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SEO Basics and Definitions

SEO Basics and Definitions

What It Is and Why It Matters

As an SEO specialist with over eight years of experience, I often hear people ask, "What exactly is SEO?" So, I decided to write this article to explain it with simple examples and straightforward language that anyone can understand—without the boring jargon and arrogance that’s often common in the Ukrainian marketing industry.
It doesn’t matter if you contact an agency in Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, or Lviv — most of the time, they will try to overwhelm you with complexity and technical terms. The goal? To make you think it’s so difficult and unrealistic that you feel the need to delegate it to someone else (spoiler: that’s actually true).

SEO in Simple Words

So, what exactly is SEO website promotion and how does SEO benefit your business? Let’s imagine you ordered or created a website that sells bicycles in the city of Kharkiv, but your site can also ship products by mail. So, right away we understand that you can sell across all of Ukraine.
What’s next? We go to Google and type the query “Buy a bicycle” — and what do we see first? (image below)

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The first thing we see on our screen is ads, because Google tries to earn from the flow of information and essentially sells ad space. This is called PPC traffic or Google Ads. You pay money for every click on your ad.
So where is SEO in all this? (image below)

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In our case, we immediately see SEO positions, but most often you’ll see 2–4 ad positions first and only then the “organic results.” So now we know where SEO works.
But why do we need it for our bicycle store? This is a completely reasonable question from a business perspective. The simple answer is — we want to sell bicycles all over Ukraine. But as users, you yourself type very different queries, such as “buy bicycle + brand,” “buy bicycle + city,” “buy bicycle cheap,” and so on.
This is exactly the task of SEO optimization. A good SEO agency or specialist first clusters these queries. In our example, they collect all possible queries related to the bicycle store and form what’s called a “semantic core” — a set of keywords (your queries) for each page. Then they optimize the technical data of the page and write the correct texts.
Feeling confused? Don’t worry — this is exactly the job of an SEO specialist: lots of analytics and precise actions. So, let’s continue.

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In this image, we took just one of our target keywords and saw that it has the potential to get 11,000 clicks per month in Ukraine. Imagine — if we put in some serious effort and optimize our store well, we could get about 9,000 clicks in one month (I recommend estimating conversion rates at around 1–2%, so in our case, that means about 220 potential customers who might fill out an order form that goes to your sales department).
So, the benefit of SEO for business is very clear and obvious.
Now imagine that our store has many types of bicycles — different colors, brands, price ranges, and so on. And for each of these, there is a set of keywords with their own traffic potential.

Website Search Engine Optimization

So now we understand why SEO is needed — it works whether you have your own blog, a store, or a development company. The industry or business focus doesn’t matter; what matters is that you have an online presence.But how does an SEO specialist promote your site, and what does their challenging daily work consist of? Let’s make a short list, and I’ll try to explain briefly:1. Optimization of meta tags on the site — what is it exactly? Essentially, your pages have parts of code responsible for the title and description.

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Here, the blue letters represent the Title, and the gray ones are the Description. Together, these are the page’s meta tags, which should explain to both the user and Google what the page is about by including relevant keywords.
2.Next comes text optimization. Your site always has some text — of course, it depends on the site’s focus, but in 99% of cases, there should be text that explains the product, service, or provides information. To make the site relevant, precise work is done to include keywords in the text (by the way, I also wrote this text following that rule, so if you’re reading this, it worked).
3.Then we have off-page optimization — primarily backlinks. Many of you have probably seen highlighted parts of text in an article, usually in blue or another color, which, when clicked, take you to another site. Those are links, and the clickable words are called “anchors” or “anchor text” — simply put, they are hooks. These links and anchor lists send signals to Google, helping it understand what the linked site is about (of course, there are many nuances and complexities, but in this article, I try to show the multi-level process with simple and clear examples).
So, when we optimize meta tags, write good keyword-rich text, and get several links from authoritative resources, Google gathers all this data and makes an overall evaluation of your site. In our example of the bicycle store, every site on the internet has such evaluations. In total, Google uses more than 200 ranking factors for sites, but in this article, I showed the simplest ones without heavy technical details.

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Why Do You Really Need SEO?

We started with the example of a website selling bicycles. Now imagine you invested in the site, hired a developer or a company, and it’s great — your warehouse is full of products, but for some reason, there are no sales. Then you start looking for ads, set up targeting on social media, maybe order Google ads. But basically, it’s like this: you got ready for fishing, bought a super fishing rod and the best bait, but never left the house — and wonder why you didn’t catch anything today.
The biggest challenge for SEO specialists or SEO promotion is that clients often don’t really understand how it works and what its potential is — because, frankly, it’s complicated.
To summarize why SEO (organic) traffic is important and how it differs from paid traffic: the main downside is that it doesn’t build up quickly and it’s not always cheap (often, not cheap at all). But you get long-term results and your traffic is highly commercial — meaning almost 100% of it can convert into sales.
SEO doesn’t work fast. You need to build all these processes, grow your mass, and only then start getting results. This can take anywhere from 3 months to a year, depending on your business and competition.
Is SEO promotion necessary for business? Absolutely, 100%. And I’m not just saying this because I’m the Head of SEO at Accendix and one of the founders of an SEO agency — I say it because I rely on data. SEO is stable traffic that brings money.
I hope if you’ve read this far, you found it interesting and useful. And if you don’t want to figure out all these nuances yourself, you can always contact our company or start by ordering an SEO audit of your site from us. We’re always happy to help you get your next customer.

Author: Vovchok Oleksandr
Head of Seo at Accendix


Accendix

© Created by Jeronymo

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Accendix

© Created by Jeronymo

All rights Reserved