My vision

What is SEO? How do you get seen through optimisation?

SEO is short for search engine optimisation, or in English search engine optimization. Put simply, SEO is a long-term process of improving mainly your website so that it gains visibility and traffic, and ideally earns money, in Google, Seznam (Czech search engine), Bing and other search platforms. Doing SEO means doing marketing for a brand or a website and trying to make the most of the potential of organic traffic (the free traffic you get without pouring money into ad credits).

SEO is marketing, even though many consultants treat it more as a set of technical recommendations. And the results show it. Of course, for larger and more complex websites you often need a technically skilled SEO consultant, but this area is often only 5% of the whole agenda. Today people also search on various social networks, so there is YouTube SEO or Pinterest SEO, for example, but SEO for Google and website optimisation still dominate. Recently, local SEO has also gained importance, as has optimisation for LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini), known as GEO. The basic principles do not change much, though, and it is mainly about optimising findability. The goals of SEO are:

Appearing in search engines for relevant keywords.
Serving content to users in the best possible form.
Bringing in continuous paying organic traffic and reducing PPC costs.
Building authority and credibility through presence at user touchpoints.
Supporting and correcting both the technical and content side of the project.

What does SEO consist of?

Setting the SEO strategy

SEO has three main pillars (content SEO, technical SEO and link building). If you want to succeed, you need to put together an SEO strategy that defines development and goals within these pillars. It is important to connect the SEO strategy to the company's business and to evaluate and track the results.

Website architecture and structure

The right project architecture is the foundation stone on which to build search engine optimisation for Google, Seznam (Czech search engine) and Bing. What is the search intent of your users and which page answers it? The architecture should be linked to the keyword research and expanded over time. I always build the structure robustly so that it can be developed over the long term without obstacles.

Link building

Link building and online reputation management is a subdiscipline of SEO in which you try to improve how search engines see your project. Placing links on other websites, working with partners and working on the brand all help increase the project's authority and support the brand.

Keyword research

One of the basic SEO analyses, which can be used across online marketing channels. Having keyword research is one thing, but working with it systematically is another. Unfortunately, a common bad habit is to commission expensive keyword research and then not use it. This is the fault of SEO consultants with these practices on one side and lenient clients on the other.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is an important foundation for making a website understandable, crawlable and indexable for search engines. Technical SEO is often checked through various analyses and audits. The goal is to create a technically sound platform that serves content to search engines as well and as clearly as possible.

Competitor monitoring

Knowing what your competitors are doing, which products they are launching, what they are working on, what works for them and how they are performing. An SEO consultant can be closely involved in shaping an online business and come up with new ideas for developing product lines or ranges. And competitor monitoring will give you much more than that.

What is SEO, step by step?

If the definition in the first paragraph was not enough, let us look in more detail at what SEO is, what it consists of and what to watch out for as a client and as an SEO specialist. SEO is a fairly broad field or service on the border between marketing and IT (to put it simply).

❌ SEO is not CEO. This mistake is made mainly by people outside marketing who mix up the two words. I have personally met several people who said they had an idea and then described something closer to a CEO. Google also shows questions such as “Who is SEO?”.

❌ “SEO optimisation” is a term sometimes used by people looking for an SEO consultant. The term does not exist, and SEO specialists often use it to spot people who only pretend to understand the field. The last letter of the abbreviation SEO already stands for optimisation.

SEO is a set of practices and techniques aimed mainly at improving the ranking and usefulness of various types of content in organic search results. In my experience, the work of an SEO consultant often includes convincing the client that they need certain content at all and that SEO matters. Sometimes there is enough content, but it is poorly targeted or structured. Typically, clients in the B2B segment do not have product pages where they could generate traffic and, above all, valuable leads.

What is the price of SEO? It depends greatly on the scope and skills of the SEO consultant. I try to approach SEO more from the marketing side and cover the project broadly, with maximum focus on financial return. There are also many consultants on the market who are technical or more focused on content. So everyone defines the framework of “what SEO is and what an SEO consultant does” somewhat for themselves.

In e-commerce, on the other hand, the problem is often non-functional filtering or poor product categorisation. So-called faceted (parametric) filtering is one of the main goals of an SEO consultant for online shops, where it can increase relevant traffic and help you pull ahead of competitors. In such cases, if an online shop does not have the right filtering, it often loses as much as 70% of its potential traffic. Simply put, in both cases the right pages with competitive content are missing.

This content can include product listing pages, service description pages, videos, images, local business profiles and more. Since organic search is the main way people discover and access online content, using SEO best practice is essential to make sure the digital content you publish can be found and chosen by the public. This increases organic traffic to your website and, above all, the financial return for the client.

How do search engines work?

To understand how SEO works, you need a basic knowledge of how search engines work. Search engines use crawlers that collect information across the internet. Once you create a website, Google will very likely discover it soon. It helps if you use one of the well-known systems such as WordPress or Shoptet.

It may find it, for example, through a link from another website. Google then considers whether the page is original and valuable. If it is, Google adds it to its large database, the so-called index. Crawlers start on a known web page and then follow links from that page to other pages. This is how they go through the whole internet, watching how website structures change and how content is updated.

For example, if a page on zijuspesne.cz, which Google has already indexed and which is full of articles, contains internal links to other pages on the site, Google can crawl those pages via these links.

Links help Google understand what a page is about and how relevant it is to users. Links are one of Google’s ranking factors. Search engines in general have thousands of ranking factors that they use to compile search results for given keywords. Google’s philosophy is simple. It tries to compile the most relevant list of pages for given keywords.

Because Google succeeds at this, it has also been able to add paid positions, which are a valuable source of income for the company. SEO, however, focuses only on organic search, which you do not need to pay for (pay the search engine).

There are three main categories of SEO: on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO, which together help search engines discover, crawl, index, understand and rank your content.

This whole process has its own name and its own rules. Before a page appears in the results at all, a bot must first find it and go through it, which is called crawling (done by search engines, SEO tools and others). Where it may and may not go is determined by, among other things, the robots.txt file, and its path is made easier by a website map (sitemap) listing the important URLs to be indexed. Only a crawled page can be stored by Google in its index, that is, indexed and then displayed in the SERP.

And be careful, crawling and indexing are not the same thing. Many websites have pages that the bot sees but does not include. It does not consider them valuable enough, or they have some other shortcoming. And when the same content runs on several URLs, this creates duplicate content and Google does not know which version to show. This is where a canonical link helps, as it tells Google which page is the original.

Why is SEO important?

Every day, Google users search for billions of pieces of information and products. It is no surprise that search engines are usually one of the biggest sources of website traffic. With the rise of search engines came the idea of controlling and influencing these search results. This is how SEO was born, and it is now one of the main digital marketing channels. If you want to tap into the potential of this traffic source, you need to appear in the top search results for your target keywords.

The logic is very simple and unforgiving: the higher you rank, the more people visit your page. The number 1 organic result is roughly 12x more likely to be clicked than a page in 10th position. Hardly anyone visits results on the second page of search results.

And the top three organic results get more than 60% of all clicks for a given search term. This is where SEO comes in. Search engine optimisation plays a key role in improving rankings. Building a website and simply hoping is very short-sighted. Better rankings mean more traffic. And more traffic means new customers, more transactions and greater brand awareness.

In other words, neglecting SEO would mean neglecting one of the most important traffic channels and leaving that space entirely to your competitors.

Search intent in search engines

There are four main types of search intent, or search intent:

Navigational (Disney+ login).
Informational (when was Disney founded)
Commercial (comparison of streaming platforms).
Transactional (Disney+ subscription).

It is search intent that I look at first for every keyword, because it determines what content and what kind of page Google actually wants to show.

When you google a query, the SERP itself tells you what Google sees behind it. In some cases guides dominate, in others products, and in others an extracted answer in position zero, the so-called featured snippet. And once you know who you are addressing, the first impression in the results is what counts, meaning your title tag and the meta description below it. They will not raise your ranking on their own, but they decide whether someone clicks on you or on a competitor.

The vast majority of transactional search engine results pages (SERPs) contain two main types of results. Transactional queries are those that usually hide buying behaviour. The opposite are informational queries, for example when a user searches for the capital of Thailand. Google or Wikipedia will answer that. With transactional queries, however, companies and online shops compete on two fronts at once:

Paid and organic traffic from search engines

Paid results (PPC): You have to pay to be here, through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. At Google, this service is called Google Ads, and today it works on the basis of auctions within the system. In the past, PPC involved a lot of manual work, but today PPC specialists mostly just monitor the automated Performance Max system.
Organic results (SEO): Here you have to “earn” your position by creating the best content for the search term, having a quality product and a technically sound website, and making sure users are satisfied with your page for that term. Search engines keep getting better at putting together the best results, so the work of SEO specialists has become much more about genuinely producing the best possible results. You can no longer game the system as easily and rank a no-name website long-term for competitive queries that a bank or Alza has its eye on.

Insurance, for example, is a very competitive sector where the cost of clicks is high. Paid results carry the label “Sponsored”, whereas the first organic result, ČSOB, has no label. That is the result of SEO and a good landing page.

Google started with one paid slot above the search results. Today you may see four, and above them there is often a so-called shopping section with products. Because of this Google monetisation technique, SEO has lost a little of its importance.

However, most younger people ignore ads and click on organic results. Yes, SEO requires more time and effort. In the long run, though, it still pays off. Once you rank for your target keywords, you can reach more people and generate “passive” traffic that does not disappear the moment you stop paying. You can also have a so-called double result, with both paid campaigns and a result in the SERP. This maximises the chance that users will notice you.

Search: What people do when they want to find an answer to a question or a product or service that meets their needs.

Search engine: A website (such as Google or Seznam) where a person can carry out that search.

Search engine optimisation: What you do to get the search engine to connect that search query with your website. This way you get traffic from relevant users.

How to improve and set up SEO?

I am not very fond of either phrase in the heading. SEO is continuous work on search engine optimisation, and you will never be finished. As the project develops, the SEO consultant has to respond to challenges and new content. What are the options for working on SEO?

Expert: Hire an SEO specialist or a consultant with a broad perspective who will start improving your project.

Start learning: Anyone can understand the principles and basics of SEO, but not everyone wants to spend hours learning.

Combination: In my experience, it works best when the client and the SEO consultant are in the same boat. The client understands SEO and brings the business perspective into the collaboration.

Why should anyone operating online pay attention to SEO?

SEO works much like a long-term investment. You have to put a lot into it at the start and then keep working on it continuously. SEO should be part of the marketing strategy of every e-commerce project to a greater or lesser extent. By neglecting this channel, you lose significant traffic and make it harder for the project to grow in the future. If you have gone in the right direction, after a while SEO will become your best marketing channel. It will give you the best return on the resources you invest.

The advantage of SEO and organic search is that if you have it running well, you can stop working on SEO and traffic from search engines will keep coming in through momentum in the following periods. Some projects have given up on SEO because their first or second collaboration with a specialist brought them nothing. SEO delivers results when the work is continuous and well managed. It is not enough just to have an SEO audit done and implement a few things from it.

What other benefits does SEO bring besides cheap traffic and a great return? People search for all kinds of things loosely or directly related to your business. All of these are opportunities to connect with these people, answer their questions, solve their problems and become a trusted source of information for them.

More website traffic: When your website is optimised for search engines, it gets more traffic, which means greater brand awareness.

More customers: For your website to be optimised, it has to focus on keywords (the terms your ideal customers or visitors are searching for), which means you get more relevant traffic.

Better reputation: Higher rankings on Google instantly build your company’s credibility. If Google trusts you, people trust you too. SEO also lets you influence reviews and your brand’s reputation.

Higher return on investment: And we are back to the main point. You put money into your website and into marketing campaigns that lead back to your website. A top-performing website improves the results of these campaigns, so your investment pays off even more. Working on SEO will very likely also help you achieve better results in paid campaigns.

How SEO is measured and what determines the result

There is no point doing SEO without measurement. Traffic is nice, but on its own it means nothing until it turns into a customer. That is why I mainly track the conversion rate, meaning how many of the incoming visitors actually do what they are supposed to, whether that is placing an order or sending an enquiry. A good indicator of a website’s strength is domain authority, which is raised mainly by quality backlinks with meaningful anchor text. But above all, it has to make sense as a whole. For me personally, the most important things at the moment are Google Search Console (organic traffic from Google) and visibility in AI tools.

And thirdly, the quality and trustworthiness of content, which Google sums up under the abbreviation E-E-A-T. In a world where anyone can generate thousands of words a minute, trustworthiness is exactly what makes the difference. Measure, evaluate, adjust. That is the continuous piece of work I have been talking about all along.

Above all, though, the client must feel that working with an SEO consultant brings them something. That is why my main focus is on constantly bringing the client new ideas and suggestions, and on implementing and evaluating the most important ones.

The 3 types of SEO in more depth

As we discussed at the start, SEO consists of 3 types of activities or areas: content SEO, technical SEO and link building. This division became established very soon after SEO emerged as a discipline and still holds today. SEO consultants also often specialise more deeply in one of these types of SEO.

SEO is, of course, a complex discipline, and a specialist should have general knowledge of all types of SEO. Today, content is probably the most important part of SEO, and improving it continuously is an almost never-ending process. Here you can browse my SEO services, which cover this division by type.

1. Content SEO

The foundation of content SEO is identifying the key keywords. Most SEO consultants and clients picture keyword research here. For simpler projects, however, a simpler analysis is often enough. I know of dozens of cases where an SEO consultant sold and delivered a very extensive, and often high-quality, keyword research to a client. And then what? Then nothing.

I recommend asking SEO specialists for a strategy and a schedule instead. Above all, ask what we will do with it and what will come out of it. Detailed keyword research can suit advanced clients who know exactly what to do with it. In my experience, though, there are relatively few of them.

So the first step in search engine optimisation is to decide which keywords you are optimising for: what the client earns money on and where their presence is desirable. In some cases this is obvious; sometimes it calls for longer discussion and research.

These are the terms your ideal website visitors are likely to type into Google or other search engines, and each page on your website should target a different cluster of keywords so that the pages do not compete with each other.

Once you have identified the keywords, you should create a clear website architecture or structure that makes sense to users and also includes all the essential transactional and commercial keywords for your business.

The goal is always to publish useful, high-quality content. You can achieve this by combining an understanding of your audience’s wishes and needs, data, and the guidelines provided by Google. First and foremost you need to satisfy users, but you must not forget search engine preferences either. For this you need a copywriter who can create high-quality content for your target audience while also understanding how content SEO works. SEO copywriting is not alchemy, just one more dimension a copywriter adds to their thinking.

2. Technical SEO

Optimising and correctly setting up the technical elements of a website is essential for SEO success. We deal with technical SEO mainly at the start of a project, and it has a big impact on the overall success of the content and of the link building support.

Various SEO audits and analyses often focus primarily on the technical state of a website. Personally, I am not very fond of them, although there are people on the market who, in my view, do them well and usefully. However, I have seen more SEO deliverables where I regretted that someone had paid for them. I also offer an SEO audit and an SEO analysis, but I always try to explain to the client what they can expect. Even so, I prefer ongoing cooperation, where I see the greatest value.

Everything starts with the architecture and choosing the right system. If you build your project on Shoptet or WordPress, you need far less technical SEO. What you need instead is an SEO specialist with WordPress experience or Shoptet experience. On these systems you often have to make technical changes using plugins rather than through direct technical intervention.

These two systems are, for example, what I focus on. Other SEO consultants may have different specialisations and experience, so it is a good idea to ask them what they have worked on and on which platforms. For the client, the advantage will be that the SEO consultant will be trying things out on them.

The aim of technical SEO is for search engines to easily discover and access all the content on your website (i.e. text, images, videos). The technical elements that matter here include URL structure, navigation, internal linking, page layout and more.

User experience is another important element of technical optimisation. Search engines stress the importance of pages that load quickly and give users a good experience. In technical SEO, elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile friendliness and usability, HTTPS and avoiding intrusive elements all matter. Structured data is another area of technical optimisation. Adding this code to your website can help search engines understand your content better and improve how you appear in search results. It is a simple task that does not take much time.

In addition, web hosting, the CMS (content management system) and website security also play a role in SEO. The technical handling of categories and filtering is critically important, because category pages and pages generated by filtering are where websites get the most traffic.

3. Link building

Link building (the process of acquiring links to a website) is the activity most associated with off-site and off-page SEO. Earning a diverse set of links pointing to your website from relevant, authoritative and trustworthy websites can bring major benefits (e.g. rankings, traffic). Link quality beats link quantity, and the goal is a large number of high-quality links.

Link building keeps getting more complicated, as Google recognises certain link building patterns and penalises them. Link building is a technique that influences search results. It is a battle between the link builder and the search engines. Google tries to detect paid link building and ignore it. The link builder, on the other side, tries to build links as naturally as possible so that the project moves up in search results. So how do you get these links?

Link exchanges
Creating link magnets
Monitoring brand mentions
Working with reviews
Collaborating with partners and competitors
Collaborating with magazines
PR articles

And other, more sophisticated techniques.

SEO tools

SEO is also very much about tools. Without them, an experienced specialist can click through a website and certainly discover a lot, but execution, analyses and keyword research require tools.

Google Search Console: the absolute basics, where you can see certain aspects of your technical status and which pages and queries bring you traffic from Google.

Ahrefs: the best tool for spying on competitors, comparative website analyses and link building.

Screaming Frog: if you are working on a website structure or an audit, Screaming Frog is an indispensable helper that can crawl an entire website.

Marketing Miner: the most widely used keyword research tool in the Czech Republic.

In my view, you cannot do without these 4, but there are of course many more excellent SEO tools.

Subtypes of SEO

Search engine optimisation also has several subtypes. Each of these specialisations differs in its own way from “regular SEO”, usually requires additional tactics, presents different challenges and emphasises different skills of the SEO specialist.

SEO for e-commerce: additional SEO elements include optimising category pages, product pages, navigation, internal linking structure, product images, product reviews, schema and more. Online shops have their own specifics, and it is a big advantage to have a specialist who focuses, even exclusively, on online shops.

Enterprise SEO: this is SEO on a massive scale. It usually means a website (or several websites/brands) with more than 1 million pages, or it can be based on the size of the organisation (typically those with annual revenues in the millions or billions).

International SEO: this is global SEO for international businesses. It covers SEO for multi-regional or multilingual websites and optimisation for international search engines.

TikTok SEO : SEO for one of the largest social networks. TikTok is one of the few social networks where SEO has become established.

YouTube SEO: this discipline is fairly niche, yet it is no longer new. There is a set of recommendations and tips on how to get more views and get a YouTube channel off the ground.

Local SEO: here the aim is to optimise a website for visibility in local organic search results, including by managing and gaining reviews and business listings. It often concerns local businesses, or rather services, or conversely a large company with a network of physical branches. Local SEO is essential, for example, for restaurants or various experience-based businesses. With local SEO, the goal is not just to get users to the website; it is enough if, for example, they find a restaurant on Google, check the reviews and are directed straight to the restaurant. That is what local SEO is about.

News and blog SEO: with news, speed matters most, specifically getting into the Google index as quickly as possible and appearing in places such as Google Discover, Google Top Stories and Google News. Naming the article correctly also matters. You need to understand the best practices.

If you are interested in SEO in general or would like SEO consulting on a specific area, feel free to get in touch.

What is SEO when you work with me

When a client asks me what SEO is in practice, I describe the first weeks rather than the theory. I start by understanding your business, your margins and which products or services you want to sell more of. Only then do I look at the website, the competitors and what your customers search for.

Getting to know the business and agreeing on what a good result means for you.
Prioritising a short list of tasks with the biggest expected impact.
Implementation together with your developer, copywriter or in-house team.
Regular reviews where I show you what has changed and propose the next steps.

I do not hand over a long document and disappear. You get a plan you can act on and someone who sees it through.

Who SEO is for and when to wait

SEO makes sense for you if people already search for what you offer and you are willing to invest for months rather than weeks. It suits online shops, B2B companies with a longer sales cycle, service providers and international companies entering the Czech market.

It is less suitable if you need sales next week, if your product is so new that nobody searches for it yet, or if your website is about to be rebuilt from scratch. In the last case, I recommend involving an SEO consultant in the rebuild itself, so you do not lose the visibility you have already earned.

Common mistakes when starting with SEO

Judging success by rankings for a few favourite keywords instead of by enquiries and orders.
Changing URLs during a redesign without setting up redirects.
Publishing many similar articles that end up competing with each other.
Leaving SEO entirely to the developer or entirely to the copywriter.
Expecting results without giving your consultant access to data and to the people who make decisions.

Frequently asked questions about what SEO is

What is SEO in simple terms?

SEO means making your website the best answer to what your customers search for, so that search engines show it to them without you paying for each click. It combines content, technical work and building the reputation of your brand. I see it as a marketing channel, not a technical checklist.

Is “SEO optimization” the correct term?

Not really. SEO already stands for search engine optimization, so “SEO optimization” says optimization twice, which makes it a pleonasm. It is enough to say SEO or search engine optimisation.

How long does it take before SEO brings results?

It depends on where your website starts from, how strong your competitors are and how quickly changes get implemented. Technical fixes tend to show sooner, while content and authority take longer to build. That is why I agree milestones with you at the start and report progress on traffic and enquiries, not only on rankings.

Is SEO still worth it now that people use AI search?

Yes. AI tools such as ChatGPT or Perplexity often draw on content that is already findable and trustworthy on the web. The basics stay the same, and where it makes sense for your business, I add optimisation for AI answers, known as GEO.