Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic (unpaid) rankings. The goal of SEO is to rank your website higher in search results for queries-known as keywords-related to your business. Because ranking higher can lead to more traffic to your site. Which can lead to more conversions for your business (like sales or signups). SEO covers technical aspects of your website and content-specific best practices. The goal is to provide a better user experience and make it easier for search engines like Google to find and understand your content. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks. The main benefit of ranking for a specific keyword is that you can get "free" traffic to your site, month after month. Note: In this guide, we’re talking about SEO in the traditional sense of improving your visibility in Google’s organic results. If you’re looking for how to show up across AI Overviews, YouTube, marketplaces, and more, check out our Search Everywhere Optimization guide.
Why Is SEO Important? In short: Search is a BIG source of driving traffic. This is true for business owners in all industries. But it’s also true for our own website. As you can see, over 78% of all of Backlinko’s traffic comes from organic search. Let’s say that you run a party supply company. According to Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool, 33K people search for "party supplies" every single month in the US. Considering that the first result in Google gets around 27.6% of all clicks, that’s more than 9,000 potential visitors to your website each month if you show up at the Top Source Media digital agency. For one search term. You can also view the estimated traffic this keyword could generate for your domain if it ranks in its potential top position. The Potential Traffic metric lets you view a traffic estimate based on PKD%, the domain’s Authority Score, potential domain position, estimated traffic values, and competitors on the SERP. But let’s quantify that: How much are those visitors worth?
The average advertiser for that search phrase spends about 1 dollar per click (the Keyword Overview tool provides this data). Which means those 9,000 visitors are worth roughly $9,000 a month. Which you could get for "free" with SEO (it still requires time-and sometimes money as well). And that’s just for that search phrase. If your site is SEO-friendly, then you can rank for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of different keywords. With one piece of content. But the real value is in what that search traffic can translate to for your business. If you could turn 1% of those visitors into customers, and your average order value is $50, you could earn potential revenue of $4,500 per month from that one post. Search engine result pages are separated into two distinct sections: organic and paid results. Organic search results are unpaid. Search engines rank the organic search results based on hundreds of different ranking factors. But in general, organic results are deemed by Google to be the most relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative websites or web pages on the subject.
Paid search results are ads that appear on top of or underneath the organic results. Paid ads are completely independent of organic listings. They’re ranked in completely different ways, and we won’t be talking about paid ads in this guide. When we talk about SEO, we’re talking about ranking your website higher up in the organic search results. SEO focuses on acquiring traffic from organic search results through website optimization. Search engine marketing (SEM) combines both SEO and paid search marketing to generate traffic from search engines. For more on this topic, check out our guide to the key differences between SEO and SEM. How did you land on this result? Chances are you typed in the search "what is SEO" or something along those lines. And the search engine did the rest. When you search for something in Google (or any other search engine), an algorithm works in real-time to bring you what that search engine considers the "best" results.