SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO (search engine optimization) is the work you do on a website so search engines understand your content and people can find your pages and decide whether to click. That is how Google itself defines SEO in its SEO Starter Guide.

What is SEO?

SEO targets organic results, the unpaid part of the results page. Google states plainly that it does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher (Google Search Central, How Google Search works, accessed October 2026).

There is also no secret that puts a site in first place automatically. Google describes SEO as the next step after a site meets Search Essentials, the baseline for being eligible to appear (Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide, accessed October 2026).

The 3 stages of Google Search

1. Crawling: automated programs called crawlers download text, images and videos from pages found on the web.
2. Indexing: Google analyzes the content and stores it in the Google index, a large database.
3. Serving: when someone searches, Google returns information relevant to the query.

Not every page makes it through all 3 stages, and Google does not guarantee it will crawl, index or serve any page. To see where your pages stop, open Google Search Console.

What SEO involves

Based on the SEO Starter Guide, the work falls into 4 groups:

• Helping Google find your pages. Google mainly discovers pages through links from pages it has already crawled, so internal links and backlinks from other sites both help. A sitemap is optional.
• Organizing the site. Use descriptive URLs, for example /pets/cats.html. Keep one URL per piece of content; for duplicates, redirect or use rel=”canonical”.
• Content. Easy to read, original, kept up to date and helpful to readers. Anticipate the words people will search: Google’s example is that experts may search “charcuterie” while newcomers search “cheese board”. This is where keyword research comes in.
• How pages look on Google. A clear, unique title for each page, a short meta description that summarizes the page accurately, and alt text on images.

What Google says not to worry about

Google also corrects some old beliefs:

• Google Search does not use the meta keywords tag.
• Keyword stuffing is against Google’s spam policies.
• Keywords in the domain name or URL path have hardly any ranking effect.
• There is no minimum or maximum word count for ranking.
• E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. PageRank uses links but is only one of many signals.

SEO and AI search

For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says there are no extra requirements: a page only needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and the usual SEO fundamentals still apply (Google Search Central, AI features and your website, accessed October 2026).

AEO and GEO describe optimizing to be cited by AI. On Google a page still has to be indexed first, so both sit on top of SEO. When the answer appears right on the results page, some searchers click nothing at all (zero-click search). That is why you should track impressions, not only clicks.

Example: putting a value on SEO traffic (hypothetical)

A furniture shop’s “leather sofa” category page brings in 1,500 organic clicks a month, according to the Performance report in Search Console. The conversion rate is 1% and the average order is VND 12 million.

• Orders: 1,500 × 1% = 15 a month.
• Revenue: 15 × VND 12 million = VND 180 million a month.
• Buying the same 1,500 clicks with search ads at a CPC of VND 6,000: VND 9 million a month.

VND 9 million is what this traffic would cost if you had to buy it with ads.

Frequently asked questions

How long does SEO take to work?

According to Google, some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months. Google recommends waiting a few weeks after each round of changes before judging the results.

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEO targets organic results and you do not pay Google per click. SEM usually refers to search ads such as Google Ads, where you pay per click.

If you need an SEO plan that also covers AI search, see Adtek’s SEO solution.