WTF is SEO? A Beginner's Guide

With tips and techniques learned over the years for websites, Instagram and TikTok, we've put together a beginner's guide to help you nail your basic SEO.

SEO talk can feel a bit confusing when you don’t fully understand what it is. Although it sounds like niche industry jargon, SEO is actually quite a simple and important marketing concept for anyone looking to push their website or social media account. 

Standing for Search Engine Optimisation, SEO is the process of increasing organic traffic to your website or account. This means using tools and techniques that help you rank higher on the search engine results page, without using paid ads. 

In addition, clever use of SEO can improve the quality of the traffic you receive. It also relates to how long people stay on your webpage or account, whether they click for more content from you and how likely they are to return.

SEO techniques can be applied to video, image and academic searches, and relies on an understanding of different algorithms. For example, search engines like Google use bots to crawl different webpages for information which is then placed in an index - think of it like a library. 

When you Google something, the bots will analyse the information in their index and rank each webpage in terms of relevancy to you, placing the most appropriate on the first page of results. The higher they appear on the page, the more likely they are to be helpful to your search. From my own experience, and with some insight from BRICKS’ Digital Editor Maddy, here are some top tips and tools to help you nail SEO.