MSM FULL-FUNNEL CONVERSION GLOSSARY
What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Optimising for search engines means making your website easier for search engines to find, understand and rank, so that people looking for what you do can reach you without you paying for the click.
THE SHORT ANSWER
The Definition
Optimising for search engines means making your website easier for search engines to find, understand and rank, so that people looking for what you do can reach you without you paying for the click.
Why It Matters Commercially
Search traffic doesn't stop when you stop paying for it. A page that ranks keeps working for years, which makes it one of the few marketing assets that gets cheaper over time. It's also slow, and businesses regularly abandon it at the point it would have started paying back.
How It's Measured
Impressions, clicks, average position and click through rate, all from Search Console rather than a third party tool. Track rankings for terms that convert, not the ones with the biggest volume.
Who Owns It
Marketing owns it. Whoever manages the website owns the technical side. In practice the two need to work together, because a content plan that ignores site speed and crawlability produces pages that never get indexed.
HOW IT WORKS
Optimising for search engines means making it easy for a search engine to find your pages, understand what they cover, and conclude they answer a question better than the alternatives. It splits into four areas.
- Technical. Can search engines reach and read your pages. Site speed, mobile rendering, crawlability, sitemaps, canonical tags, structured data.
- On page. Does each page make its subject obvious. Title tag, meta description, one clear H1, sensible heading order, content that answers the question in full.
- Content. Do you have pages worth ranking. This is where most of the work sits and where most businesses stop too early.
- Authority. Do other credible sites link to you. This is the ceiling on everything above.
Authority is the constraint
The part businesses least want to hear is that content quality doesn't override domain authority. A newer site with few referring domains can publish an excellent page and still sit behind weaker content on an established domain, because search engines weigh who is saying it as well as what is said.
That doesn't make the content pointless. It makes the sequence matter. Publish the pages, build the authority alongside, and the pages rank as the authority arrives. Publishing without link building produces a library nobody finds.
SEO versus GEO
A newer distinction and a useful one. Traditional SEO aims at a position in a list of results. Generative engine optimisation aims at being the source an AI answer draws on when someone asks a question rather than searching for a page.
The technical foundations overlap heavily. What differs is structure. AI answers favour content that states a definition plainly, attributes claims, and organises information so a machine can extract a specific answer. Pages written as clear reference material do better than pages written to hit a keyword count.
SEO versus paid search
Paid search buys position immediately and stops the moment you stop paying. SEO takes months and compounds. Businesses often treat them as alternatives when they answer different problems: one covers you now, the other lowers what you need to spend later.
Optimise or optimize
British and American spellings of the same thing. If your audience is in the UK, use the British spelling consistently across your site rather than creating separate pages for each, since search engines treat them as the same query in most cases and duplicate pages compete with each other.
Our website performance work covers the technical and on page side. See also conversion rate optimisation, which deals with what happens once the traffic arrives.
WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
A business publishes twenty articles over six months and sees impressions rise steadily while clicks barely move.
Checking Search Console, the pages appear for relevant searches but sit around position twenty, which produces almost no clicks. The content is fine. The domain has eight referring domains, and every page above them has considerably more.
The pages weren't wasted. They were early. Once link building started, the same pages began climbing without a word being rewritten, because the constraint was never the content.
IS THIS COSTING YOU REVENUE RIGHT NOW?
Check these against your own site:
- Is every page in Search Console, and does the indexed count match what you've published?
- Does each page have a unique title and meta description?
- Does every page have exactly one H1?
- Do you know how many referring domains point at your site?
- Do your pages link to each other, or does each one sit alone?
- Are you tracking rankings for terms that lead to enquiries, or terms with big volumes?
Two or more no answers and you have work to do before more content will change anything.
SEE WHAT YOUR COMPETITORS ARE DOING THAT YOU AREN'T
We'll analyse two of your competitors against your own site and show you where they're winning conversions you should be getting.
WHAT WE SEE IN THE FIELD
Two things get confused constantly. SEO brings people to your website. It has nothing to say about whether they enquire once they arrive.
Plenty of businesses double their traffic and see no change in revenue, then conclude SEO doesn't work. The traffic worked. The page it landed on didn't. Judge SEO on impressions and clicks, and judge the page on what happens next.
Reviewed by Ian Wilson, MSM.
Frequently Asked
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