Are you just beginning your journey into Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? You may have heard that understanding how search engines work can help you increase traffic to your website and achieve higher rankings in search results.
We are here to clear up any confusion or complexities surrounding SEO—and we will also provide insights into the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in digital marketing. Once you grasp the fundamentals, you will learn how to leverage SEO to drive website traffic and generate high-quality leads.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Let’s begin with a simple question: what exactly is SEO?
SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization." It is a process used to drive traffic (visitors) to a website through the free, organic, editorial, or natural search results provided by search engines. Its primary goal is to improve your website's position on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Keep in mind that the higher your website appears in search results, the more people will see it.
Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz, created an excellent graphic modeled after Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. This "Mozlow's Hierarchy of SEO Needs" illustrates how SEO efforts should be structured and executed.
Pro tip: SEO is no longer limited to search engines like Google or Bing. It is now equally important to focus on ranking videos on platforms like YouTube, engaging with social networks, and even leveraging TikTok as a search engine—as people increasingly rely on these platforms to find information.
What are the three pillars of SEO?
As a digital marketer, knowing how to get your brand, website, or company in front of people searching online is a crucial skill. Understanding how SEO is constantly evolving will help you stay ahead in this field.
While minor changes in SEO occur frequently, its core concepts remain constant. SEO can be broken down into three main components—or pillars—that you should be familiar with and work on consistently:
Technical Optimization: This encompasses activities that improve your website's SEO but are not directly related to the content itself. These processes typically take place "behind the scenes." A simple example of technical optimization is submitting your sitemap to Google.
On-Page Optimization: This process ensures that your website's content is relevant and provides an excellent user experience. It includes the strategic use of keywords within your content. This can be managed through content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, or Shopify.
Off-Page Optimization: This involves activities conducted outside of your website to improve its ranking on search engines. It primarily relies on acquiring high-quality backlinks, which help enhance the site's reputation and credibility.
Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz, created an excellent graphic modeled after "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" pyramid. Fishkin’s ‘Mozlow’s Hierarchy of SEO Needs’ illustrates how one should approach SEO work.
Paid Search vs. Organic Search – Differences and Similarities
To begin with, it is essential to understand the differences and similarities between organic (natural) search—often synonymous with SEO—and paid search.
What are the differences between paid search and organic search?
There are five key differences between paid search and organic search. The table below briefly outlines these distinctions in terms of position, time required to achieve results, return on investment (ROI), share of traffic, and the investment required.
Position
The first difference between paid and organic results is where they are located on the search engine results page.
Water bottle SEO search
For Google, the AI Overview dominates the top of the results page with its cited articles on the right side of the screen.
That section is followed closely by the organic results and to its side, the sponsored products or paid results.
As we can see, Google's AI Overviews is changing display advertising all the time using AI. So it’s important to keep on top of developments for your SEO activities.
Time
Another key difference between paid and organic search is time. With paid search, you can get results quickly whereas, with organic search, results take more time - often weeks, months, and even years. So you have to play the medium to long-term game with organic search.Payment
As the name suggests, you pay for paid search traffic, with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.What that means is, you pay a fee every time a user clicks on your ad. So instead of relying on organic traffic to your website, you buy traffic for your page by paying Google to show your ad when your visitor searches for your keyword.
For organic search, traffic is free, although it does require an investment of both resources and time.
ROI
In terms of the return on investment (ROI), it's much easier to measure paid search. That's partly because Google provides more keyword data that you can capture in Google Analytics (GA4).However, with paid search, ROI can stagnate or decline over time. With organic search, ROI is a little bit harder to measure, but it often improves over time. Over the long term, organic search can offer a very good return on investment.
Share of traffic
When it comes to traffic, organic search remains one of the most important sources of website visits. BrightEdge’s research shows that organic search continues to be the primary driver of referral traffic, even as AI search platforms emerge as a new discovery channel. In fact, BrightEdge found that AI search accounted for less than 1% of referral traffic in its analysis of data from January to August 2025.The landscape is changing, but the fundamentals haven't disappeared: earning visibility in traditional search remains a major way for businesses to attract high-intent visitors to their websites.
It’s not all about differences – there are also similarities between paid and organic search:
Keyword research: You use a search engine for both paid and organic search, and both require a user to enter a keyword. So you need to do keyword research for organic search and paid search.
Landing pages: Both types of search require you to create great landing pages. For SEO, the landing page needs to be connected to your website. For paid search, it can be the exact same landing page you use for organic, or it can be a completely separate stand-alone page that sits on your website.
Traffic: Generating traffic is a major goal of both paid and organic search. Most importantly, both paid and organic search traffic include user intent. That is, someone is asking Google a question or searching for information – they are in an active mindset and as a result they are more likely to take action once they find this information.
How do search engines actually work?
Search engines are used by people when they have a query and are searching online for the answer.Search engine algorithms are computer programs that look for clues to give searchers the exact results they are looking for. Search engines rely on algorithms to find web pages and decide which ones to rank for any given keyword. That's why Google algorithm updates can have a huge impact on brands and marketers so you need to keep on top of them. Remember there’s also social media algorithms to consider for search.
There are three steps to how search engines work: crawling, indexing and ranking.
Step 1: search engine crawling
The first step is crawling. Search engines send out web crawlers to find new pages and record information about them. We sometimes call these web crawlers ‘spiders’,‘robots’ or Googlebots.Their purpose is to discover new web pages that exist, and to periodically check the content on pages they’ve previously visited to see whether they've changed or been updated.
Search engines crawl web pages by following links they’ve already discovered. So if you have a blog and it's linked from your homepage, when a search engine crawls your homepage, it will then look for another link and may follow the link to your new blog post.
Step 2: search engine indexing
The second step is indexing. Indexing is when a search engine decides whether or not it is going to use the content that it has crawled. If a crawled web page is deemed worthy by a search engine, it will be added to its index.
This index is used at the final ranking stage. When a web page or piece of content is indexed, it is filed and stored in a database where it can later be retrieved. Most web pages that offer unique and valuable content are placed into the index. A web page might not be placed in the index if:The content is considered duplicate
The content is considered low value or spammy
It couldn’t be crawled
The page or domain lacked inbound links
Top tip: You can check your indexed pages by typing ‘site:yourdomain.com’ in the search bar (see our example below). This will show you the pages showing up on Google. For a more detailed report you can look at the ‘Index Coverage report’ in Google Search Console.
Google Search Console site search
Step 3: search engine ranking
The third step is really the most important, and that is ranking. Ranking can only happen after the crawling and indexing steps are complete. So once a search engine has crawled and indexed your site, your site can be ranked.There are more than 200 ranking signals that search engines use to sort and rank content, and they all fit under the three pillars of SEO: technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization.
Some examples of signals that search engines use to rank web pages are:
Keyword in title tag – Whether the keyword or a synonym was mentioned on the page and within the title tag
Website reputation – Whether the web page and website is considered reputable for the topic being searched for
Backlinks - The quantity and quality of backlinks to a web page
Content quality and relevance - Is the content valuable and relevant to the website’s target audience?
Mobile friendliness - Are pages, content and images optimized for mobile?
If you're looking for agency support in the areas of SEO, content marketing and paid media, get in touch with Neil Patel Digital
Google uses multiple automated ranking systems and signals to determine which results are most relevant and useful for a particular search.
Rather than relying on a single algorithm, these systems work together to evaluate factors such as the meaning and intent of a query, the relevance and quality of content, links between pages, freshness, location and other contextual signals:
If you're looking for agency support in the areas of SEO, content marketing and paid media, get in touch with Neil Patel Digital
How does Google order and rank search results?
Google uses multiple automated ranking systems and signals to determine which results are most relevant and useful for a particular search.
Rather than relying on a single algorithm, these systems work together to evaluate factors such as the meaning and intent of a query, the relevance and quality of content, links between pages, freshness, location and other contextual signals:
Google's AI-powered systems help it understand both what a person is searching for and how different pieces of content relate to that search. For example, RankBrain helps Google understand relationships between words and concepts.
BERT helps it interpret the meaning of words in context.
Neural matching helps connect concepts in queries with concepts represented in pages, and passage ranking helps identify relevant sections of individual pages
As a digital marketer, you may find yourself working a lot with on-page optimizations foror ranking, which is why you should also consider Google’s EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) framework — a component of its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
Top tip: Other technologies to consider are Google Multitask Unified Model (MUM) and the AI-chatbot Google Gemini.
How to get the most out of RankBrain
A good SEO strategy is to optimize your website to improve user experience and satisfaction, and try to get the most out of the RankBrain ranking factor.The most effective ways to do this are:
Write naturally and comprehensively. Use the language your audience uses, but focus on covering the topic accurately and thoroughly rather than repeating keywords. Google's AI-powered systems can understand relationships between words and concepts, so exact keyword matching is less important than demonstrating relevance and meaning.
Create people-first content. Provide original information, analysis, research, first-hand experience or expertise that adds genuine value beyond what users can find elsewhere. Google's guidance specifically recommends creating content primarily to help people rather than content created primarily to attract search traffic.
Optimise titles and search snippets. Write unique, descriptive and concise page titles that accurately represent the content. Create useful meta descriptions where appropriate, while remembering that Google may generate the search snippet from other content on the page. Avoid keyword stuffing.
Improve the overall page experience. Make content easy to read, navigate and use across devices. Use images, video, diagrams, tools, examples or other formats when they genuinely help users understand the subject or accomplish their goal—not simply to increase time on page.
Focus on satisfying the user's need rather than engagement metrics. Don't optimize specifically for metrics such as bounce rate or dwell time. A successful page is one that helps the visitor accomplish what they came to do, whether that takes 30 seconds or 30 minutes.
Demonstrate expertise and trustworthiness. Where appropriate, show who created or reviewed the content, provide sources and evidence, and demonstrate relevant first-hand experience or expertise.
What is an SEO strategy?
Like anything in digital marketing, you need a strategy to help implement, track and tweak to be successful. It’s the same for your SEO.An SEO strategy is focused on optimizing your content to get ranked as high as possible on search engines - preferably page or position #1. Its goal is to boost organic traffic so you get found by your target personas.
A strategy for SEO also helps you to stay on track with your content. Instead of investing time and money into content that won’t perform, you will create quality content based on performance and user intent.
Top tip: If you’re a small business or one operating in a specific area, then local SEO can improve your visibility online and is an important element to bake into your strategy. It will help you get found by people in your area.
How to set objectives for your SEO strategy
Setting SEO objectives is a vital part of any SEO strategy. It is important to set SEO objectives – and align them with your overall business objectives as:- They encourage buy-in from key stakeholders
- They help you to formulate your SEO strategy
- They ensure goals are met
What metrics should you measure for SEO?
While it can feel like a time-consuming task to set objectives, measuring them can help you make progress with your SEO in the long term. So what metrics should you measure to track performance?- Keywords - These are the terms people type into search engines or social media sites. By tracking which keywords your site ranks for and the performance of each will help you understand the visibility of content to your target audience. This metric is for Top of the Funnel (TOFU).
- Organic traffic - This refers to visitors who arrive at your website through organic search results. An increase in organic traffic is a good indicator that your SEO strategies are working. This is a TOFU metric.
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP) results - SERP rankings show where your page appears for specific queries and the higher you are, the better your visibility. This is a TOFU metric.
- Time spent on page - This shows how long people are spending on your pages. If people are spending a long time on a page this suggests they are finding the content valuable and informative. This is a Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) metric.
- Engagement rate - This measures how people are enganging with your site and include likes, shares, time on site or comments. A high engagement rate is a good indication that your content or message is working. This is a MOFU metric.
- Click-through rate - This metric shows how many people are clicking through on a page or site after seeing a search result. The higher the CTR, the better! This is a TOFU metric.
- Brand awareness - This measures recognition and recall of your brand name or products/services which can lead to brand loyalty and brand recognition. This is a TOFU metric.
- Leads and revenue - By linking leads and revenue to SEO you can see how effective your activities and efforts are and look to replicate those that perform. This a Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) metric.
- Domain authority - This metric predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results so improving domain authority correlates with stronger SEO performance. This is a TOFU metric.
- AI citations - The number of times you are mentioned by AI Answers and AI platforms directly feed into your authoritativeness and adds to awareness about your brand.
3 examples of SEO objectives
When setting objectives and KPIs it’s important to be realistic. If you’re starting from nothing - i.e. you’re only starting to use SEO properly - then be modest in your figures but also have ambition.
If you have already been using SEO and seeing results, be more aggressive with your targets but base them on existing data. Setting unrealistic percentages will only bring disappointment.
Here are three examples of SEO objectives that can be used as a guide to setting relevant objectives for your own business or website:
- Move 50% of our top 20 keywords onto the first page of Google within nine months This objective focuses on keyword ranking.
- Improve our year-on-year organic traffic by 20% in quarter three and 25% in quarter four - This objective focuses on increasing organic website traffic.
- Grow our SEO market share from 3% to 5% in the next financial year - This objective focuses on growing market share.
How to set objectives for different types of businesses
The focus of your objectives will vary depending on whether your business is transactional or informational.If your business is transactional and you have an e-commerce element, you’ll want to set your objectives around tracking sales and lead conversions. However, if you're a non-ecommerce commercial site, you’ll want to focus on lead generation.
If your business is informational, you are more likely to set objectives focusing on brand awareness or website traffic.
Remember, even when you have fully implemented your SEO strategy, SEO is never finished. With SEO, you may need to change tactics midway through, play a long game, and wait to see the end results. But with a solid SEO foundation in place – and a little patience – the benefits of your SEO strategy should become apparent, leading to a better user experience for customers and more conversions for your business.
How to become an SEO Specialist
Now that you know what SEO is and how to use it, would you like a career in the area? If the answer is yes, then you’re in luck. Not only is it a skill that’s in high demand by companies across industries but you can also make a healthy living from it.Here are some of the skills necessary to thrive in this industry in 2026:
What Is SEO and How Does it Work?
If you’re starting from zero, taking an SEO course from the Digital Marketing Institute that covers all the basics is a good start.
Having that certification from a trusted brand like the DMI is also a signal for future clients or employers that you have done the work and you gained the necessary skills.
What skills do you need to become an SEO specialist? Companies rely on organic traffic to increase online visibility and when it works, they enjoy the rewards of SEO as a low-cost strategy.
There are a number of skills you need to succeed in the area of SEO.
- Keyword research - Understanding how to find and use the right keywords through keyword research can help your content rank higher on search engines and social media, drive targeted and high intent traffic, and increase conversions.
- Link building strategy - Knowing how to use internal and external links to build authority and show your depth of knowledge can help content to rank higher and build brand awareness.
- Content optimization - Understand how to create relevant and informative content that your audience wants and needs by developing content pillars. You should also update and optmize content to ensure new content gets attention and top-performing content keeps bringing in traffic.
- Data analysis - SEO relies on data. This means that you need to be able to analyze data to get insights into customer behavior and understand the reasons behind increases or drops in site traffic or conversions related to SEO.
- Content marketing or copywriting - Being able to write good copy is a real bonus as an SEO specialist. Luckily there are now lots of AI tools you can use for copywriting to generate ideas, create outlines, provide recommendations for optimization or proofread.
- Technical SEO - Get to grips with the technical aspects of SEO to improve a website's visibility and performance. Elements to consider are page speed, structured data, broken links and mobile optimization.
What can you earn as an SEO Specialist?
The salary of an SEO expert can depend on where they work: freelance, agency, or in-house. It will also depend on the level of experience and time spent doing SEO effectively.
SEO Specialist salary by location. Source: DMI
Salary figures are based on Indeed salary data and can change over time. The Ireland figures should be treated as indicative because of the relatively small number of reported salaries.
In the United States, Indeed reports an average salary of $80,693 per year for an SEO Specialist, with salaries typically ranging from around $41,843 to $155,617 depending on experience, location and employer. Junior SEO Specialists earn an average of $54,393, while Senior SEO Specialists average $89,477.
In the UK, an SEO Specialist earns an average of £35,399 per year, while Junior SEO Specialists average £24,795 and Senior SEO Specialists average £40,380. Indeed's data also shows that location can make a significant difference, with London-based SEO Specialists averaging close to £39,810.
In Ireland, Indeed currently reports an average salary of €41,370 per year for SEO Specialists. The average for an SEO Manager is higher at €56,782 per year, although these figures are based on relatively small samples and should therefore be treated as a general indication rather than a definitive market rate.
As SEO continues to evolve alongside AI search, technical SEO, content strategy and AI visibility are also becoming increasingly relevant skills. Developing expertise across these areas can open up opportunities beyond traditional SEO roles, including technical SEO, SEO management, search strategy and emerging AI-search optimisation roles.
Key resources:
Search Marketing Interview Preparation Toolkit - DMI
What Does an SEO Manager Do? - DMI
What are the best SEO tools?
What are the best SEO tools?
Luckily, there are loads of great resources and tools out there to help with your SEO activities. Some have free plans and others are paid, so it’s about finding what’s best for you.- Google Search Console
- GA4
- KWFinder
- SemRush
- SEO audit toolsScreaming Frog
- SEOptimer
- Moz
- Answerthepublic
- UberSuggest
- BuzzSumo
- seoClarity
- Surfer
AI and SEO
Artificial intelligence is already used to optimize many areas of SEO. From using tools to help with keyword research and content generation to getting AI-driven insights and user intent intel.Developments to monitor in AI and SEO are:
- Google’s AI Overviews - Featured snippets on steroids, SGE uses AI to generate detailed results to give users exactly what they are searching for. This includes not only a detailed generative answer (similar toChatGPT) but also offers an image carousel along with suggested questions and suggestions.
- Predictive analytics - You can predict changes in search algorithms and adapt your strategy accordingly. Use AI tools that examine historical data and current trends to make predictions such as RankSense, Ahrefs, and CognitiveSEO.
- AI in local SEO - Optimize content to localize content based on preferences or regional factors. Tools that can help are Moz Local, and BrightSpark.
- Answer Engine Optimization - AI is changing how users search and find information so it could be a good idea to optimize for answer engines. Tools that can help are ChatGPT and Google SGE.
- Video SEO - People love video content so it’s crucial to optimize your videos for SEO, on YouTube or otherwise.
- Multimodal search - Search is becoming increasingly multimodal, meaning people can use text, images, video and other formats to find information. Google's AI search guidance recommends supporting written content with high-quality images and videos where appropriate, while keeping important information available in text.
- Core Web Vitals (CWV) - The CWV consists of three user experience metrics that measure the loading, interactivity, and visual stability of a web page. Optimizing them will improve the page speed and SEO ranking.
- AI Agents - One of the emerging areas to watch is the development of AI agents that can move beyond finding information to helping users complete tasks. Google has begun providing initial guidance around AI agents as part of its broader recommendations for generative AI search.
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