What SEO is

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the work of helping search engines understand your website so the right people find it. Google puts it the same way: SEO is “about helping search engines understand your content.” It adds a warning: “There are no secrets here that’ll automatically rank your site first in Google.”[1]

Keep that warning in mind when you buy. A provider who sells a trick, a guaranteed position or a fixed date is selling something Google says doesn’t exist. A set of practices does exist. They make a site easier to find, read and trust, and their gains build on each other.

SEO serves two audiences. The search engine has to discover your pages, work out what each one covers and decide whether it answers a search well. The person searching decides in seconds whether your result looks relevant. You need both to say yes.

How search engines find and show your pages

Google discovers pages through links from pages it already knows, and a sitemap helps.[1] Once it finds a page, the search engine reads it, files what it says and later decides which pages earn a place for a given search.

For an owner, this means three things:

  • A page that can’t be read counts for nothing. Content built by script, hidden behind a login or blocked in robots.txt may stay invisible to search engines.
  • Your words carry the signal. Clear titles, descriptive headings and plain text that matches how customers ask connect you to their searches.
  • Competitors share your results page. Find out who appears when your customers search, and why they win.

The four parts of SEO

1. Technical health

Search engines need to crawl the site, and visitors need it to load fast and stay steady. Google’s Core Web Vitals put numbers on that: Largest Contentful Paint (loading) of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability) of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of visits.[4]

2. Helpful content

Google says its ranking systems prioritise helpful, reliable information created to benefit people.[2] Its guidance names trust as the most important part of E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust) and says E-E-A-T is not itself a ranking factor.[2] Write original, accurate pages. Show who wrote them. Answer the question a buyer has.

3. On-page signals

Titles, meta descriptions, headings, link text and image descriptions tell a search engine and a searcher what a page covers. Google’s starter guide recommends unique, clear titles, descriptive meta descriptions, descriptive link text and alt text on images.[1]

4. Structured data

Google defines structured data as “a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.”[3] It recommends JSON-LD, and valid markup can make a page eligible for rich results.[3]

Why SEO is hard for owners to judge

You pay for SEO and see little of it. The changes sit in code, titles and content. Results arrive weeks or months later, tangled up with seasonality, competitors and search updates. A provider can fill a report with activity and still leave you unsure whether anything worked.

Put five questions to any SEO report:

  1. Does it show where customers find you for the searches that matter, and who appears in your place?
  2. Does each finding name the page, the evidence and the fix?
  3. Does it separate what the provider tested, what it observed and what it estimated?
  4. Does it admit what the provider couldn’t check?
  5. Did someone write it who isn’t paid to do the work it reviews?

No provider can promise a ranking, because Google controls the results. A report that promises one deserves suspicion. We set out our own standards on the method page.

How AI answers are changing what SEO is for

Search results now often open with an AI summary. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. People clicked a traditional result link in 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary and 15% of visits to pages without one. They ended their session on 26% of pages with a summary and 16% without. They clicked a link inside the summary in about 1% of visits.[5] The sample is American and covers Google only, but the direction is plain: fewer clicks reach the results below an AI answer.

Google says the fundamentals still apply. Google must index a page, and the page must be eligible to show with a snippet, before it can appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google lists “no additional requirements” and no “special optimizations necessary.”[6] Ranking well still matters, because it gets a page considered at all.

Two newer disciplines build on SEO. Answer engine optimisation (AEO) makes your answers easy to quote. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) makes you reachable and trusted by the AI systems that write answers.

What a good SEO review covers

A useful review scores the areas that decide whether customers find you and ranks the fixes by commercial impact. It also compares you with the competitors in your results.

The Vyzpro audit covers six weighted areas: AI search readiness 25%, technical health 20%, content 20%, on-page 15%, meta and snippets 10% and images 10%. Each finding carries one evidence tag (tested, observed, inferred or to verify), and the report lists what we couldn’t check. We use public information only, so you give us no logins.

The method page shows how we build the score. Our report shows what you receive. The AI search audit page explains what we add for answer engines and generative engines.