An SEO guide for beginners

Search engines do three things: they find pages, they decide what each page is about, and they order them for a given query. Everything called SEO is work on one of those three steps.

That framing is worth holding onto, because it tells you which of your problems is which.

Step one: being found

A crawler follows links and reads sitemaps. If nothing links to a page and no sitemap lists it, it may never be visited.

What breaks here. Pages blocked in robots.txt. Pages carrying a noindex tag. Pages that only exist behind a form or a filter. Sites where the content appears only after JavaScript runs.

How to check: Search Console, the Pages report. It lists what was found, what was indexed, and the reason for anything excluded. Read the reasons. They are specific and they are usually correct.

Step two: being understood

The engine builds a model of what the page is about. From the text on it, the headings, the title, the links pointing at it, and the structured data.

What helps here. Writing about one thing per page. Using the words your readers use. Putting the important content in text, and not in an image. Marking up what the page actually is.

What hurts: pages that cover four topics, titles auto-generated from navigation, and text that avoids the obvious word because someone was worried about repetition.

Step three: being chosen

This is the ranking part, and it is the part nobody outside Google can describe precisely. What is observable is narrower. Pages that answer the query specifically tend to do better over time. From a source with some standing, loading quickly, not frustrating the reader.

You influence this. You do not control it.

What to do in your first month

Find out what people type. Support tickets, sales calls, site search. Thirty phrases.

Check each phrase in a search and keep the ones where you could plausibly write the best page. Assign each surviving phrase to one URL.

Confirm those URLs are indexable and load fast. Fix what is not.

Write or rewrite those pages, answer first.

Link to them from your existing pages using the phrase as the anchor.

Submit a sitemap and read the Pages report a week later.

That is a month of work and it is the foundation everything else sits on.

What to expect

Nothing, for a while. A new page on a new site working a competitive term is planning in quarters. A rewritten page on a site with history can move in weeks.

Watch impressions before you watch traffic. A page starting to appear for a query at position 40 is the signal that the first two steps worked. It arrives long before anyone clicks.

The vocabulary you will meet

Crawling is discovery. Indexing is storage. Ranking is ordering. Canonical is the URL you declare as the real one when several could serve the same content. Backlink is a link from another domain. Anchor text is the clickable words in a link. SERP is the results page.

Core update is a periodic broad change to how ranking works. If your traffic moved on the same day one was announced, that is probably why, and there is no setting to change.

When to get help

When the diagnosis is the hard part. A traffic drop, a migration, a site that has been worked on by three agencies and has the redirect map to prove it.

Our SEO work starts with that diagnosis, because the fix is usually cheap once you know what actually broke.