Day 1 of 7

What is SEO?

The foundation of digital marketing. Understand this and everything else makes sense.

Key SEO Terms

Keyword
A word or phrase someone types into a search engine. E.g. "what is branding"
SERP
Search Engine Results Page. The page you see after you type something into Google.
Backlink
When another website links to yours. Signals trustworthiness to Google.
Bounce Rate
Percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page.

What Does SEO Actually Mean?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the process of making changes to your website so that search engines like Google show it higher up in their results when someone searches for something related to your content.

The key idea is that you are not paying to appear there. You are earning it by making your site as useful and well-structured as possible.

Think of it like YouTube. If you upload a video, you want it to appear when someone searches for that topic. SEO for websites works the same way — you want your pages to appear when people search for things you write about.

Organic Traffic vs Paid Traffic

When you Google something, you see two types of results.

  • Paid results appear at the very top with a small "Sponsored" label. A business paid Google to be there. The moment they stop paying, they disappear.
  • Organic results appear below. These websites earned their position through SEO. They pay Google nothing to be there.
PRO TIP 75% of people never scroll past the first page of Google results. If your site is on page 2 or 3, almost nobody will find it — no matter how good it is.

Why SEO Matters More Than Ads

Paid ads get you results quickly but stop the moment you stop paying. SEO takes longer to build but the results last much longer and cost nothing once you have earned the ranking.

  • A well-ranked page can keep bringing in visitors for months or years
  • People tend to trust organic results more than ads
  • For anyone without a big budget, SEO is one of the only ways to compete with larger brands

The 3 Stages: How Search Engines Work

Crawling

Search engines use automated programmes called bots or crawlers. These bots constantly travel across the internet, jumping from link to link, finding new pages and revisiting old ones.

Indexing

Once a bot finds a page, the search engine reads it and stores it in a massive database called the index. If a page is not indexed, it cannot appear in search results.

Ranking

When someone searches for something, the search engine picks the pages it thinks are most relevant and useful. It orders them from best to worst. SEO is the process of improving your position in that order.

On-Page vs Off-Page SEO

SEO is split into two main types.

On-page SEO — Changes you make directly on your website (titles, headings, content). You will practise this on Days 2 and 3.
Off-page SEO — Things that happen outside your website (like backlinks). Harder to control but very powerful.

Watch the video below for a visual explanation, then test yourself with the quiz.

Video Recap Slides

Slide 1 Slide 2 Slide 3 Slide 4 Slide 5 Slide 6 Slide 7 Slide 8 Slide 9
Supplementary Video

Day 1 Knowledge Check

Test your mastery. Answers are automatically checked for keywords.

1. What does SEO stand for?

2. What type of traffic does SEO generate — paid or unpaid?

3. What is the first stage search engines use to discover new web pages?

4. What happens during the indexing stage?

5. What is it called when a search engine decides the order pages appear in results?

6. What do you call a word or phrase someone types into a search engine?

7. What is it called when another website links to your website?

8. What metric measures the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page?

9. What score from 0 to 100 predicts how well a site will rank?

10. What type of SEO involves changes you make directly on your own website?

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