SEO Marketing Digital

A plain-language publication

Search is one channel. Learn how it really works.

SEO Marketing Digital explains search engine optimisation as one part of digital marketing, next to paid ads, social, email and referrals. Every guide is written from the search engines' own documentation, with no ranking promises and nothing to sell.

Start with how search works See all five guides
A diagram of five coloured channel lines, one per marketing channel, all leading to the same web page. The search line is drawn thickest.
Five channels, one website. Search is the line this publication follows most closely.

The reading path

Five guides, in the order they make sense

Each guide stands on its own, but they build on each other. Start with how search engines handle pages, then see where search fits, then plan, measure and avoid the shortcuts.

  1. How search engines find, store and show pages

    Crawling, indexing and serving, and what each stage asks of a site owner.

  2. Where organic search sits in the marketing mix

    Organic search beside paid, social, email and referrals, and how to weigh it.

  3. Search intent: writing for the question behind the query

    Reading the job behind a query and planning one page per real need.

  4. Measuring search performance without fooling yourself

    Clicks, impressions, average position and fair comparisons over time.

  5. Shortcuts that backfire: a plain reading of spam policies

    What search engines treat as spam, and how to judge an SEO offer.

How these guides are made

From the source, not from folklore

Search marketing attracts confident claims that nobody can check. This publication takes the opposite approach: each guide starts from what search engines publish about their own systems, says where that guidance comes from, and is clear about what nobody outside a search engine can know.

Read the editorial policy

  • Primary sources firstGuides are based on documentation from Google Search Central, Search Console Help, Google Analytics Help and Bing Webmaster Tools. Each guide lists the documents it relies on.
  • No ranking promisesNo one can promise a position in search results. Any page here that seems to suggest otherwise is an error, and the policy explains how corrections are handled.
  • Nothing for saleThere are no services, affiliate links, sponsored posts or tracking scripts on this site.

New to this?

Start with one question: can search engines find and read your pages?

Before keywords, before content plans, a page has to be crawled and indexed. The first guide explains those stages in about ten minutes of reading.

Read how search engines find, store and show pages