What Is SEO? Understanding Search Engine Optimization in 2025

In other words, those seemingly small factors, like keywords in URL, that on their own make up 1%, are not so small. Our approach targets users first because that’s what search engines reward. This chapter covers keyword research and other methods to determine what your audience is seeking. Learning about SEO from scratch requires a lot of time and patience. Besides understanding the basics of SEO, you’ll need resources to learn the fundamentals of digital marketing and how search engines work. When you optimize a title tag with a target keyword, it gives the search engine more opportunities to discover your website and rank it higher.

Understanding this intent can significantly impact your content strategy, keyword selection, and ultimately, your SEO success. Incorporating Core Web Vitals into your UX and SEO strategy not only aligns your website with Google’s ranking factors but also ensures a superior browsing experience for your visitors. By focusing on these metrics, you can enhance your site’s visibility in search engine results, attract more organic traffic, and foster a loyal audience base. If you’re not able to increase your organic traffic, you’ll want to have a keen eye on your ranking positions across your target keywords. Knowing if there is enough demand for a keyword will help you determine if you want to spend time and effort ranking for that keyword.

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Services provided by SEO consultants include SEO audits, local SEO audits, link audits, competitor analysis, keyword research, website usability analysis, and SEO reporting. Let’s say GSC data shows some of my key pages have low click-through rates (CTRs). I can check the title tags and meta descriptions alongside that data in Screaming Frog to see if I can improve them.

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• Step #3 is to publish a piece of content around the keyword you just picked.
• Look through the results to see if there are any subtopics you can cover.
• Even if you’re an SEO whiz kid and have the basics down, it’s worth sticking around.
• Use Semrush’s Site Audit tool to check your site for over 140 on-page and technical SEO issues.
• Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy.

It spawned an entire industry of keyword stuffers, backlink brokers, content optimizers, and auditing tools, along with the professionals and agencies to operate them. But in 2025, search has been shifting away from traditional browsers toward LLM platforms. With Apple’s announcement that AI-native search engines like Perplexity and Claude will be built into Safari, Google’s distribution chokehold is in question.

Some people have confidence issues, or imposter syndrome, or are dealing with things that are making challenges at work that much harder,” says Russell. Last but by no means least, I spoke with Emma Russell, the founder of SEO Anomaly Oxford Comma Digital. Russell has a decade of experience helping start-ups and household name brands capitalize on and increase demand. “So from my experience, when they business owners have a small website, it’s totally possible to do SEO optimization themselves. Most likely, that would be on-page,” Zhukova says. I spoke with Christopher Levy, director of growth at Marketing Six, about local SEO best practices.

A while ago I noticed that lots of SEO blogs were talking about voice search. In fact, BuzzSumo found that publishing an industry study can bring you a ton of traffic, social media shares, and mentions in the press. When your content is easy to read, people will spend more time on your site. …then “pogosticks” back to the search results to find something that actually helps them. Some content formats are eligible for special types of search results, such as this recipe carousel.

Wix has got your covered with thousands of design features, built-in SEO and marketing tools, that will allow you to scale your content, your brand and your business with their blog maker. This happens when another platform has noticed you and has decided that your site can add value to their content. They therefore link to your page as a way to help their own readers or users. The more authoritative or important the other site, the more valuable their link is. While there’s no short-cut for gaining genuine external links, the best way is to strive to consistently create good quality content. Many SEO experts consider your meta titles, or title tags, and meta descriptions to be some of the strongest SEO signals that you can send Google.

You can start by going through the aforementioned steps and ensuring they are implemented on your site. A simple way to do this is to utilize Wix SEO tools such as the SEO Wizard. This tool will give you personalized SEO recommendations according to the needs of your site. Of course, you can also implement each of the strategies independently. Being an authority on a given topic can also be achieved with some simple steps.

Outside the flagship content optimization feature, Clearscope has a few useful performance analysis tools. Meanwhile, Clearscope’s keyword discovery tool uses “intelligent language algorithms” to identify viable keyword options based on topic ideas or URLs. Clearscope’s dashboard is organized a bit differently than most products.

So while there’s no need to redesign your website every few months, it should look good and reflect your brand. This is a tab on the SERPs that allows users to see results from TikTok, YouTube, Quora, Reddit, tweets, and more. In our example, since it’s a product review and there was no mention of our free SEO tools or AWT, we could reach out and let the author know. The easiest way to find content worth updating is to install our free WordPress SEO plugin and run a content audit. This will tell you which articles to update to get more traffic. Non-traditional search results (not a ’blue link’) like videos, tweets boxes, or featured snippets.