What is SEO?

So you’re here because you’ve heard one way to get more traffic to your website is by doing SEO.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing your website so that a search engine algorithm assesses it favorably and ranks it higher in search results.

When your rankings go up, more people click through to your website.

And the more keywords you rank for - and the more searched they are - the more traffic you can bring in.

As you can see from the graph above, the first few ranking positions receive the lion’s share of clicks so it creates a strong incentive to optimize your website to rank higher.

SEO is what it takes to get there.

Before I share what works today, let's address the elephant in the room: the persistent myth that "SEO is dead"—a refrain that resurfaces after every algorithm update. This couldn't be further from the truth.

What's actually happening is far more straightforward: more businesses are competing for the same limited real estate. The first page of Google still captures the majority of clicks, but with millions of new websites launching every year, the competition for those coveted positions has intensified dramatically. Sites using outdated tactics or that attempt to cheat the algorithm have seen their traffic plummet, creating the illusion that SEO no longer works—when in reality, the standards for success have simply risen.

"But wait," you might be thinking, "do people still use Google? Hasn't AI replaced traditional search?" The data tells a different story. Recent research shows that American desktop users perform an average of 126 unique Google searches per month. Google says they process over 5 trillion searches worldwide annually. While AI assistants are grabbing headlines, they're not making a dent in Google's traffic engine.

The simple truth is if you want more website traffic, Google is the biggest source of it. Plus even as AI assistants grow more popular, did you know they too search Google to find sources for their answers?

How Google ranks websites

Google’s mission is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To do that, Google crawls the web and maintains an algorithm that returns the most valuable information it’s seen when searchers query it.

The basic unit of information to Google is the webpage.

So by creating genuinely valuable content on your webpages - while understanding the technical aspects that makes that value visible to Google - you can win the heart of the algorithm and capture first-page visibility.

Google ranks webpages according to three main criteria:

• How easily and efficiently Google can discover, render, and index the page, what we term technical SEO;
• The relevancy of your page’s content in relation to specific keywords, otherwise known as content SEO; and
• How many other pages link to your page (and how many other pages link to their page, and so on), what we call authority in the SEO world.

No doubt many aspects of SEO are highly technical and remain “under the hood” of the website, never visible to the ordinary person browsing. However, the main touchstone of search rank is something very simple and common sense: Does your webpage efficiently address the question(s) intended by a given search query?

How to do SEO

In a nutshell, you need to build pages that are relevant for each group of closely related keywords that people search, not have any technical issues that would prevent Google from crawling and indexing those pages, and get people to link to your pages when they write about you online to build your authority.

If you do those three things consistently, Google will rank you higher and you’ll get more traffic to your website.

How to do those three things in detail and quickly I won’t get into (hire me), but I will answer another frequently asked question about SEO: how long it takes.

SEO typically takes 3 months to start seeing an uptick in traffic

Writing optimized content takes time. Fixing technical issues on your website takes time. Getting other people to link to you takes time. Depending on how quickly you can write, code, and convince others to link to you, that’s how long SEO takes. If you have a new website with no links to it, expect SEO to take a long time. If you already have a lot of content on your website and people have already linked to it, expect SEO to take the least amount of time.

For the average website, SEO takes 3 months before you get to the point where clicks from Google are increasing.

Remember, even after you take action on your site, Google needs to crawl it again to discover the changes and re-rank you. At the same time, competitors are also making changes on their sites too. In other words, there’s no easy answer to how long SEO takes because there’s a lot of moving parts to it.

Think of doing SEO as a giant feedback loop

Google has a free tool called Google Search Console that tells you how well you’re doing SEO. It provides technical diagnostics as well as shows you what keywords you’re ranking for, in what positions and how many clicks you’re getting from them. And if you want to understand what someone does on your site after clicking through to it from Google, Google Analytics is another free tool you should set up.

You can learn from and act upon all this data to improve your SEO. It’s a giant feedback loop.

For example, you may see keywords losing ranking position, which makes you update the page that was ranking. Or you may see a new keyword start ranking you hadn’t thought about before, which you could write a new dedicated page about in order to rank even better.

If your site doesn’t have Google Search Console set up already, that’s step one to do SEO. You can’t do SEO in the dark without getting feedback on how you’re doing.

The Cogney Difference in SEO

Besides 15 years in the industry and having worked on large, well-known websites, the other thing that sets me and my agency Cogney apart is I’ve built custom, cutting-edge tools to help understand and shorten this feedback loop in SEO I just talked about.

I call this suite of tools SEO Intelligence and you can check it out here. It’s not for beginners (it doesn’t tell you exactly what to do, more like it tells you where you need to focus) so it’s best if you have some knowledge of SEO already. If you don’t - or just don’t want to spend your time doing it - you can also reach out to me here to tell me about your website and I’ll reply sharing if and how I think I could help optimize it.