Satirical illustration of the March of Intellect (1829) showing mechanical figures and crowds in motion
William Heath, <em>The March of Intellect</em> (1829). Public domain, via The Public Domain Review.

SEO guide for non-technical people: how search engines work and what to do about it

By Mauricio Antúnez1 min read
SEOEntrepreneurship
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You have a business and decide to establish an online presence: a website to show your products or services. Maybe your product is digital itself, and then the website isn't just one channel: it's the main one. That's where SEO comes in.

Here's something from our own consultancy: I was going to write "most clients," but no. Every client we've had, past and present, came to us looking to improve their SEO. Not UX, not research. And the pattern behind it repeats: after being online and spending heavily on Ads, companies realize they want something sustainable long-term. With paid media, what you invest is what you get (that's the idea, anyway): no budget, no incoming clients. SEO aims for the other side: making your site visible to people searching for what you offer, without paying for each visit.

I'm not saying this works for every business. If your client is so high-profile that your sale has to be ultra-consultative, the website probably isn't the channel (and neither are Ads, for that matter). But for many people out there it does work: if you sell cars, bicycles, flowers, clothing; if you serve clients; if you offer professional services, this is for you.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the work of getting your brand to appear in the top positions of a search engine (whichever one; in Latin America it's probably Google, in China it's Baidu, because everyone wants to appear there). In numbers: globally, Google holds around 90% of searches, Bing about 5%, Yahoo 1.5%, and the rest (DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex) share what's left, according to DemandSage data. Optimizing for Google covers the vast majority, but as you'll see below, what works well for Google also works for the others. And how do you do it? Super easy... no. Unfortunately not: it's hard, honest work, as my grandfather would say. This guide is so you understand that work without needing to know how to code, and so no one can sell you magic formulas along the way. It's based on the official Google Search Central documentation, the Bing webmaster guidelines, and 13 years working in SEO at companies like Uber and Cornershop. If anything I say here sounds different from what an agency told you, check the sources at the end: they're all linked.

How a search engine works: three phases

Before the phases, something worth knowing from the start, which Google states explicitly in its documentation: it does not accept payments to crawl a site more frequently or to improve its position. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're lying.

With that said, Google describes its operation in three phases, and understanding them puts everything else in order: almost every expensive mistake I've seen (buying links, stuffing pages with keywords, hiring "magic formulas") comes from not understanding them.

1. Crawling

There is no central registry of all web pages. Google uses automated programs (crawlers, the most well-known being Googlebot) that move through the web following links: from a known page they find links to new pages, and so on. In practice, this means the main way a search engine discovers your content is through links: from other pages within your own site and from other sites.

2. Indexing

Once a page is found, Google tries to understand what it's about: it analyzes the text, headings, images with their descriptions, and stores that information in its index, a massive database. Here it also decides, if you have several pages with nearly identical content, which is the "canonical" version it will show.

Important: indexing is not guaranteed. Google doesn't index everything it crawls, and low-quality content is one of the most common reasons a page gets left out.

3. Serving results

When someone searches, the system goes through the index and returns what it considers most relevant and highest quality for that query, factoring in hundreds of signals, including the searcher's location and language. That's why your position isn't fixed: the same search shows different results in Santiago and Mexico City, and your position changes when a competitor with better content appears or when the algorithm updates. The only constant here is change.

If you want to see how one of your pages is doing in terms of SEO without depending on anyone, you can use the UXR SEO Analyzer extension I built exactly for that: it's free and runs locally in your browser.

What you can actually control (without knowing how to code)

Useful content, made for people

This is where results are most at stake, and it's the part that depends least on technical knowledge. Google is explicit: its systems are designed to reward content created to help people, not content created to manipulate rankings. Its documentation includes self-assessment questions that I consider the best free SEO tool that exists. Some of them:

  • Does your content provide original information or analysis, or does it just summarize what others say?
  • Does it show that it was written by someone who knows the topic firsthand?
  • Will someone who reads it feel they learned enough, or will they need to keep searching elsewhere?
  • Is it the kind of page you would bookmark or recommend?

Google sums this up in three questions about your content: who created it (is it signed? is something known about the author?), how it was created (if you used AI substantially, do you disclose it?) and why it was created. If the answer to "why" is "to attract search engine traffic," you're on the wrong path according to Google's own criteria.

A nuance that almost no one communicates well: you've probably heard of E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness). Google clarifies in its own documentation that E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor in itself, but rather a framework describing what its systems try to reward collectively, with special weight on topics affecting people's health or money.

Titles and descriptions

Your page title (what appears as the blue link in results) and the description accompanying it are among the few things you directly control about how you appear in a search engine. Google's recommendation is simple: unique titles per page, clear, accurately describing the content. No exaggerations: in fact, one of their self-assessment questions is whether the title avoids sensational or exaggerated expressions. (Yes, the previous version of this guide was called "The Definitive Guide." I learned.)

Links

Links serve two functions: internal links connect your content and help the crawler (and people) navigate your site; external links, when a trustworthy site links to yours, function as a recommendation. What doesn't work is buying them: acquiring unnatural links goes against search engine spam policies and can result in penalties that remove your site from results. And if your business doesn't appear in search results, for a huge portion of your potential clients it simply doesn't exist.

Where not to spend time or money

This section exists because there's an entire industry selling optimizations that Google explicitly dismisses in its documentation:

  • The keywords meta tag. Google doesn't use it. Since 2009.
  • An "ideal" content length. There's no magic word count, no minimum or maximum. Write what the topic needs.
  • Keywords in the domain. They have barely any effect on rankings. Choose the name that's best for your business.
  • Repeating keywords. Keyword stuffing (saturating text with the same word) goes against spam policies and also exhausts anyone who reads it.
  • Changing dates to appear current. If the content didn't change substantially, it doesn't help. (This rewrite, for the record, changed 90% of the text.)

And the usual red flag: anyone who guarantees you a top position in a short time, with formulas "only they know," is suspicious and best avoided. Nobody can guarantee positions (not even by doing everything right) because you're competing against other sites that are also improving and against algorithms that change. What does exist are practices to get closer over time, iterating on your specific site. SEO strategy is a tailored suit: there are general recommendations, but every business has different technology, team, industry, and differentiators.

SEO no longer ends at the results page

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When I wrote the first version of this guide, I said I didn't know anyone who used a social network to find a vendor. I was wrong, and people told me: today many people discover products and services on social media, and more and more people ask an AI assistant directly instead of searching on Google.

This doesn't invalidate SEO, but extends it. Bing's current guidelines are explicit on one point: the same practices that support crawling, indexing, and content clarity also support eligibility to appear and be cited in AI-powered experiences like Copilot. In other words, well-structured, accurate content created for people performs better across all search surfaces, traditional or generative. Bing adds something honest worth repeating: SEO doesn't guarantee rankings or traffic, and AI optimization (sometimes called GEO) doesn't guarantee that you'll be cited. These are practices to improve your chances, not promises.

In practice, the underlying work is the same: useful content, with an identifiable author, well-structured. What changes is where and how to measure whether you appear. On that topic, Paulina recently wrote about how to measure whether your site shows up in AI answers, and why a single query isn't enough to know.

After SEO comes UX

Let's say all of this works and your clients finally reach your site. That's where my part of the work ends, and that's where Paulina comes in: once inside, people need to be able to navigate, choose, and take some action: fill out a form, complete a cart, schedule a call, download something. And that doesn't happen well if the site doesn't meet certain requirements, which is exactly what UX Research studies.

SEO brings people in; UX turns that visit into something. There's little point appearing first on Google if the person who clicks can't find the price, understand the service, or complete the purchase.

Sources: read the original documentation

Everything in this guide comes from sources you can read yourself, in English and for free:

If you're interested in seeing how this applies in a real case, I wrote about building the SEO area at Cornershop: decisions, architecture, and results.

This guide doesn't cover everything: technical SEO, for example, warrants several more guides and does require development work. If you find something outdated or outright wrong, write to me: I'd rather fix it than leave it published.

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