What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation: helping the right people find you in search by making your site fast, clear, structured and useful.
SEO stands for search engine optimisation: the work of helping the right people find your website through search engines like Google, and through AI answers and assistants.
The three jobs
- Technical SEO. The foundations: a site that loads fast, crawlers can read, mobile works, and structured data explains the page. It’s the groundwork behind search readiness.
- On-page SEO. The content: clear pages that answer real questions, with sensible titles, headings and internal links.
- Off-page SEO. The reputation: other credible sites referencing and linking to yours.
Usefulness beats tricks
Good SEO starts with useful pages, not keyword stuffing. Search engines try to reward pages that help the person searching. Durable SEO gives the best answer to a question your customers ask, then makes the site fast and structured enough for that answer to be found.
How long does it take?
Longer than most people hope, and then it compounds. A new site or a new page usually takes a few months to earn enough trust to rank for anything contested; low-competition and local terms can move sooner. SEO is a slope, not a switch: the work you do this quarter tends to pay off over the next few. Anyone promising page one in a fortnight is selling something else.
What you can do yourself
More than you’d think. Write pages that answer the questions your customers actually ask. Give each one a clear title and headings. Keep the site fast and the internal links sensible. Set up a Google Business Profile if you serve a local area. The parts that reward specialist help are the technical foundations, the structured data and the judgement about which terms are worth chasing at all. That’s the work behind search readiness.
SEO and AI search
AI search wants the same signals: clear answers, evidence, structure and signs that a real business owns the content. A glossary like this one is a long-term play. Each entry answers one question and gives both people and machines a stronger trail to follow.
Common questions
Is SEO still worth it now AI answers questions directly? Yes. Assistants pull from the same well-structured, credible pages that rank in search, so clear content now does double duty: it gets found and gets cited.
Do I need to pay for backlinks? No. Buying links breaks Google’s guidelines and risks a penalty. You earn links by being genuinely useful and worth referencing.
What’s the single biggest lever? Usually a fast, well-structured site with pages that answer real questions. Get that right before anything clever.