Search Engine Optimisation
Date: 2026-08-16
Earning search visibility rather than buying it. This is the content and intent half — the technical half is architecture, and separating them is what stops SEO being a single undifferentiated backlog nobody owns.
What it is
SEO is the practice of ranking in organic search results. It splits cleanly into two disciplines with different owners:
| Content SEO — here | Technical SEO — architecture |
|---|---|
| What to write about | Can a crawler reach it |
| Matching search intent | Can it render the content |
| Information architecture for demand | Which URL is canonical |
| Internal linking and authority | Crawl budget, redirects, structured data |
The technical half is Technical SEO, filed in Web Development because it’s implementation. Neither works without the other.
Intent is the organising idea
The durable insight, and it survives every algorithm update: a search engine is trying to satisfy an intention, not match a string.
"wool socks" commercial — wants a category page
"are wool socks warm" informational — wants an article
"merino wool socks size 8" transactional — wants a product page
"best wool socks uk" comparison — wants a guide or listicle
Ranking requires matching the page type to the intent, not just containing the words. A product page will not rank for an informational query however well optimised, because it doesn’t answer the question.
Check what currently ranks for a target query. The page types in the results tell you what the engine believes the intent is, and that’s more reliable than any keyword tool’s classification.
The ecommerce shape
For a retailer, the demand pyramid runs:
brand terms highest intent, lowest volume, mostly yours already
product terms high intent, competitive
category terms the commercial prize
informational high volume, low intent, feeds the top of the funnel
Category pages are usually the biggest opportunity and the least worked on. They target the highest-value commercial terms and are typically thin — a product grid with no copy, no internal linking logic and a title tag generated from a template — Category Page Design.
What’s durable versus what isn’t
Worth separating, because SEO advice ages badly:
Durable — matching intent, genuinely useful content, clear site structure, internal linking that reflects importance, earning links because something is worth linking to, page experience.
Not durable — keyword density, exact-match anchor text ratios, specific content lengths, anything phrased as “the algorithm rewards X”. Those belong in a dated landscape note if anywhere.
The durable list survives the shift to retrieval-and-synthesis interfaces largely intact — what changes is the consumer, and what it does to measurement — Answer Engines.
Measuring it
- By query intent group, not by individual keyword. Rankings for one term are noisy; the aggregate for a group is a trend
- Clicks and impressions from Search Console, not third-party rank trackers, which sample from locations and devices that aren’t your customers
- Landing page, not keyword, is the actionable unit. You optimise a page
- Attribute honestly. Organic captures demand created elsewhere, so a rise in organic following a paid social campaign is partly that campaign — Multi-Touch Attribution
The incrementality question
Uncomfortable and worth asking: how much organic traffic would arrive anyway? Branded organic in particular is largely demand created by everything else you do.
Which means SEO’s measured value is inflated for the same structural reason paid search’s is — both capture existing demand and both get credited for it. The difference is that SEO has no direct cost per click, so the error is less expensive — Incrementality Testing.
Where it interacts
- Technical SEO — none of this matters if the page can’t be crawled or rendered
- Rendering and SEO — client-side rendering delays indexing and is invisible to AI crawlers entirely
- Site Migrations and SEO — the fastest way to lose everything above
- Content Design and Product Descriptions — the actual writing