How does SEO work?

This guide is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative website with great expertise on and Hatch experience in the topic of SEO (we’ve been covering all SEO changes, big and small since 2006). Originally published in 2010, our “what is SEO” page has earned a whopping 324,203 links.

Put simply, these factors (and others) have helped this guide earn a good reputation with search engines, which has helped it rank in Position 1 for years. It has accumulated signals that demonstrate it is authoritative and trustworthy – and therefore deserves to rank when someone searches for SEO.

But let’s look at SEO more broadly. As a whole, SEO really works through a combination of:

People: The person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic, tactical and operational SEO work is completed.
Processes: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.
Technology: The platforms and tools used.
Activities: The end product, or output.
Many other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most important knowledge and process elements.

1. Understanding how search engines work
   Simply, if you want people to find your business via search – on any platform – you need to understand the technical processes behind how the engine works – and then make sure you are providing all the right “signals” to influence that visibility.

When talking about traditional web search engines like Google, there are four separate stages of search:

Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to discover pages on the web by following links and using sitemaps.
Rendering: Search engines generate how the page will look using HTML, JavaScript and CSS information.
Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages it has discovered and add them to a database (though there’s no guarantee every page on your website will be indexed).
Ranking: Complex algorithms look at a variety of signals to determine whether a page is relevant and of high-enough quality to show when searchers enter a query.

Researching
Research is a key part of SEO. Some forms of research that will improve SEO performance include:

Audience research: It’s important to understand your target audience or market. Who are they (i.e., their demographics and psychographics)? What are their pain points? What questions do they have that you can answer?
Keyword research: This process helps you identify and incorporate relevant and valuable search terms people use into your pages – and understand how much demand and competition there is to rank for these keywords.
Competitor research: What are your competitors doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What types of content are they publishing?
Brand/business/client research: What are their goals – and how can SEO help them achieve those goals?
Website research: A variety of SEO audits can uncover opportunities and issues on a website that are preventing success in organic search. Some audits to consider: technical SEO, content, link profile and E-E-A-T.

Planning
An SEO strategy is your long-term action plan. You need to set goals – and a plan for how you will reach them.

Think of it your SEO strategy as a roadmap. The path you take likely will change and evolve over time – but the destination should remain clear and unchanged.

Your SEO plan may include things such as:

Setting goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and expectations (i.e., timelines/milestones).
Defining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics.
Deciding how projects will be created and implemented (internal, external or a mix).
Coordinating and communicating with internal and external stakeholders

Creating and implementing
Once all the research is done, it’s time to turn ideas into action. That means:

Creating new content: Advising your content team on what content needs to be created.
Recommending or implementing changes or enhancements to existing pages: This could include updating and improving the content, adding internal links, incorporating keywords/topics/entities, or identifying other ways to optimize it further.
Removing old, outdated or low-quality content: The types of content that aren’t ranking well, driving converting traffic or helping you achieve your SEO goals.

5. Monitoring and maintaining
   You need to know when something goes wrong or breaks on your website. Monitoring is critical.

You need to know if traffic drops to a critical page, pages become slow, unresponsive or fall out of the index, your entire website goes offline, links break, or any other number of potential catastrophic issues.