What the heck is SEO, actually?!
Is it branding, is it UX? What about links? Or site speed?
Yes. It’s all of those things. With 200+ things that can affect how a page ranks, understanding SEO can be super confusing!
Let’s keep it simple.
First, I’ll give you my explanation of SEO and then I’ll share two others to round out your perspective.
Here’s An Easy, Clear Definition of SEO For People Who Don’t Really Get What It Is
My definition of SEO comes out of my personal projects, consulting, client work, and as the SEO director of Clique Studios where I’ve worked with the full spectrum — from local Chicago-area businesses to $100 million venture-backed startups.
For me, SEO is all about solving problems. You need to reverse engineer it — what are people actually looking for? What’s their real search intent? When someone types a phrase into Google, what do they really want? Then it’s about taking that information, using our expertise and research abilities to make sure that the information is there when they want it.
Here are two other great explanations of SEO (via Ahrefs):
Glen Allsop, CEO of Detailed and Founder of Gaps:
SEO to me, if given an explanation that I’m interested in, is part reverse-engineering algorithms and part reverse-engineering human nature. It’s about using logic and ‘gut’ to do what you think should matter and then relying on data to correct yourself in due-course.
Ross Hudgens, Founder and CEO of Siege Media:
SEO is search engine optimization, the act of optimizing your website to show up higher in search engines. At the core, the two biggest ranking factors for this are content and links, matching users’ expectation for that content and being perceived as authoritative enough for the search engines to return.
As SEOs, we are all at a basic level optimize for these things. At a more advanced level, we think about and optimize for the 200+ factors Google has also mentioned are important to them. But if you focus on just those two, you’ll return quite highly (knock on wood!)
Search engine optimization — it just doesn’t need to be more involved than that. Kapish?!
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