. There are 3 main types ofSEO: There are also a few subtypes of SEO focusing on specific business conditions such as local SEO, ecommerce SEO, and enterprise SEO. There are many. Here are 7 ranking factors that have been confirmed: There are many good resources you can find online, and a good portion of them are free. You can start with our guide on SEO for beginners or take free courses in Ahrefs’ Academy. The short answer is yes if you run a small to medium-sized website. All you need is some time to learn and practice SEO, plus good SEO tools that offer vast and accurate data. For bigger sites, more than one SEO specialist may be needed. You may need to hire someone or outsource to freelancers or an agency. SEO is usually a lengthy process. We learned from over 4k respondents that it typically takes between 3-6 months to see results. If you’re looking to hire someone for SEO instead of doing it yourself, your options are: The cost estimates are based on our study. Got questions or comments? Ping me on X.1. Find what people search for
2. Create relevant, optimized content
3. Get backlinks
What is the difference between SEO, SEM, andPPC?
What are the types ofSEO?
What are the SEO ranking factors?
How can I learnSEO?
Can I do SEO on myown?
How much time does SEOtake?
How much does SEOcost?