What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, the practice of structuring a site so that it ranks well in unpaid (organic) search results.
Also known as: Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the discipline of getting search engines to send you traffic for the queries that matter to your business. The work splits roughly three ways: technical (the site is fast, crawlable, indexable, and renders the right content), on-page (titles, headings, body, internal links, structured data), and off-page (backlinks, brand mentions, authority signals).
Google's ranking system is famously a black box, but the broad shape is well understood: relevance to the query, quality of the content, authority of the domain, freshness, user experience signals (Core Web Vitals), and an increasing helping of intent-matching from AI-driven systems. The 2024 helpful content update tightened the screws on AI-generated and thin content; SEO that does not also serve a real user need is increasingly punished.
For LLM-era SEO ("AEO" or "GEO"), the same fundamentals apply with a new layer: structured data (JSON-LD) and clearly written, factual content matter more because that is what AI assistants quote when they answer questions. A page that ranks well in Google increasingly also ranks well as a citation in Claude, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.
In the wild
- A SaaS startup investing in long-tail comparison pages to capture bottom-of-funnel queries
- A site refactor consolidating duplicate content with canonical tags and 301 redirects to recover lost rankings
- An LLM-visibility audit checking which pages get cited when ChatGPT is asked about the brand's product category