What is SEO? Search engine optimisation explained

Google describes its own process in three stages. It crawls the web to discover pages, indexes them to understand what they contain, and serves results it judges relevant to each search. Google also states that it does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher.

SEO is the work of being a good candidate at each stage, then giving a searcher a reason to choose you. In plain terms, Google's starter guide frames it as helping search engines understand your content and helping people decide whether to visit.

The order is what makes this practical. If a page is blocked from being crawled, better writing will not help. If a page is indexed but answers the wrong question, more links will struggle to help. Most wasted SEO budgets we see were spent on a later stage while an earlier one was broken.

Results also vary by person and place. Someone searching in Parramatta and someone searching in Perth can see different results for the same words, and that is why a position is better read as an average than as a single fact.

You will see lists of three, four or more types of SEO. The labels matter less than the questions behind them. These four cover what most Australian businesses need.

People also ask about the 80/20 rule in SEO. It is an informal idea, not a Google rule: a small share of pages and fixes tends to produce most of the return. It is useful as a reason to prioritise, as long as the 20 per cent is chosen from your own data rather than from a checklist.

Being visible is not the same as being chosen. A Backlinko study of Google Search Console data, covering more than 12 million searches, found the first organic result earned about ten times the click rate of the tenth, and that hardly anyone clicked through to page two.

The study is not Australian, and click rates move with the search and with what else Google shows on the page, so read the figures as a shape rather than a forecast.

Two lessons follow. First, impressions on their own flatter you: a page sitting on page two can collect thousands of impressions and almost no visits. Second, a move from position 15 to position 8 can matter less than a move from 8 to 3. Measure clicks and enquiries by page, as our guide to measuring SEO performance sets out.

No, though the prize is changing. Roy Morgan found 58 per cent of Australians aged 14 and over, about 13.6 million people, used AI tools in an average four weeks during the March 2026 quarter. That is a real change in behaviour. It has not displaced search as a source of traffic to websites, as the Statcounter figures above show.

The bigger shift is on the results page itself. Pew Research Center studied the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025 and found people clicked a traditional result on 8 per cent of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15 per cent when one did not. That is US data rather than Australian, but it shows the direction.

That small check is a useful picture of the opening. The sources being cited are clear, plain and specific about what they know, and local expertise is thin among them. A government page earned its place by explaining the subject well and showing why it matters: the NSW Government reports that almost 45 per cent of traffic to nsw.gov.au arrives through search.

The good news is that most of the work overlaps. Pages that are crawlable, specific and trusted serve both search engines and AI answers. Getting named in those answers has its own methods too, which we cover in what generative engine optimisation is.

For a small business, this order gets to the useful work quickly. Each step takes the output of the one before it.

Keep your words natural. Google's starter guide notes it does not use the keywords meta tag at all, and stuffing a page with a phrase is more likely to put readers off than to help. Google also says changes can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to show, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging one.

For realistic timing, see how long SEO takes in Australia. For budgets, see how much SEO costs in Australia. Small operators may also want our small business SEO guide.

Yes, particularly in a small local market with a clear offer and a founder who can write. The basics are free to learn, and the free tools from Google and Bing will take you a long way. What runs out first is usually time, because SEO rewards consistency over many months.

Hiring tends to make sense once search is worth real money to the business, your competitors are investing, or the site has technical problems you cannot diagnose. At that point, our search engine optimisation service is one option, and how to choose an SEO agency covers the questions to ask anyone, including us.

Our Snowball SEO platform automates much of the heavy lifting other agencies bill by the hour, so more of a client's budget goes to the video, photography and writing that give people a reason to choose them.