12 Jun What Is SEO? Understanding Search Engine Optimization in 2025

To better understand what SEO is, this article will walk you through the search engine and SEO basics, explain how search algorithms work, and what factors influence your site’s ranking. Content is your brand’s voice in today’s information-saturated environment and must be heard. Many clients pair BHS Links social ad campaigns with our other SEM and SEO services to boost their brand, website traffic and leads. Paid social media (ads) let you get the word out about your business to a wide audience of your choosing. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram have transformed traditional marketing. Businesses can use paid social media campaigns to increase their brand authority and reach customers as never before.

• They are not the same and while the PageRank metric was discontinued, the PageRank algorithm is still a part of Google’s ranking.
• There are many people today that agree that optimizing for an AI search engine is fundamentally the same as optimizing for a traditional search engine.
• The goal is to provide both perfect content and UX while showing search engines what the page is about.
• In practice, it means the content is served in a simpler, stripped-down version of your page on smartphones.

So, it’s important to publish high-quality content that is also pleasant to consume on a fast-loading, mobile-friendly, and secure site. Overall, SEO not only increases your brand’s visibility but also helps in establishing trust and credibility by making valuable content more discoverable. To make the most of this exposure, focus on publishing high-quality, valuable content that genuinely helps your visitors. The traffic quality and how you engage visitors once they land on your site are also major determining factors in whether they turn into customers or not. So, it’s important to consistently produce new content, update existing web pages, and continually optimize your website’s performance.

Quality of content

This guide contains five detailed templates that make creating super high-quality content much easier than starting from scratch. Now that you’ve zeroed-in on low-competition terms with high CPCs, it’s time to actually choose the first batch of keywords that you’re going to create content around. For example, I created this post optimized around “link building services” because it has a super high CPC. Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results.

For example, whenever we publish fresh blog posts, we add them to our blog archive page. For instance, you can plug these topics into the Keyword Magic Tool to find useful keyword variations. Or you can use them as a reference while mapping out your content calendar. These ideas can serve as inspiration for your next content pieces. For example, “How to live more sustainably at home” could be a potential blog post. This will expand the card to show top headlines, questions, and related keywords around this subtopic.

For more marketing tips

When I first got started with keyword research, I pretty much ignored the cost per click (CPC). You can usually filter out a good chunk of keywords based on keyword difficulty alone. Either way, you’ll get an idea of how hard (or easy) each keyword is to rank for.

✅ Use Breadcrumb structured data

Search engines process and store information they find in an index, a huge database of all the content they’ve discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers. Your primary goal in creating content that attracts SEO traffic is to satisfy the user. The best way to do this is to make sure they don’t want to go back to Google and click on another result. Another great place to find keywords you already rank for is Search Console’s Performance Report. While not required, we highly recommend you run a crawl of your website in order to highlight SEO issues that may not be obvious. Web analytics gives you information about who visits your site, how much traffic you receive and from where, what pages people visit, how they engage with your content, and more.

Your content strategy should be based on a proper understanding of your niche and the needs of your audience. One of the biggest mistakes people make with keyword research is that they only look at the numbers they see in the keyword tool. You want to optimize your squat racks product page and you find the keyword “best squat rack”. In most tools, the keyword difficulty value is indicated on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the score is, the harder it is to rank on the 1st SERP for the keyword.