The Basics of Search Engine Optimization for Marketers & Businesses (2024)

By Ethan Lazuk

Search engine optimization, it sounds complicated, right? Well, yes and no.

While the fundamentals of SEO are easy to grasp, the landscape of organic search is like a dune of sand, always shape-shifting with the changing winds of technology or user behavior.

Knowing the basics of search engine optimization, how it’s evolved into 2024, and how it can be practiced differently by agencies, in-house marketers, or independent consultants (like me) will help paint a clearer picture for doing it yourself or hiring a provider.

Here’s an outline of what we’ll cover in this guide:

• What is SEO in detail?
• Main buckets of tactics
  • Technical SEO
  • Authority building (off-page)
  • Content (on-page)
• Semantic vs. lexical search
• Site structure and indexing
• User journeys and sales funnels
• SEO tactics vs. strategies vs. brand building
• Going beyond keyword rankings
• The evolution of SEO into 2024 and beyond
• Supporting resources

But first, let’s set the stage a bit …

The context for SEO today

The core fundamentals of search engine optimization include a website’s technical foundations, helpful content, and authority signals (like backlinks). This has been the case for decades.

However, the ways SEO fundamentals get approached, and their impact on websites’ organic search visibility (including rankings), have evolved over time.

You may hear that, “SEO is always changing.” Well, that view is usually shared from the outside looking in.

In reality, SEO doesn’t change all that much. It’s still about serving users the answers they need along their buyer’s journeys by appearing in search results organically.

Except, the ways content can earn visibility through SEO are always changing. Google Discover, People also view in SGE while browsing, and the Perspectives filter are just a few examples.

So, whether it’s the ranking systems Google and other search engines use or the different search features and surfaces where content can appear, SEO professionals need to stay abreast of industry changes to continue delivering value for their clients.

It’s not only search engines, though. Users’ expectations and behaviors change, as well.

Google crawls and ranks the mobile versions of websites today, a change that completed in October 2023 but started 6+ years earlier. Mobile-first indexing, as this is called, was basically a response to more people visiting the web on their smartphones.

This is also a crusade of mine. Having worked in digital agencies for 8+ years, I saw many examples where beautiful websites designed for desktop browsers had mobile experiences that were clunky, awkward, or incomplete. That’s backwards.

Of course, a website should be enjoyed across all devices equally, yet when I make design changes to my website, for example, I focus on its mobile version first.

Just like content or links, design elements and user experiences matter for SEO. Google is great at understanding user engagement, including whether a page offers quality content or a satisfactory experience.

How people use search engines, and the ways results get presented organically, also evolve. Google’s shopping graph, for instance, provides many different ways for stores to showcase their products for free online.

Search today is also more multimodal than in the past. Users can use Google’s multisearch, for example, combining text with images in a query (thanks to AI technologies like MUM) and get generative AI answers.

Here’s me using multisearch on my iPhone’s Google app to ask how much sun the plant on my desk needs using a photo, a use case inspired by Marie Haynes’ newsletter (Ep. 321):

As for how SEO gets approached, it’s important to remember there are different areas of specialization. (In fact, Ahrefs just published a list of 51 types!)

Some SEOs are generalists, specialists, or strategists, while others focus on technical SEO, local search, content marketing, digital PR, or certain websites or industries, like ecommerce, B2B, or law firms.

There are different philosophies in SEO, as well. Personally, I use a people-first approach, which involves aligning with E-E-A-T and other Google documentation, as well as focusing on buyer’s journeys and personas, brand building, and helpful content, rather than optimizing for search engines. Some SEOs, on the other hand, don’t trust Google or want to monetize traffic primarily by influencing ranking signals.

Suffice to say, no two SEOs are alike. That said, many learn by doing SEO themselves and following thought leaders, or people with relevant experiences or insights to share. If you’d like to find trusted SEO voices, I’d suggest visiting Hamsterdam.

In summary, SEO has core fundamentals, but these apply to dynamic landscapes, where how SEO gets approached is based on who’s doing it.

If I could leave you with my biggest takeaway from my SEO career, which included 8+ years of working with agency clients before starting my company, it’s the value of focusing on users first.

Optimizing websites, Google Business Profiles, or other digital assets for your audience, and not search engines like Google, is how you can help future-proof your brand’s SEO.

The goal is to deliver helpful, reliable, and people-fist content that satisfies your audience’s search intent better than your competitors, and thus holds up to Google’s evolving AI- and machine learning-based ranking systems, including the helpful content and reviews systems.

As you read the rest of this guide, keep in mind that I’m just one of many voices out there. In the end, let your personal ethics, goals, and experiences guide how you approach SEO.

That said, I hope you’ll focus on your users and help make the internet a better place, every day. 🙂

Now with a little context in our back pockets, let’s get into more details, starting with a robust definition of what SEO is.

What is SEO?

The term “SEO” can refer to search engine optimization as a digital marketing channel, a set of tactics or strategies, or the person who does the work.

The role of an SEO is to help a brand’s website (and other digital assets) appear prominently and organically on Google Search (or other search engines) when their target audience is looking for related information or services.

Let’s look at examples of organic search results on Google from January 2024.

If we search for [what is SEO] on a desktop computer, we might see a search engine results page (SERP) with different types of results and features. (These may be influenced by factors like the user’s Google profile, location, or search history, as well.)

In the SERP shown below, we see traditional web results, People also ask (dropdowns with links), videos with expandable key moments, a knowledge panel (powered by Google’s knowledge graph) with People also search for suggestions, and filter pills along the top for images, Perspectives, and other related topics:

That’s a lot more than the traditional “10 blue links.”

How we as SEOs can optimize for a brand’s visibility along user journeys in SERPs like that, or how much the benefits of our efforts can be determined just from just clicks, impressions, or average position in Google Search Console, has changed a bit.

That said, the fundamentals of serving the user the content they want are still the same.

But it doesn’t end there …

Search experiences on Google can also include results from AI snapshots called Search Generative Experience (SGE). This is an experiment currently available when users sign up through Google Search Labs. (However, we recently learned some generative AI-powered overviews on multisearch results will be widely available.)

For the same query, here’s how an SGE snapshot looks like on desktop:

That’s an expanded SGE snapshot, where we have a generative AI answer divided into sections, each with dropdowns for links (citations) that powered the information. There’s also a carousel of related links on the top right. Out of view, along the bottom, is also a search bar that suggests follow up queries to continue the conversation.

The inclusion of links to organic search results makes Google SGE different than a default ChatGPT experience, for example.

Whereas ChatGPT uses an LLM, generative AI snapshots, like SGE, provide answers through retrieval augmented generation (RAG). This combines web search results (from information retrieval) with prompts for large language model outputs.

Microsoft Bing incorporated generative AI in its Bing Chat search results (now Copilot in Bing) before Google. Meanwhile, other search engines with AI have come and gone, such as Neeva, and new ones, called answer engines, have emerged, such as Perplexity AI.

According to a recent study Danny Goodwin covered in Search Engine Land, 94% of Google SGE citations are different from its traditional search results. This means SGE has the potential to shake up the game for brands’ keyword rankings, SERP visibility, and organic traffic.

Many SEOs have speculated about SGE’s impact, like that websites might see fewer but maybe more qualified clicks. However, until the final form of SGE rolls out broadly (if it even does), we won’t know for certain.

That said, I’d start accounting for SGE in your content strategy today, if you haven’t already.

And it’s not just SGE giving SEOs more to think about.

Google and other search engines continue innovating, and as recently as January 2024, Google announced more ways to search: “Ultimately, we envision a future where you can search any way, anywhere you want.”

In my view, the SEOs and businesses who embrace new frontiers for organic search visibility, strategize beyond keyword rankings, incorporate more forms of SEO content, and measure their success with cumulative visibility, both organically and by incorporating SEO within a holistic digital marketing and brand strategy, they’ll be positioned best for the future.

Now that we have a definition of SEO, let’s look at its tactics in more detail …

SEO’s three main buckets

Holistic SEO strategies can touch nearly every aspect of a brand’s online presence. My view is that SEO is a multi-faceted and over-arching channel, and its tactics should be collectively prioritized based on achieving business goals.

For further context, I’d recommend reading about what Glenn Gabe has described as a “kitchen sink” approach and what Jason Barnard has called “a new paradigm for SEO” rooted in brand building. Each offers a helpful perspective for grasping the broadness of SEO work.

That said, there are generally three buckets of SEO tactics, used for the sake of simplicity. Most guides define these as “off-page,” “on-page,” and “technical SEO.”

I prefer slightly different wording of the first two, calling them “authority building” and “content.”

Let’s go into a little more detail about each of them.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to how a website is built and functions for its users and search engines alike, including details like site speed, security, and crawlability, like for Googlebot.

Goals of technical SEO include ensuring that search engines can understand webpage content and site structures to crawl, index, and rank content. Such optimizations likewise help users access the content or navigate the site on any device, be it a computer, tablet, or mobile phone.

Third-party crawler tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ahrefs, Sitebulb, and others can report technical errors, warnings, or opportunities for websites.

Google Search Console’s Pages report or Bing Webmaster Tool’s SEO reports can also uncover issues, as can developer tools, like Lighthouse, or PageSpeed Insights to look at Core Web Vitals.

More websites today are built with JavaScript, as well, so attending to issues like server-side vs. client-side rendering or ensuring content is indexable can be a focus for technical SEO.

Other items might include adding structured data to get rich results or build entity presences in knowledge graphs or shopping graphs, or using hreflang for multilingual or international websites.

Authority building

The second bucket is off-page SEO, or what I call authority building. Usually on-page or content would be second, but I’m saving it for last. 😉

Authority building means establishing a brand’s credibility and trust online with its users, including for its website but also for associated entities, like in the knowledge graph, and in Google-owned or third-party domains, like Maps, review sites, or directory listings.

Methods of building authority can include earning backlinks from authoritative and relevant sites, demonstrating the brand’s or team member’s expertise or experience, or growing awareness through external trust signals, like mentions in industry press, knowledge panels, or customer testimonials, forums, or reviews.

Establishing a brand’s reputation helps align what Google calls E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust) and reinforce the merits of its products or services, which contributes to conversions and revenue.

I like to remind businesses that E-E-A-T isn’t limited to how the brand is perceived by Google or its users, but rather it’s like a digital embodiment of its real-world status. Here’s a great article by Miriam Ellis, where she explains how what local businesses do offline can translate to E-E-A-T on Google Search.

Of course, earning backlinks (inbound links from other websites) is an important way to establish a website’s authority. Google has viewed backlinks like votes of confidence from its inception with the PageRank algorithm, which played a role in differentiating its results from other search engines, particularly in the early days.

However, today Google’s search rankings are partly based on ranking systems that use AI, machine learning, and deep learning. Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), connecting the dots between entities with knowledge graphs, and other advanced methods, a website’s backlinks are less important for rankings.

I don’t offer active backlink building in my consulting business, for example. Instead, I try to help clients earn links passively by distributing their content on social media, email, or other channels, creating linkable assets, like first-party data reports, or getting mentions in press or industry publications.

Using and promoting experts as authors, accumulating UGC, optimizing content for social media, or earning coverage with digital PR can be ways of building authority.

Content

Instead of on-page SEO, I call the third bucket “content,” which encompasses all of the audience-facing information or assets a brand puts online that can surface organically.

Content is what websites provide to help users satisfy their search intent, and what search engines crawl, index, rank, and surface in organic search surfaces, including normal results, SGE snapshots, or Discover and People also view.

We hear a lot about “SEO spam” these days, but to me, this is just search engine-first content, or content that’s created to manipulate search rankings more than satisfy audience goals.

However, creating helpful, reliable, and people-first website content for search engines to rank is a long-term and sustainable SEO strategy. Because information, ranking systems, or user expectations change, so too can your content’s performance. Optimizing for users first with unique insights gives your content the best chance to weather SERP volatility and avoid being cannibalized by generative AI answers.

Content types can include webpages, such as product, service, or location pages, blog posts, about pages, media like videos, infographics, or podcasts, and so much more.

SEO content also goes beyond websites, such as Google Business Profiles, free product listing grids or Merchant Center feeds, knowledge panels, and Perspectives results, including social posts, YouTube videos, and forum discussions.

This is why it’s important to look beyond traditional content creation methods, including less focus on optimizing for keywords …

Semantic search vs. lexical search

To do SEO today, it helps to grasp the fundamentals of entities and the semantic web.

With lexical search, search engines looked to match keywords in content to the query a user typed into the search bar. With semantic search today, search engines use natural language understanding and entities (real world concepts) to better understand search intents and connect the dots in content to return more precise results.

SEOs can use keyword research, business insights, structured data, linking, and other methods to find and establish semantic relationships.

Another component of optimizing for semantic search is understanding taxonomies, whether they involve how information is organized on webpages, a website, or across the web.

This webpage you’re reading, for example, is a blog post in the /blog/ file path on my website. This page also has a hierarchical heading structure, with an H1 heading that leads to H2 subheadings containing H3 subsections, thus dividing the content into logical chunks based on their relationships to the main topic of “SEO.”

You can also use semantic HTML to distinguish your main content from supplementary or other page content.

Understanding site structure (architecture)

Site structure (or site architecture) plays into the topic of taxonomy, as well. It refers to how the pages of a website are organized based on internal linking and URL patterns.

While I chose to put this guide in my blog, other websites might instead have their SEO guides be webpages in a different part of the site structure, like a /resources/ folder.

There’s no right or wrong answer. Like most SEO decisions, there’s testing involved. That said, what’s most helpful for your users is usually the best place to start. 😉

I often see site owners get preoccupied with URLs and even start changing folder paths and adding 301 redirects. Search engines like Google can certainly use hierarchical site structures to assess different areas of a website.

Bing recently shared information about their Site Explorer tool, which can filter your website’s data by folders. Additionally, Google has said quality plays a role in how content gets crawled and indexed, as well.

That said, exercise caution when changing URLs, especially for “SEO reasons.” The important element for your site architecture is how the pages are linked together. Key pages should be linked from the main menu or other important pages. Linking topically related pages together is also commonly done in a pillar-cluster or hub-and-spoke model.

User journeys and sales funnels

While keyword rankings and organic traffic are common SEO KPIs (key performance indicators), the goal is to use organic search visibility to achieve business goals, like brand awareness, conversions, or revenue.

Blog posts are a common type of SEO content. Informational content, such as this guide you’re reading, can lead to direct conversions, such as when a reader clicks a CTA (call to action) or visits a linked product or service page.

That said, SEO content is usually about covering the full user journey. This means informational posts are usually a stepping stone where a user will travels down a (sales) funnel.

First a user identifies their problem or need (upper funnel), then they compare options or solutions (middle funnel), and finally they choose one (lower funnel).

Sales funnels can start with informational search intents, then commercial intent, and finally transactional intent. Once a user trusts your brand or products, they may search directly for your with navigational intent. SEOs can detect these stages by looking at keywords, including how they’re phrased or if they’re branded or non-branded.

SEO can play a role all throughout the sales funnel, often in conjunction with paid ads, email, or social media channels. When reporting results, attribution models, such as in Google Analytics (GA4) or Shopify’s marketing reports can help illustrate the contributions of organic search touchpoints to conversions and revenue.

When it comes to creating content, SEOs can use keyword research, competitor data, or business resources, like sales or customer service data or audience personas to determine topics along the buyer’s journey.

To give an example, the main audience for this SEO guide is likely upper-funnel readers who are just learning. However, secondary audiences might include marketers wanting to refresh their knowledge or businesses wanting to understand how SEO can benefit them.

Distinguishing SEO tactics, strategies, and brand building

Most of the time, user journeys aren’t linear, and organic search is just one of many touchpoints.

Getting your content to rank on Google Search might be just one piece of the equation. A typical user might view several pieces of related content or engage with other channels before they discover their problem or your solution.

Good ways to measure the impacts of SEO work are with qualified clicks and conversions. Reporting on these can help get buy-in by tying organic traffic and visibility to business revenue, showing a return on investment (ROI).

My view is that SEO is a holistic digital marketing channel, and its ROI shouldn’t be viewed in isolation but rather in compliment to other marketing efforts, especially paid ads, social media, and email. This is why attribution models play an important role.

How SEO can contribute value includes supporting long-term brand building efforts.

A typical career in SEO may go through an evolution from doing tactics, to strategies, and lastly brand building. Junior SEOs may start as specialists, completing lists of tactics. More senior strategists may audit websites and put the lists of tactics together as part of a prioritized strategy. While more experienced SEOs may incorporate strategies into holistic digital marketing plans to achieve broader goals for brand building.

There are many paths in SEO, however. Some specialize in one area, such as JavaScript, content, or local businesses. The best path is the one that fuels your passion. 😉

Going beyond keyword rankings

Whether I’m working with a business with no presence on Google Search or a CMOs who knows SEO well, one of the most common issues I find is when a client has a specific metric in mind and puts full stock in it.

One example is Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores. While CWVs are important for page experience and UX, good scores alone haven’t historically played a big role in keyword rankings, for example.

Speaking of rankings, the average position of specific keywords can be another focal area for some clients. However, while more visibility for content improves its likelihood of qualified clicks, the degree of rankings volatility and number of Google SERP features and surfaces makes focusing on individual keyword rankings less useful.

Instead of single metrics, I try to steer clients towards holistic strategies that support long-term brand building, and I report on cumulative organic visibility, including how a brand’s content fits into their target audience’s user journey.

In that spirt, I’d like to talk lastly about the evolution of SEO …

The evolution of SEO into 2024 and beyond

I believe we’re in a new era of SEO, what I call the post-helpful content system era. One event that helped usher in this era was the third helpful content update in September 2023.

Google Search’s helpful content system is an AI-based ranking system that uses a site-wide signal for content helpfulness. The third update had dramatic implications for websites that were creating content for rankings over users.

The traditional way SEO content has been created typically began with keyword research. Selected target keywords then were the basis for content topics and sections, and they usually came from third-party tools and got chosen based on metrics like search volume, difficulty, or intent.

When a webpage ranks organically on Google Search, the queries can appear as impressions in Google Search Console’s performance report. Here are examples of queries an earlier version of my glossary ranked for:

Usually, content had a target keyword that the page would try to be ranked for. The SEO might look at SERPs for the keyword, draw competitive insights, and use those to craft a brief or outline for a content specialist. This outline would usually have subsections based on related keywords.

Google Search can use passage ranking to look at sections or chunks of text. You may hear this spoken about in the context of candidate passages for featured snippets. That means pages could also rank for related terms.

SEOs might also use related keywords to create supporting pages in a pillar-cluster model.

In terms of how content was written, the SEO might suggest where to use certain terms. Though fortunately, thanks to Google’s AI systems, like RankBrain, keywords don’t need to be exact.

One problem with the approach just described is that it tends to focus on creating content designed to rank in search results, not satisfy users.

Given innovations like Google’s helpful content system, reviews system, and hidden gems improvement to its core ranking systems, just to name a few, I’d contend the time has come for a new approach to content creation.

In another article about unique content, I argued keyword research, competitive insights, and gap analysis have a place, but when they’re done without a subject matter expert or creative approach, the end result could actually hold back the site’s potential.

Google Search Central has documentation called Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, which was the basis for my helpful content guide. This suggests avoiding “search engine-first content” and instead focusing on “people first.”

So, don’t think about ranking for keywords as the goal. Google Search is just a delivery mechanism for your content, not the audience itself. Instead, create for them.

When creating this guide, for example, I didn’t:

• Think about keywords.
• Look at competitors.
• Care how Google would rank this page.

But here’s what I did do:

• I created this guide to help a specific audience.
• I monitored this page’s keyword rankings and adjusted to better serve the search intents I saw.
• I put myself in the user’s shoes to create what I felt would be most helpful guide.

I hope this has helped you better understand SEO today!

Extra resources

The learning journey never stops. If you’re looking for more information, I’d suggest these guides:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide – Google Search Central (Recently updated!)
• The Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Moz
• The Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2023 – HubSpot
• The Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Ahrefs
• SEO for Beginners: An Introduction to SEO Basics – Search Engine Journal
• What Is SEO – Search Engine Optimization? – Search Engine Land
• SEO Basics: How to Do SEO for Beginners – Semrush
• SEO Glossary: A Modern Guide for Beginners to Pros (2024 Edition) – Ethan Lazuk

Interested in SEO news and trends? I also create weekly recaps called Hamsterdam. Feel free to check them out!

“We are will and wonder”

I’ll continue to add to this guide over time and refine the writing and information. If you have questions, feel free to contact me!

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂