Beginner's Guide to SEO in 2025

There are 4. 9 billion active internet users in the world, and half of those people use Google Search. If you want your business to appear when people search for things you sell, you need three little letters.

S E O. SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, sums up all the strategies that will help your website rank higher in Google search results. Now, one of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that it is paid for.

It's not. At least not if you do everything yourself. There are two types of search results, paid and organic.

Organic, which is what concerns SEO is free. In this video, I'm going to explain organic search, what it is, how it works and how it can work for you and your business. In the end, I will also share the one truth most SEO and marketing experts fail to reveal.

Let's start with the basics, organic versus paid search results. When I go into Google and search for anything, let's say it's buy garden furniture, the page I see When I hit enter, that's called the SERP, the search engine results page. The results at the very top, often labeled as sponsored, are the paid search results.

These are businesses that are paying Google for these spots at the very top of the page. Below here are what we call the organic search results. These are links that have earned their place on the first page of Google through effective SEO, not through direct payment to search engines.

By this, I mean that their websites are optimized in a way that allows them to rank higher in search results. More on this later. The goal of all SEO is to be this link right here at the very top, because only the first three search results actually matter.

In fact, the number one search result In this case, Ikea is 10 times more likely to receive a click than a page ranking in position number 10. And the top 3 organic search results get more than 50 percent of all the clicks on the SERP. Search engine optimization plays a key role in improving your ranking positions.

And better rankings mean more traffic and more traffic means more sales and more sales means more money and more money means more problems and you might have 99 of them but SEO ain't one. So let's go back to the SERP for a moment. Your goal with SEO is to climb to the very top, but all your competitors are also trying to get there and they're all doing their best to optimize their websites.

So if you haven't started, just know that it's not too late to understand how to do that. First, you need to understand how search engines actually work. Now I want you to think of the internet as a vast and kind of intimidating hardware store, except they have everything.

When you arrive, there's just no way you can find anything. So you go straight to the information stand. That is Google.

If you're looking for garden furniture, you can ask and Google will try to show you the best possible garden furniture. And what is considered best. But, unlike a hardware store salesperson who might have a dozen or so garden furniture sets to choose from, Google has to sort through hundreds of billions of pages containing garden sets of all shapes, sizes, colors, and prices.

Since humans can't do this job alone, Google resorts to technology, which is something they're kind of good at. So here's how the whole process works in three steps. First crawling, Google bot, a web crawler will crawl your site.

That means it goes from one page to another and reads the content. Second, Indexing. Then Google stores information about your pages in a huge database called the Google Index.

Finally, ranking. If the page meets Google's criteria, it will be served as a search result for relevant search queries. Now, what are Google's criteria and what is a relevant result?

That is probably the most important question in the world of SEO. Honestly, the stuff that keeps some marketers up at night. In short, only Google knows.

The exact algorithm is secret and for good reason. If everyone knew exactly how it worked, people could game the system and search results would kind of become useless. But over the years, Google has officially confirmed the importance of several factors.

Here are seven of the most important ones. We added some links in the description of this video to go deeper into each of these topics. If you are interested.

First content relevance, Google determines whether a page is relevant to a search query, meaning does your page have an answer for whatever the searcher typed into Google? Let's say for example, that I'm searching for buy garden furniture. I want Google to give me a page where I can actually do that, buy the stuff.

Not a blog post about gardening best practices, for example. That would be completely irrelevant. Second factor, content quality.

Google uses various means to identify quality to rank pages. This includes input from real people, like you and me, and machine learning algorithms. Three, backlinks.

Relevant links from other sites help Google identify trustworthiness as well as relevance. Basically, every site that links back to you is seen by Google as a vote of confidence. Backlinks say, this site is so awesome that I'm going to link to it.

Yay. Number four, physical proximity. Google considers how far a business is from the searcher's location for local search results.

Number five, mobile friendliness. Pages optimized for mobile devices may rank better in Google's mobile search results. Six page performance.

Google uses a set of metrics called core web vitals to determine how well a page performs in terms of speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. Number seven, HTTPS. Google detects whether a website uses a secured, encrypted connection and gives a slight advantage to those that do.

Now, there are also some negative ranking factors that you should consider. The presence of these on a website can lead to worse rankings or even a penalty from Google. Number one, Intrusive pop-ups, especially the kind that prevent users from accessing the content on mobile devices.

Keyword stuffing or using irrelevant keywords or excessive usage of certain keywords and unnatural links. This is any attempt to manipulate Google's algorithm, including link buying, Link exchanges or low quality links. Now, please note that these are just examples of ranking signals Google uses.

No one knows all of them or their exact levels of importance. This is why SEOs or the marketers who specialize in SEO obsess over each new Google release because each time Google updates its algorithm, they could theoretically change the rules of the game. And then off we go to make all the necessary changes to keep our websites ranking in organic search.

So there you have it. That is the most we know about Google's sorting hat. It better be Gryffindor!

Now that you understand what SEO is and how search engines work, it's time to do the most important work of all. Optimization. This generally falls into three distinct categories on page SEO, off page SEO, and technical SEO.

If you are curious about any of these topics, and if you want your website to rank higher in organic search results, I linked our most popular beginner SEO courses in the description below, they are free. Before I end, as promised, here is the important fact that many marketing experts miss when it comes to SEO. SEO, my friend, is a long term game.

Results usually don't appear immediately, although there are some exceptions. Like, for example, when you fix A serious issue with your website, but in general, you should be thinking in months instead of days. And please don't pay attention to people who promise overnight success.

It's just not true in 99. 9 percent of cases. But if you commit yourself and play the long game, SEO wins can build a moat around your business.

One that your competitors will have a hard time overcoming. Now, if you could get one SEO question answered right now, What would it be? Post your questions in the comments, and we might feature yours in our next video.

Hasta pronto.