SEO Fundamentals: 5 Key Tactics to Rank in Google and AI Search

In the next 14 minutes, you're going to learn 80% of what you need to know to get results [music] from SEO. These are

the same fundamentals that I teach in our 2-hour SEO course, the same tactics that grew Ahrefs over 4 million monthly

visits from Google search alone. And before anyone says it, no, SEO is not dead. Google still sends 345

times more traffic to websites than AI chatbots. And 76% of the citations inside Google's AI overviews come from

pages already ranking in the top 10. SEO didn't die, it just became the foundation [music]

of AEO or AI SEO. So, in this video, I'll teach you the five pieces you need to know to get your pages ranked in

Google and cited by AI. And it all starts by understanding how Google search actually works.

Most people picture Google as a giant brain reading the live web. It's not. It's a library. In a nutshell, Google

sends out crawlers that hop from link to link, copy every page they find, [music] and store those copies in a massive

database or their search index. So, when you search, [music] you're searching Google's copy of the

web. And ranking algorithms decide which pages from that copy deserve the top spots. Now, Google has hundreds of

ranking signals, and nobody knows exactly how they all work. But decades of testing have made three of them

crystal clear. First are [music] backlinks. These are links from a page on one website to another. In fact,

[music] Google actually tells us that links from prominent websites is generally a good

sign that information is trustworthy. [music] Just think of links as votes. The more

votes you get from credible sources, the more Google trusts your page. Second is search intent, which is the purpose

behind a searcher's query. Think about this for a second. Google's entire job is to return the most relevant results

>> [music] >> for any given query. So, if someone searches slow cooker recipes and you try

to rank a product page selling slow cookers, it's not going to rank. And that's because when people search for

that, the search results tell us [music] that they actually want to get recipes, not a product. And third is user

satisfaction. Your page needs to resolve the searcher's query the best it possibly can as fast as it can. So, that

doesn't have anything to do with content length. >> [music]

>> In fact, the top ranking page for how to turn off iPhone 12 is only 283 words, but it perfectly resolves the query.

Now, AI search isn't just about asking a question and then finding a page that best serves it. When you ask ChatGPT or

Google's AI a question, that one prompt gets fanned out into dozens of smaller searches behind the scenes. And guess

what those searches pull from? Search indexes, the same ones you just learned about. So, every fundamental in this

video isn't just how you rank in Google, it's how you become source material for AI, too. But, knowing how the game works

doesn't tell you what to play for because if you're not ranking for things people actually search, your SEO efforts

are meaningless, which is why everything starts with keyword research. Keywords are just the words and phrases people

type into search engines, and keyword research is the process of finding the ones worth targeting. Notice how I said

worth targeting? That's because most keywords aren't, and there's a five-point checklist I use to separate

winners from time wasters. The first check is search demand. This is measured by search volume, which you can find in

any keyword research tool. My favorite is obviously Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. But, you can't just choose keywords

based on search volume alone because search volume can lie to you. Take the query kilometer to miles. It gets

searched hundreds of thousands of times per month. Sounds amazing, right? Until you see that there's only 0.17 clicks

per search. Why? Because So, one has to click anywhere to solve their query. Google already does it, which is why the

second check matters more. Traffic potential. Traffic potential is the total traffic

you get if you're ranked in the top position for your target query. And it's often bigger than search volume suggests

because pages don't rank for just one keyword. In fact, our study shows that the average top ranking page ranks for

nearly a thousand other keywords in the top 10. So, instead of trusting volume, you need to look at the SERP and check

how much traffic the current top pages actually get. That's the number you're gunning for. The third check is business

potential, and this one's simple. Score every keyword from zero to three based on how naturally you can pitch your

product in the content. For example, if you sell used golf clubs, buy used golf clubs is a three. Someone searching for

that is ready to purchase. Best golf clubs is a two because it's easy to recommend products in your store.

Whereas, what is a handicapping golf is a one. It's relevant traffic, but tough to pitch anything. And something like

Happy Gilmore review would be a zero, even though it's a fantastic movie about golf. The fourth check is search intent,

and you read intent by looking at what's already ranking. Pay attention to the content type. Like, are the top results

blog posts, videos, product pages, or category pages? Then look at content format. Are they how-tos, listicles, or

reviews? And finally, check out the content angle. Is it a piece targeted at beginners? Are they boasting about how

fresh they are, price, something else? If the SERP is full of e-commerce category pages and you've got a blog,

that's not [music] your keyword. Move on because if you can't match intent, you're not going to rank.

And the fifth check is ranking difficulty. Compare yourself to the pages that currently rank. Can you get

more [music] quality backlinks than they have? Is your website authority in the same ballpark? Is your site equally or

more topically authoritative? Do you have something better to offer than the other top ranking pages? The more yeses,

the better. Now, there's one more filter I'd add in the AI area that wasn't in the original

course. I call it the AI filter. AI overviews now show up on about 21% of all keywords,

>> [music] >> but for question queries, that jumps to nearly 58%

and when an AI overview appears, the number one ranking page loses around 35% of its clicks. So, before you commit to

a keyword, Google it and ask, "Can AI fully satisfy the searcher without a click?" If the answer is yes, that

keyword may be dead like in our kilometers to miles example, or you might just have to target it

differently. For example, there's no doubt that AI overviews are taking away clicks for queries like best [music]

weightlifting shoes, but instead of chasing the click, your goal becomes getting your actual shoe brand mentioned

inside the AI answer itself because this can lead people to take that brand and search for it in Google, YouTube,

Amazon, [music] or other social media networks. Now, to actually generate keyword ideas, start

with seed keywords. [music] These are broad terms related to your niche. You can drop them into Keywords Explorer,

open the matching terms report, and you'll have more ideas than you know what to do with.

Fortunately, you can use these filters to search for modifiers by intent. For example, you can filter for best, top,

versus, and review to find keywords with buying intent. [music] Or switch to how, what, why, and guide to find

informational topics. And when you run out of ideas, just steal your competitor's best ones. To do that, put

a competing site into Ahrefs Site Explorer, open their top pages report, and you'll see exactly which pages send

them the most search traffic. If it's working for them, it belongs on your list. But keyword research is just going

to tell you what to target. It doesn't actually go and create the page that actually [music] ranks. So, the next

piece to learn is creating search optimized content. And I want to bust a myth before we start. On-page SEO is not

about stuffing your keyword into the page a magic number of times. And it's not about hitting a word count. In fact,

our free backlink checker is around 600 words, and it pulls in hundreds of thousands of monthly search visits. What

on-page SEO is about is satisfying search intent better than anyone else on the SERP. And the fastest way to learn

what searchers want is to study the pages already winning. Just open the top three relevant ranking pages for your

keyword. Skip the outliers that don't match the dominant intent. Then look for patterns. What subtopics do they all

cover? How are their subheading structured? Who are they writing for? Then take it one level deeper with a

content gap analysis. Drop those same URLs into Ahrefs content gap tool, and you'll see the keywords those pages rank

for in common. These are the subtopics searchers expect to see on a page. Hand it to you as a checklist. From there,

the technical stuff is quick. Put your keyword in the title when it fits naturally, use a short descriptive URL

slug, add internal links from your other relevant pages, and write in short sentences, short paragraphs, with

descriptive subheadings. Now, that's the TLDR of how you write for Google. [clears throat]

But AI assistants, they read your content differently. They don't process your pages as one piece. They chop it

into chunks, and you don't control where the chunks fall. [music] So, there are three structural habits that make your

content easier for AI to parse, [music] and therefore cite. First, put the bottom line up front. Start every

section with the answer, not the backstory. Both humans and AI weigh the beginning of a passage more heavily than

the middle. Second, make every section atomic, meaning every section on its own should make sense. Because that's

exactly how AI will read it. And third, write entity-rich content. [music] So, instead of "This tool helps with SEO",

write "Ahrefs Keywords Explorer helps with SEO". Names, numbers, and specifics [music] give AI something concrete to

quote. The last thing on content, especially if you want to appear in AI search, is to keep it all fresh.

Content cited by AI is on average 25.7% fresher than what ranks in traditional search. So, your fastest wins usually

aren't new pages. They're updates to pages that [music] used to rank but slipped. But, content is only half the

job. You can write the best page on the internet and still sit on [music] page five where no one will see it. Because

remember those votes from earlier? That's right. It's time to learn how to get backlinks.

>> [music] >> And that's done through a method called link building. Link building is the

process of getting other websites to link to yours. And there are only three ways to do it. You can create links, buy

links, or earn them. Creating them yourself would be things like directories, blog comments, profile

links. These are easy, which is exactly why it barely moves the needle. Now, buying them works until it doesn't.

Because technically, it violates Google spam policies. It risks penalties, and on average, they'll run you hundreds of

dollars per link. Which leaves earning them. And this is where beginners get link building wrong because they treat

it like a number scheme. They blast a thousand templated emails >> [music]

>> and pray for the scraps. But, here's the reframe that can change everything. Link building is actually about building

relationships with relevant site owners who want to link to you because your content enhances theirs. Now, there's

three important words in there that matter. There's relationships, relevance, and value exchange.

Every good link building tactic is just a different flavor of value exchange. Guest posting, they get free content for

their audience, you get a link. Becoming a source for journalists, they get expert quotes on deadline, you get

mentioned in publications you could never pitch cold. And when you do outreach, the goal of your first email

isn't necessarily to get the link. It's to start a conversation. I'll give you a quick example. We created a post about

SEO statistics, and we noticed that the top ranking pages hadn't updated their stats in decades. So, we emailed sites

linking to the top page about a 14-year-old stat that I think it was 93% of online experiences begin with a

search engine, and we pointed them to the fresh number on our site. [music] And that campaign, it earned us 27

backlinks from outreach, and we ranked number one for SEO statistics pretty soon after. Now, here's where AI search

kind of changes everything with outreach. And honestly, it's good news. In our study of 75,000 brands, branded

web mentions had the strongest correlation with visibility in AI overviews. Stronger than backlinks,

[music] stronger than domain rating, stronger than anything else that we studied.

Which means every outreach email you send now has [music] two potential payoffs. If you get the link, you climb

the Google rankings. If you get mentioned, even without a link, and AI has one more training example [music]

connecting your brand with your topic. The unlinked mention, it used to be a consolation prize, but now it's a win.

So, now you know what to target, how to create content that ranks, and how to earn the links and mentions that push it

to the top. But, none of this matters if search [music] engines can't actually reach your pages. And that's what

technical SEO protects. For beginners, it comes down to a handful of things that quietly break sites all the time.

The big one is the no index tag. >> [music] >> It tells search engines to keep a page

out of their index. Oftentimes, developers use it on staging sites during a redesign because [music] they

don't want a duplicate version of your site indexed in Google, and for good reason. But, when it comes time to

launch, people often forget to remove it. And that one left over tag tells Google not to add your pages to their

search index, which means no search traffic. Then, there's your robots.txt file, which tells crawlers

where they can and cannot go on your site. One disallow rule can tell Google AI

bots [music] and other search engine tools not to crawl your site, which isn't good if you want them to recommend

you. Now, monitoring hundreds of potential SEO issues is impossible to do manually. The real move is to [music]

stop guessing and just run scheduled site audits. And you can do that free with Ahrefs Webmaster [music] tools.

Just verify your site and set up a weekly or monthly crawl, and you'll get a health score, a prioritized list of

issues, and instructions on how to fix each one. And that's the 80% of SEO you need to know to get real results. Now,

if you want the full playbook with every workflow step-by-step, watch our free SEO course for beginners right here on

YouTube.