SEO Series 4: What is SEO? A Complete Beginner to Advanced Guide (2025 Edition)

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website easier for search engines to discover, understand and recommend, so the right people find you at the right time. It’s also a job title: an SEO is the person who plans and executes those improvements. If your site lives on platforms like Wix, Squarespace or Blogger or you run a small business with limited time learning just the basics of SEO can deliver outsized results. A little knowledge goes a long way (Google for Developers, 2024; Ahrefs, 2025).

SEO matters because search is how people solve problems in seconds. When someone searches “best coffee near me” or “how to fix a flat tyre,” Google decides in milliseconds which page deserves to be seen. If your site isn’t optimised for that decision, it’s like whispering in a stadium full of megaphones. The good news? Google doesn’t charge you to appear in Search, and no one can pay to jump the organic queue — you earn it by being genuinely useful and technically sound (Google for Developers, 2024; Ahrefs, 2025; MOz, 2025).

Fact: SEO earns attention for years; ads rent attention for days. Do both if you can but invest in the asset you own.

SEO definition (2025)

  • Google: “The Search Essentials outline the most important elements that make your content eligible to appear in Google Search. There’s no guarantee of indexing but following these essentials increases your chances.” SEO is about taking the next step to improve your presence and performance (Google Search Central, 2025).
  • Ahrefs: SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic search results and growing a website’s organic search traffic. It can helps increase the quantity and quality of the traffic to your site. It’s where you do things that help you show up and rank higher in a search engine’s organic results (Ahrefs, 2025).
  • Digital Marketing Institute (DMI):  is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position in search results pages (SERPs). (DMI, 2025)
  • Semrush: is the practice of optimizing your website to appear higher in search engines’ organic (unpaid) search results. To gain visibility among potential customers who might visit your site and even make a purchase (Semrush, 2025)
  • Moz: It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as “organic”) search engine results.

To put it simple:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving your website to increase its visibility in search engines like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo.

  • Search Engine = the tool people use to find information online (Google has ~90% market share).
  • Optimization = making changes to your site so search engines understand it better and rank it higher.

At its heart, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is about making your website:

  • Discoverable – Search engines can find and crawl it.
  • Understandable – Search engines can read your content and know what it’s about.
  • Trustworthy – Other sites link to you, and users engage with your content.
  • Relevant – Your content matches what people are searching for.

Think of SEO as speaking Google’s language. The better you speak it, the easier it is for your site to be recommended to searchers.

Why SEO still matters in 2025

Imagine you’ve just opened a bakery in London. Your cakes are delicious, your branding is sharp, and your store is in a buzzing neighbourhood. You’ve invested in the best ovens, crafted a menu of mouth-watering pastries, and painted the front door a vibrant pastel blue. But weeks go by and… crickets. Hardly anyone walks in. and if no one walks through the door, your business can’t grow.

Now picture this: right across the street, a chain bakery has a giant glowing sign, ads on the bus stop, and every time someone Googles “fresh croissants near me”, their name pops up first. Which bakery do you think new customers will choose?

This is the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In today’s digital world, it’s the difference between being hidden in a back alley and having a shopfront on Oxford Street. That’s where SEO comes in. Search Engine Optimization is the digital equivalent of putting your bakery on the busiest street in town. Done right, SEO ensures that when people search for “best chocolate cake near me” or “wedding cakes London,” your website shows up front and centre.

If you were born in early 80-90s, you must have heard about Yellow Pages. A decade ago, businesses fought for space in the Yellow Pages or local newspapers. Today, they fight for a spot on Google’s first page. Think about your own habits: when you want a pizza place, do you flip through a phone book, or do you type “best pizza near me” on your phone? Google alone processes over 8.5 billion searches every single day . That’s billions of chances for your website, blog, or online store to be discovered — but only if you play by the rules of SEO.

In 2025, with AI-driven search, zero-click results, and stiff competition online, SEO is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s survival – so whether you’re a blogger, small business owner, ecommerce seller, or aspiring SEO professional, you know now how important SEO to be part of your marketing strategy. And here are why:

  • People are searching, constantly. Estimates place daily Google searches at 8.5+ billion; SEMrush pegs it at 5 trillion+ per year (~9.5 million per minute). If you’re not visible, you’re invisible. Market.us Scoop+1
  • Organic traffic compounds. Unlike PPC, you don’t pay per click once you rank, your investments in content and UX compound. (There’s still cost  involves which is time, skill, links, tech.)
  • AI is changing search. Google’s AI-driven features and experiments (e.g., SGE/Web Guide) summarise and cluster results. Sites with clear expertise and people-first content fare better. The Verge
  • Mobile is dominant. Mobile accounts for ~57–58% of global web usage, your site must be fast, readable and stable on phones. StatCounter Global Stats
  • According to HubSpot, companies that blog and optimise for SEO generate 67% more leads than those that don’t.
  • 93% of online journeys start with a search engine.
  • Organic traffic = free traffic (no ad spend).
  • Trust factor – People trust organic results more than ads.
  • Compounding effect – Good SEO builds over time, unlike ads that stop the moment you stop paying.Clicks concentrate at the top. Fresh CTR modelling suggests the top 3 organic results capture ~69% of clicks on a results page. So Position and presentation matter. First Page Sage
  • Most people click one of the first few search results, so higher rankings usually lead to more traffic. Unlike other channels, search traffic tends to be consistent and passive. That’s because the number of searches is usually quite consistent month to month. Search traffic is also “free.” That’s a big deal because ads can be expensive. For example, we get an estimated 1.4M monthly visits from organic search. It would cost us an estimated $1.7M per month to get that same traffic from search ads.

Sidenote. No source of traffic is truly free. SEO costs time and effort.

How it work?

  • If you’re completely new to SEO, then it’s easiest to think of search engines as libraries. But instead of storing books, they store copies of websites and web pages. So, when you search for a query, the search engine will then look through all pages in its index and try to return the most relevant results. And SEO helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result.
  • Search engines will scan, or crawl, different websites to better understand what the site is about. This helps them deliver more relevant results to those who are searching for certain topics or keywords. SEO involves making certain changes to your website design and content that makes your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in the hope that the search engine will display your website as a top result on their results page. Most of this process will revolve around how you use keywords, the words and phrases in the web content that make it possible for people to find a site via search engines.
  • Search Engine Optimisation is also affected by website design. The search engines will scan the site to determine how easy it is to navigate and read, rewarding user-friendly sites with higher rankings on the search engine results page. We will explain further in series 6: How search engines rank pages and personalize results

Why you should focus on SEO when there are so many other marketing mediums?

There are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization and, in my opinion, these three things make SEO the best traffic source.

  1. Cost – Unlike paid ads, search traffic is free. SEO is far less expensive than advertising to acquire customers. The only costs in SEO are the costs to hire the best SEO Company. Unless you have experience in website coding and Google algorithms, you will need an SEO firm or agency to grow your rankings and reap the benefits of SEO.
  2. Consistent result – SEO is 24/7. It does not sleep. Your rankings do not disappear overnight. You can increase your website traffic all day, every day. Organic traffic is typically consistent once you’re ranking high. search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information. And the number of searches for a given topic is typically consistent month to month. Social media and email marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing. It makes sense because social media networks are designed to surface fresh content. Emails often get marked as read, forgotten, or land in the spam box.
  3. You have the opportunity to reach massive audiences you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. In fact, as of October 2019 there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users around the world. And almost 4 billion of those people are Google users. This is why search engine optimization is an 80 billion dollar industry and why marketers from all walks of life are adopting and pursuing it today. Everyone wants their business to get discovered and SEO is the perfect way to do that. Plus based on the table below, showing the number of people searching every single day.

Table 1: Here’s a quick look at SEO’s impact in numbers (2025 data):

Factor

Stat (2025)

Source

Daily Google searches

8.5B+ per day

Market.us (2025) Market.us Scoop

Share of mobile web usage

~57.5% mobile (global)

StatCounter (Sept 2025) StatCounter Global Stats

Top 3 organic results’ click share

~68.7% of clicks

FirstPageSage (May 2025) First Page Sage

Most pages with zero organic traffic

~96.6%

Ahrefs (2023–25 studies) Ahrefs+1

(Stats vary by query/device/vertical; treat these as directional benchmarks, not absolutes.)

  1. SEO builds trust. Because people trust Google and ask most of their questions there. They use it every day to find what they are looking for. By ranking high on search engines, your business will build trust and credibility within your audience.

When should you use it?

You can use SEO in a number of situations. For instance, this is the right tool for when you want to increase the clicks through to your website, your blog posts or even when you want to increase your social media followers. 

As your visitors are researching your website, they are likely to click your social media icons to follow you.

Things to consider:

  • SEO is measurable. You can measure your conversions and the source of conversions. Be smart setting your target.
  • Including your competitors, everyone is using SEO, before you decide what you are going to do, have a look at what your competitors are doing.

Conclusion

Search Engine Optimization is more than keywords — it’s a system of making your website discoverable, useful, and trustworthy in the eyes of both people and search engines. SEO isn’t about gaming algorithms; it’s about earning trust at scale. In 2025, that means: people-first content, crisp tech, genuine authority, and an experience that makes users stay. Start with one page: align it to a real query, make it the best answer, tidy the basics, and measure. Then repeat, every week.

Next in the OTINGA SEO Series: How Search Engines Work – Crawling, Indexing & Ranking (2025 Edition).

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