SEO delivers measurable results, ensuring your audience can easily find your business, products, or services through platforms like Google. This drives highly targeted traffic to your website.
NOTE: As Google has over 92% of the UK search market, I will use Google and the search engine interchangeably.
Traditionally, SEO was about 10 blue links, which had a few dispersed ads (PPC) around those listed links.
Today, in 2026, there are competing areas on the Google search results page. These can include local maps and listings, videos, AI overviews, and featured snippets, to name a few.
Even with all the changes to the algorithm and Google's features, SEO remains a highly viable marketing channel that delivers a very favourable return on investment.
I mentioned the algorithm there, and it’s important to understand that the actual algorithm is a closely guarded secret. Even senior employees in Google's search department wouldn't know every factor that goes into how Google ranks pages.
That said, with Google's own guidelines, years of testing, reverse engineering, and data leaks, SEOs have a very good idea of how Google ranks pages.
Whilst SEOs can understand the factors that go into ranking pages, it's the weighting of those factors that's up for debate. For instance, getting a backlink from a specific site and knowing that it will be weighted more than a strong internal linking structure of 15 pages is impossible to know.
We just know that backlinks from popular sites, as well as internal linking between related pages, are strong ranking factors. That’s what this guide is about: a practical, hands-on guide that shows you what it takes to rank a Craft CMS site high on Google.
SEO traffic is declining, yet for many, it remains a strong marketing channel.
SEO fundamentals haven’t changed: useful, high-quality content and backlinks from reputable sites remain essential. While SEO has nuance, it’s not rocket science. If your content is strong and you have good backlinks, your site will attract traffic. However, poor page titles and non-descriptive H1 tags can limit your site’s search potential.
6 reasons why SEO can be beneficial to you
Increase traffic
This is the main reason for many: with a successful SEO campaign, your site will attract an influx of targeted visitors looking to read your content and potentially buy your products and services. Sure, not every visitor to your site will buy, but many will. People use search engines to find information and buy products and services. It would be no different for your business; people are looking to buy what you sell.
Cost-effective marketing
There are many channels for marketing a business: Radio, Print Advertising, billboards, Social Media, and TV. However, SEO is often at the top for return on investment, with an average return of 748%—for every £1 spent, you get £7.48 back. That’s impressive. Business owners consider SEO a key part of their marketing and business strategy.
Overall user experience increases
When you start making better web pages for users (Google's advice), you get happier customers, which makes for a better user experience. Also, when you optimise your site so it’s faster loading, also known as web performance, the user is happier and hungrier to buy what you sell.
Beat competition
Your competition is likely taking in revenue from SEO. You naturally want to beat them at it. Your competitors will see SEO as a cost-effective marketing channel that brings in sales and leads for them, and you can have a piece of that pie.
Brand awareness
If you are high in the search results and getting good traffic, your brand awareness will only increase. Every time someone consumes your content and learns something, or enjoys it, that’s another good impression they have of your business.
Reputation management
People Google things almost without thinking these days. If you hear of a nefarious business that has ripped people off, the first thing people do is Google it. When people hear of you, you want to be seen at the top of the pile, especially when some speak negatively about you. Reputation management is about getting your site in prominent positions when they search for your business, beating out other sites that mention you.
SEO has been vital to many businesses for over a decade and will remain so. As business competition increases globally, SEO's favourable, proven ROI ensures it will persist.
Written by John Macpherson