SEO stands for search engine optimization and refers to the process of improving a website to increase its visibility in search engines. The goal is to understand what people search for online and provide relevant content to connect people with the solutions offered. Search engines scour content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine the best answers to user queries. While paid advertising can generate traffic, SEO is one of the few marketing channels that can continue generating traffic over time through organic search results if content is optimized properly. Regular SEO audits analyze a website against best practices to identify issues affecting search performance and provide an implementation plan.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.”
In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to
increase its visibility when people search for products or services
related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search
engines.
It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of
website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-
paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.
It’s about understanding what people are searching for online,
the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the
type of content they wish to consume. Knowing the answers to
these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are
searching online for the solutions you offer.

2. Search engine basics
Search engines are answer machines. They
scour billions of pieces of content and
evaluate thousands of factors to determine
which content is most likely to answer your
query.
Search engines do all of this by discovering
and cataloguing all available content on the
Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos,
etc.) via a process known as “crawling and
indexing,” and then ordering it by how well it
matches the query in a process we refer to as
“ranking.”

3. Why SEO is important?
While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms
can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is
driven by search engines.
SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that,
when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time.
If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for
the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas
advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your
site.
Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.
Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to
search engines so that your content can be properly indexed
and displayed within search results.

4. Search Engine Crawlers
The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing and
Yahoo!, use crawlers to find the pages for their
algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from
other search engine indexed pages do not need to be
submitted because they are found automatically.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different
factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by
the search engines. Distance of pages from the root
directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not
pages get crawled.

7. What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is the process of analyzing how well your web
presence relates to best practices – it is the first step to
creating an implementation plan that will have measurable
results.
The purpose of the audit is to identify as many foundational
issues affecting organic search performance as possible. The
SEO audit will reveal:
• Technical SEO issues
• Website structure issues
• On-page SEO issues
• Potential off-site problems
• User experience issues
• Content gaps and opportunities
• Competitive marketplace insights
An audit is a standard procedure that should occur on a regular
basis – It is essentially a “health check” for your website.