The SEO process explained in plain English

When I tell people what I do for a living, I usually say something to the effect of, “I help businesses appear higher in Google search results for words and phrases related to the products and services they offer”.

It’s an over-simplification… but also the simplest answer.

9 times out of 10, they’ll nod their head, let it stew for a few seconds, and ask, “… so how do you do that?”.

What follows is my answer — my typical SEO process for clients, in plain English, as well as the value each step provides.

Here’s the process in summary:

1. Identify the highest ROI search terms for your business
2. Optimize different pages of your website for these terms
3. Fix any technical issues that may be holding you back
4. Create new content for continued traffic growth
5. Get other relevant websites to talk about you
6. Track progress, analyze results, and make improvements

Step 1: Identify the highest ROI search terms for your business

Imagine a potential customer trying to find a plant-based protein bar — they’ve never heard of you, but they’re searching anyway. What words and phrases are they going to type into Google to find one? Maybe “plant-based protein bar”? “dairy-free protein bar”? “best vegan protein bars”?

While we could just guess using our own knowledge and intuition, there are tools and research methods at our disposal that actually tell us all the different variations people use, and how frequently they use them. In other words, which variations are used the most (and thus, will bring the most visitors to our site once we rank on page 1 for them)?

And the keyword research from this step doesn’t only inform Google. It’s also the foundation for prompt research later in the engagement — identifying the questions and conversational queries people are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity about your category.

Step 2: “Optimize” different pages of your website for these terms

Google ranks pages, not websites. What this means is that every page of your website has the ability to appear in Google for various search terms related to the content on the page.

The goal here is to “map” the search terms we identified in Step 1 to the pages on your website that best match the topic and intent (of the person searching for them). Once mapped, each page can be “optimized”… which simply means making sure each page is relevant to its intended terms and ultimately keeps the promise of why someone would have clicked onto your page.

Some of the lowest-hanging fruit in an SEO engagement shows up at this step. A business I recently started working with had a thoughtful glossary of industry terms spanning hundreds of pages — significant work had gone into the content. But the title tag was identical across every page and didn’t include the actual terms. One small fix later, those pages started ranking better almost immediately. It’s not always that easy, but it’s more often than you’d think.

Step 3: Fix any technical issues that may be holding you back

There are a million and one technical issues on a website that can prevent Google from finding (or “crawling”) important content or pages on your website. Many of these issues impact your visitor experience as well.

Some examples include: broken links, missing or empty pages, slow loading pages, un-secure pages, etc. You don’t need to know what each of these means (although I’d be more than happy to tell you) – just know that they may not only be hindering your ability to rank in Google but also hindering your customer experience.

In practice, I’ll often run a quick technical pass at the very start of an engagement — before keyword research even begins — just to catch anything urgent. I recently picked up a noindex tag spanning a large directory of an otherwise well-built site. Wasn’t intentional; no one had caught it. One fix and a Search Console resubmit later, dozens of good pages were indexed within days. Easy work for an outsized result.

Step 4: Create new content for continued traffic growth

There are only so many search terms you can rank for (and traffic you can receive) with your existing website content. New content, based on more keyword research, is required if you want to continue growing.

Your blog is the best place to consistently serve new, useful content that can rank for meaningful keywords and drive more traffic to your site. While your main pages will rank for highly-targeted commercial terms like “plant-based protein bars”, the blog is the place to target more informational terms like “plant protein vs. whey protein”, “best dairy-free snacks”, “healthy post-workout meals”, etc.

In practice, the blog ends up doing more heavy lifting than people expect. With nearly every long-term client I’ve worked with, blog traffic eventually exceeds the traffic to the main site — often by multiples. Two reasons: the informational topics tend to have higher search volume than the commercial ones, and the blog has room to keep growing month after month, where there are only so many product or service pages a business can credibly create.

Step 5: Get other relevant websites to talk about you

By “talk about” I mean link to. Think about it like this: every relevant, high-quality website that links to your website is a “vote”, and Google’s search engine rankings are a popularity contest. Simply put, the more votes you have, the better your web pages will rank for your keywords.

There are a lot of ways we can get other websites to link to yours, but most will involve either doing something noteworthy offline or creating something valuable (like content) online. In either case, the goal is to get the sites you want a link from to recognize it and link to your site as the source. This is more or less “digital public relations” with an extra focus on earning links.

There’s an emerging AI search wrinkle here. In traditional SEO, an unlinked mention of your business — a journalist referencing you in an article without including a link, say — counted for relatively little. In AI search, those mentions appear to carry more weight: LLMs are trained on how brands are referenced in trusted sources, so being talked about in the right contexts increasingly matters even without a link back. The work to earn those mentions looks similar to traditional link-building, but the success metrics broaden.

Step 6: Track progress, analyze results, and make improvements

Is what we’re doing working? Such a seemingly simple question, yet many businesses engaged in SEO (or any marketing initiatives for that matter) don’t know the answer to it. Of course, this is never the case with my clients. (wink, wink)

At the most basic level, you can expect to receive the following information from me each and every month: total website traffic and organic website traffic (i.e. traffic from search engines like Google), conversion metrics like online sales, new business leads and newsletter sign-ups, and of course, search engine rankings for our top-priority keywords.

Reporting now also includes your brand’s visibility in AI-generated answers — how often you show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews when people ask questions related to your category.

The work doesn’t end after Step 6

Steps 1 through 3 in particular aren’t one-and-done. They’re more like an ongoing rhythm.

• Keyword strategy gets revisited. If a target keyword stops moving, or worse loses ground, the diagnosis is usually one of three things: a competitor published something better, the search intent shifted, or the on-page optimization needs another pass. Sometimes the right move is to push harder on the same keyword. Sometimes it’s to recognize that the keyword isn’t the right target anymore and reallocate.
• Technical health decays. Sites accumulate new technical issues constantly. Plugins get updated, templates get edited, redirects break, new pages launch without proper canonicalization. The fixes from month one tend to slowly come undone unless someone’s checking. Regular technical passes catch issues early, while they’re still small.
• The business itself changes. Products and services get added, retired, or repositioned. Each change has SEO implications — pages getting taken down need their rankings preserved through redirects; new pages need to be optimized for the keywords that actually have demand. Without someone watching for these shifts, traffic gets lost on the deletions and never earned on the additions.

This is part of why most of my work is structured as ongoing retainers rather than one-off projects. There’s always more to do, and the work compounds when it’s continuous.

What about AI search?

SEO isn’t just about Google anymore. People are also asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity their questions — and Google itself now answers many queries directly in AI Overviews before anyone clicks a link.

What this means for the process above: not as much as you’d think.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. The same keyword research, on-page work, technical maintenance, content creation, link building, and reporting that earn rankings in Google are also what earn visibility in AI search results. Quality content, clear structure, and topical authority are still doing the heavy lifting.

What does change is the lens. A few specific updates I now build into every engagement:

• Prompt research, built on top of keyword research. A few months into an engagement, once we have solid keyword data, I layer in prompt research — the questions and conversational queries people are actually asking AI tools about your category. Sometimes the language overlaps with traditional keywords. Often it doesn’t.
• Content that’s built to be cited. Ranking #1 on Google still matters, but increasingly the goal is also being the source AI tools quote when they answer a related question. That favors content that’s clearly structured, well-attributed, and definitive on the topic it covers.
• Brand mention tracking. Reporting now includes how often your brand shows up in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, not just where you rank in traditional results.

It’s not a parallel service, it’s not a bolt-on, and it’s not something I sell separately. It’s how I do SEO now.

A few things worth underlining

• Many businesses are over-reliant on branded search. A lot of clients come to me with the majority of their traffic coming from people who already know who they are. SEO is how you start reaching the rest of the market — the people who don’t yet know you exist but would happily buy from you if they could find you.
• The value extends beyond what you can measure on your own site. Some prospects who find you through SEO will buy directly. Others will go to Amazon, or your retailer of choice, or walk into a store. Some will follow you on social, sign up for your newsletter, and convert months later. The work is building awareness as much as it’s building direct sales.
• It’s one of the lowest-cost ways to reach new customers. Compared to paid ads, sales hires, or trade shows, the cost-per-acquired-customer through good SEO work is hard to beat, particularly because the work compounds over time rather than resetting every month.

Bottom line

This is far from the most comprehensive explanation of the SEO process online — but my hope is that it’s the most straightforward, and that the value of each step is clear by now.

If you’re trying to figure out what an independent SEO consultant should actually be doing for you — or whether to hire one at all — I hope you find this useful.