SEO

SEO matters because it captures high-intent traffic—people actively searching for solutions—without ongoing advertising costs, creating compounding returns as your content library grows. One well-optimised article ranking for valuable keywords can generate hundreds of qualified visitors monthly for years with zero marginal cost, dramatically reducing blended customer acquisition costs over time. For B2B companies especially, SEO enables you to intercept prospects during early research phases, establishing thought leadership and earning consideration before they've even assembled their shortlist. The channel also produces higher-quality leads than interruption-based advertising: organic visitors actively chose your content because it appeared relevant to their query, arriving more informed and engaged than cold prospects. SEO's compounding nature makes it especially valuable for startups and scale-ups with limited budgets—whilst paid channels require constant spending, SEO investments accumulate, with each new piece of content adding to your asset base. The authority SEO builds also has spillover effects: high rankings signal market leadership to prospects, and the backlinks and brand mentions you earn through content improve overall brand recognition. However, SEO requires patience and sustained commitment: meaningful organic traffic typically emerges 6-12 months after consistent effort, making it unsuitable for businesses needing immediate results. The channel also faces increasing competition as content marketing has become table stakes, requiring genuinely excellent content rather than keyword-stuffed mediocrity to rank. Algorithm updates can also disrupt rankings overnight, though sites with genuinely helpful content typically recover quickly. Organisations succeeding with SEO treat it as a long-term compound growth strategy rather than quick wins, committing to consistent content production, technical excellence, and earning authoritative backlinks through quality rather than shortcuts.

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 :) 

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].