The Basics of SEO

1. Technology: the foundation on which everything rests

A website whose technical SEO isn’t up to par rarely really stands out in search engines. Technical SEO is the foundation: without a solid foundation, content and authority have little chance of performing well. Think of factors such as speed, security, and structure.

Search engines want to provide users with a seamless experience, and that starts with your technology. You’ve probably been there: you type a search query into Google, click on a search result, and the page just won’t load. Nothing is more frustrating.

What should you keep in mind when it comes to technique?

To ensure that your technical foundation is solid, here are the most important points to focus on:

• Improving load speed: Fast websites keep visitors engaged and are ranked higher by Google. You can read more about this on our page about Core Web Vitals.
• Crawlability of your platform: Make sure search engines can discover all important pages without any obstacles.
• Structured data: Provide search engines with additional information in a structured way.
• Mobile-friendliness: With the majority of traffic coming from smartphones, this isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.
• Security (HTTPS): A secure connection is now standard and helps build trust among visitors.

Common Technical Errors

Despite the best intentions, errors often creep into websites that can negatively impact your search visibility. By identifying and resolving these issues in a timely manner, you can prevent them from undermining your SEO efforts:

1. Broken internal links that send visitors and bots down a dead end.
2. Incorrect canonical tags, which cause pages to be indexed incorrectly or not at all.
3. A robots.txt file that accidentally blocks important pages from being indexed.
4. Incorrectly configured filters and pagination, resulting in thousands of URL variations.
5. Incorrect HTML headings, which prevent Google from understanding the hierarchy of your content.

How can you approach technology in a smart way?

Most technical issues can be easily identified using technical tools such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. These tools can scan your website regularly and report any significant issues. This allows you to identify bottlenecks and address them immediately, ensuring that your technical foundation remains strong.

2. Content: Answer your target audience’s questions

Content is the second pillar of SEO and is important for long-term discoverability as well as for actually helping your target audience. Search engines are good at recognizing which texts are valuable and which ones add no value. So focus on the questions and needs of your target audience and write authentic, useful content. Is your content being read, shared, and linked to? If so, that enhances both the visitor experience and your ranking on Google.

What makes content powerful?

Good content isn’t just about words; it’s about providing valuable answers that meet the needs of your target audience. Strong content has several key characteristics:

• Relevance: Address the search intent—whether it is informational, transactional, or navigational.
• Readability: Use short paragraphs, clear headings, and a logical structure.
• Unique insights: Share insights that set your organization apart, such as your own data or real-world examples.
• Enrichment: Support your text with visuals, tables, diagrams, or videos to reinforce the message.

Use search terms correctly

Many companies still believe that keywords are synonymous with SEO or that you have to include search terms exactly as they are in your content. Search terms provide insight into how your target audience searches for your products or services—and how often they do so. They can also reveal your target audience’s intent: are they looking for information, or do they want to make a purchase?

The trick is not to force search terms into your content. Doing so compromises the quality of the content and its value. Still, search terms are important, and you can identify them through keyword research (using tools like Ahrefs or SE Ranking). There are several ways to make effective use of search terms:

1. Place relevant keywords in natural locations such as titles, headings, and alt tags.
2. Avoid keyword stuffing: focus on writing that flows naturally and is easy to read.
3. Use variations and synonyms to enrich the text and cover multiple perspectives.

How to Write Content That Ranks Well

Ultimately, what matters is that your content helps the user. So start by identifying your target audience’s questions, and build a strong content strategy from there. Also, make sure your text is unique and doesn’t contain duplicate content, so search engines can clearly see which pages are valuable.

3. Search Quality: Demonstrate your experience and reliability

Content alone isn’t enough, because search engines want to know if you’re a reliable source. That’s where search quality comes into play: the extent to which your website demonstrates that the information is accurate, relevant, and credible. Google evaluates this based on, among other things, the E-E-A-T principles: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. By highlighting these factors in your content, you increase the likelihood that both visitors and search engines will take you seriously.

The Building Blocks of Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)

To assess the reliability of your website, Google uses a number of established criteria. Together, these pillars form the basis on which search engines determine whether your content is truly valuable and credible:

• Experience: Show that you speak from real-world experience by sharing case studies, reviews, or examples.
• Expertise: Demonstrates that the author or organization has in-depth knowledge.
• Authority: Make sure others link to your site as a source of information.
• Reliability: Be transparent about sources, authorship, and company information.

How can you improve search quality?

Putting these principles into practice requires concrete actions. By consciously focusing on the elements listed below, you’ll gradually build more trust with both visitors and search engines:

1. Include clear author pages that provide background information and details about their expertise.
2. Publish content with citations to boost your credibility.
3. Collect and display customer reviews or testimonials that confirm your experience.

Show that you’re the expert

Don’t just state what you know—actually show that you put it into practice. Share concrete results or insights from your own projects. This will make your content tangible and compelling.

4. Authority: Trust from the Outside World

A strong website isn’t just supported by itself, but also by the signals others send. Backlinks—links from external sites—are crucial in this regard. Every high-quality link is a recommendation that says, “This site is important.”

What builds authority?

SEO authority doesn’t happen on its own; it’s built by carefully establishing signals that show your website matters. The following elements directly contribute to a stronger and more reliable profile:

• Internal link structure: Create a clear hierarchy that gives important pages extra weight.
• High-quality backlinks: Look for links from relevant and authoritative websites in your field.
• Guest blogs and publications: Share your knowledge through external platforms to increase visibility and build trust.
• Digital PR: Promote newsworthy research or stories to generate media attention.

What You Should Definitely Avoid When Dealing with Authority Figures

Not all links are valuable. In fact, making the wrong choices can harm your search engine visibility. Here are the risks you need to be aware of:

1. Links from irrelevant or spam websites can harm your reputation and ranking.
2. Sudden spikes in link counts may be interpreted as unnatural behavior.
3. Paid links without clear context—Google takes a strict stance on this and penalizes abuse.

How Google Evaluates Links These Days

Whereas Google used to rely primarily on manual penalties that affected the entire website, links are now largely evaluated in real time and at the page level. This means that unnatural or irrelevant links lose their value more quickly and can negatively impact the visibility of specific pages, often without any clear notification.

Is your website receiving unnatural or low-quality links? If so, there’s no need to worry right away. Google usually “filts them out” and doesn’t assign them any value. But if you’ve invested a lot of time in link building, it would have been for nothing.

To prevent this, it’s important to build authority sustainably through relevant, high-quality link building. This ensures your link profile remains future-proof and prevents your rankings from coming under pressure without you realizing it.

The Evolving Search Landscape: Beyond Google with GEO

More and more often, users are finding their answers not through traditional search results, but through AI systems—such as ChatGPT or the AI summaries from Google and Bing. This is giving rise to a new discipline: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO for short, is the next step in search engine optimization and focuses specifically on AI-driven search engines. While traditional SEO revolves around rankings in search results lists, GEO is about being visible within AI overviews and chat interfaces.

Instead of a list of ten links, an AI system often presents one or a few (shared) answers. With GEO, you can ensure that your content appears exactly there—as part of those generated answers—by making your knowledge, structures, and authority available to those systems.

Why is GEO important?

AI search engines are increasingly determining what information users see first. If you’re not visible there, you’re missing out on opportunities. Below, we’d like to share the reasons why GEO has become indispensable:

• New user expectations: More and morepeople expect immediate answers from AI interfaces instead of having to click through multiple web pages.
• The Evolving Search Landscape: AI-powered summaries are playing an increasingly important role alongside—or even in place of—traditional search results.
• Competitive advantage: By focusing on GEO now, you can stay ahead of competitors who focus solely on traditional SEO.
• Long-term strategy: GEO ensures that your brand, expertise, and content remain discoverable in future AI landscapes.

How do you respond to this?

To remain visible in AI overviews, it’s important to structure your content and brand in a way that makes it easy for generative systems to pick up and use them:

1. Make your content comprehensive and transparent, because incomplete or vague texts are less likely to be noticed.
2. Make sure your brand is widely visible in reliable sources; this also includes mentions of your brand without a link.
3. Focus on projecting reliability; AI models are more likely to trust content from authoritative sources.
4. Take complaints about your business seriously and address them.
5. Make sure your content is easy to read by using short(er) paragraphs and clear HTML headings.
6. Make sure AI models can crawl your website properly, even without JavaScript. For example, ChatGPT does not render JavaScript.

With GEO, you can ensure that your brand is visible not only on Google, but also in the answers generated by AI systems.

SEO is still an ongoing process

The four pillars—technology, content, search quality, and authority—are the building blocks of sustainable discoverability today. By continuously working on these pillars and also focusing on AI search engines, you can ensure that your SEO strategy is future-proof.

SEO isn’t a project you complete, but a process that continues to evolve. Those who have a solid foundation and keep an eye on the future will succeed in the long run. Want to improve your organic visibility? Feel free to contact us with no obligation, and who knows—we might be able to help you achieve your organic goals soon!