SEO

Search-engine optimisation—SEO for short—is the discipline of making your content the best answer to a user’s question and helping the search engine recognise that fact. In practice this means choosing the right topics (keywords), structuring pages so a crawler can understand them, earning signals of trust (backlinks, engagement) and removing technical friction (page speed, mobile layout, indexability). When all four elements align, your article, video or product shows up ahead of competitors in the results and collects free, compounding traffic.

Although most of us shorthand SEO to “ranking on Google”, the concept applies to every platform with a search box and an algorithm: Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, YouTube, Amazon, the LinkedIn feed, the App Store and—rapidly—AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Gemini that cite web sources. Wherever potential buyers type, talk or tap a query, optimisation matters.

I started tweaking meta titles in 2010, months before launching my first paid-search campaigns. Fifteen years and hundreds of audits later, I still rely on the tandem: paid search for instant data and leads, organic search for compounding trust and lower long-term acquisition cost. In fact, this entire Solid Growth wiki is itself a growth hack—an SEO backbone designed to rank for B2B terms my future clients Google every day—and you are reading the results of that strategy in action. So it's working :) 

Captures demand without ongoing click costs

Paid campaigns pause when budget dries up; well-ranked content keeps pulling visitors and leads long after the work is done. That “free” traffic buffers against rising CPCs and unpredictable social algorithms, giving you a cheaper blended acquisition cost.

Builds brand authority and trust

Ranking organically signals impartial credibility: an editorial algorithm, not a paid bid, placed you on page one. Prospects implicitly trust information surfaced by Google or YouTube, raising conversion likelihood when they later meet your ads or sales team.

Generates data for product and content strategy

Keyword research exposes pain points in your market. The questions people ask—“how to shorten sales cycle”, “best B2B CRM pricing”—feed content ideas, product copy and even roadmap prioritisation. Organic click-through-rate (CTR) tests headlines before you invest ad budget.

Future-proofs visibility in AI search

Large-language-model search tools draw answers from high-authority, well-structured pages. Sites that already meet Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines are more likely to be cited by AI assistants, keeping them visible in an answer-box world.

Map search intent before writing

• Informational – “what is account-based marketing”, “hubspot vs salesforce”.
• Navigational – “zoom pricing page”, “solid growth blog”.
• Transactional – “buy webinar software”, “best managed SOC provider”.

Create content that exactly satisfies the intent. A purchase-ready keyword wants pricing, demo videos and case studies, not a 3,000-word history essay.

On-site SEO (sometimes called on-page)

Structure the HTML so search engines parse it quickly:

• One clear H1 headline, cascading H2/H3 hierarchy.
• Target keyword in title tag and first 100 words.
• Descriptive alt text for images.
• Internal links that give crawlers (and readers) next-step context.
  

Technical SEO

Make the site easy to access and fast to load:

• HTTPS by default.
• Sub-2-second Largest Contentful Paint for mobile.
• Logical URL paths (/growth/b2b-marketing-funnel not /page123?id=456).
• XML sitemap and robots.txt configured; no accidental noindex.
• Schema markup for events, FAQs, products where relevant.

Off-site SEO

Earn trust by collecting signals from the wider web:

• Backlinks – other sites linking to your content because it adds value. Quality beats quantity.
• Brand mentions in niche podcasts, newsletters, industry reports.
• Engagement metrics—time on page, low bounce rate—indicate usefulness and indirectly support ranking.
  

Think beyond Google

• YouTube SEO – optimise title, description and tags; encourage watch-time and comments. Ranking high on YouTube results rougly equals ranking on Google’s video tab.
• Amazon SEO – for B2B books or software listings: optimise the title, bullet features, images and encourage verified reviews. The A9 algorithm weighs conversion and relevance heavily.
• App Stores – name, keywords and review velocity determine visibility.
• ChatGPT optimisation – publish authoritative, well-structured content with clear author bio and primary sources; AI tools cite high-trust pages for factual queries.
  

Site-speed and mobile readiness

Google’s Page Experience signals reward pages that render quickly and elegantly on mobile. Compress images, defer non-critical scripts, adopt lazy-loading and test in real devices. A one-second improvement can raise conversion rate by five per cent or more—SEO impact aside.

Pair with paid search for feedback loops

Launch a Google Ads campaign on your target keywords. Highest-CTR ad text often becomes the organic meta description. Conversion data reveals which problems resonate; feed those into deeper organic guides. When organic pages reach page one, reduce the overlapping PPC budget and redeploy spend to new terms.

Frequently asked questions

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are hyperlinks from one domain to another. Search algorithms treat them as votes of confidence: if reputable sites cite your guide on “B2B onboarding email templates,” they imply it is worthy of attention, lifting your authority score.

How long until SEO “works”?

Newly registered domains in competitive B2B niches often need four to six months to see significant organic traffic. Established domains adding siloed content may see ranking movement in weeks. Speed depends on content quality, technical health, competition and backlink velocity.

Should I focus on keywords or topics?

Think in topics—clusters of related queries—so one pillar page answers multiple intent variations and sub-articles dive deeper. Google’s semantic understanding groups synonyms; topic authority outlasts single-keyword chasing.

Is domain authority still a thing?

Google says it uses no single “domain authority” score, but independent tools approximate it by backlink quantity and quality. Treat DA/DR as relative signals in competitive analysis, not an absolute KPI.

Recap

SEO is the long-game partner to the instant traffic of paid search. It demands an empathy for the searcher’s job-to-be-done, disciplined on-site structure, bulletproof technical foundations, and a proactive approach to off-site trust-building. Apply those four layers across Google and secondary engines—YouTube, Amazon, emerging AI search—and your content becomes an evergreen growth asset. For the complementary quick wins of bidding on those same keywords, see the paid-search primer at [/what-is/paid-search].