Don’t know how to do SEO or make your website search engine– and user-friendly? If you’re a beginner, this guide will help you optimize your website for both search engines and users. You’ll learn everything from keyword analysis to link building and website tracking.

Let’s get started with How to Do SEO: A Beginner’s Guide—a step-by-step process to follow.

What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization?

In simple terms, SEO is the process of optimizing a website for search engines and users to improve visibility, drive traffic, and increase sales using on-page and off-page techniques.

Why does SEO matter for small businesses?

Every business is moving online to generate more sales, conversions, leads, and revenue. As a result, countless businesses are creating websites and apps to attract more customers.

Because of this competition, it’s difficult for every business to rank at the top of search engines like Google. Billions of users search every day to find information and buy products or services online, and only high-ranking websites capture most of their attention.

The internet search landscape is changing significantly. For years, professionals relied on SEO. With the coming in of AI tools, there’s been a massive shift. Roughly 20% of humanity uses AI tools for various purposes, with 500-600 million engagements per day. Amongst all, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are the most commonly used AI tools.

With the growth of AI, SEO professionals are now turning to AEO or Answer Engine Optimization. Through AEO, you can tailor your web content to AI search engines. If you want your business to grow online today, it is important to tailor your content to AI engines. These help to boost searchability and visibility. Recent studies show that AI-powered search engines now handle 30% of online searches.

Let’s explore how to optimize content for these AI-powered engines.

What are AI Overviews?

Formerly known as Search Generative Experience (SGE), AI overviews are Google’s entry into generative AI, integrated into core search results. Google now just doesn’t provide links as answers to your queries, but a concise answer. An AI-generated summary appears at the top of the SERP as an answer to the user’s query.

Botify’s AI Overviews study shows that AI overviews currently appear in around 47.4% of search queries. This is having a significant impact on how users interact with search. These AI overviews extract information from various sources, such as the web, and provide a direct citation for each. Businesses and content creators are no longer depending on ranking #1; they are focusing on staying relevant, per AEO.

Several business owners have lately observed their website traffic going down. Around 60% of searches today don’t end up in a click. Why? Because people receive answers from AI. As soon as one puts up a query, you’ll get AI-generated, accurate answers. Thus, one may not need to visit the website either.

Don’t be worried. The good news is, the AI that is probably killing your business’s traffic will also help to drive growth. When AI and SEO work together, it can drive wonders. SEO isn’t only about keywords, algorithms, and rankings. It’s about building trust. It’s about strategy and social much more.

SEO Marketing in the Age of AI

With the coming of AI, the customer search behaviour is changing significantly. Well, Google has been weaving AI into its search algorithm for a very long time. RankBrain can easily interpret content, while BERT helps search engines understand language’s context better.

Despite all this, a significant question remains: Is SEO relevant in the age of AI? Well, sure it is. You may come across headlines that say AI will replace SEO or SEO is dead, but don’t just believe them. SEO is not dead; it is evolving. AI will only improve the process. Many are calling it Adaptive SEO.