Editorial guide · SEO and GEO · Updated September 2026
What is SEO, explained by the people who run it daily.
SEO is the work that makes a company findable when someone searches for what it sells. This guide covers how search actually works today, across Google and the AI assistants, what each pillar demands, how long each front takes and how to hire without buying a promise.
We work in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Headquarters in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
01Overview
What is SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the work of making a website found and chosen when someone searches for what your company sells. If you want to know what is SEO in one line, this is it: the combination of engineering, content and authority that gets a page read by search engines, judged the best answer, and clicked without paying for the click.
In 2026 that definition picked up a second layer. The same question typed into Google is now also asked of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot, and the answer comes back synthesized, with sources credited. Companies that do SEO properly show up in both places, because the signals that lift a page in Google are close cousins of the signals that make a language model cite it.
This guide was written by a team that runs search every day. Netlinks has served more than 200 companies since 2017, in English, Portuguese and Spanish, with specialists who came out of Méliuz, Globo.com, Rock Content and LWSA. Everything here is what we apply on live client work, including the timelines that really happen and the parts most vendors leave out.
200+
companies served since 2017
R$ 100 M+
in sales generated for clients, in Brazilian reais
4
pillars behind every project
3
languages we plan and execute in
02Contents
What this guide covers
Fifteen blocks. If you already know the basics, jump straight to the pillar you need.
SEO is the optimization of a website and of a company's wider digital presence so that it appears in unpaid search results and in answers generated by artificial intelligence. The end goal is a steady stream of visits from people whose buying intent is already formed, earned repeatedly and without paying per click.
The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization. It was coined to describe Google, but today it covers anywhere there is a search box and an algorithm deciding what to show: YouTube, Amazon, the App Store, Reddit and the AI assistants.
It is worth separating SEO from paid media early, because the confusion is expensive:
Paid media rents attention. You pay per click or per impression, results arrive the same day and stop the day the budget stops.
SEO builds an asset. A page that starts ranking keeps bringing visits next month and next year with no cost per click. The trade is time: weeks or months before it matures.
The two work well together. Paid covers the short term while organic matures, and conversion data from ads tells you which keywords deserve a page of their own.
One last point on vocabulary. SEO is not algorithm trickery, it is relevance engineering: almost everything that works today works because it improves the experience of the person reading, not because it fools the crawler. The techniques built to fool search engines died with the last decade of algorithm updates.
04Mechanics
How search works today: Google and AI
Google runs four stages, and a failure in any one of them erases the work done in the others:
Crawling. A bot follows links and downloads pages. If the bot never arrives, nothing else matters.
Indexing. Content is interpreted and stored. Duplicate pages, wrong canonicals and content that only loads after a click routinely stay out of the index.
Ranking. For each query, indexed pages are ordered by relevance, authority, page experience and track record.
Presentation. What appears on screen has changed enormously: rich results with stars and price, People Also Ask, local packs, video, and AI Overviews, the AI generated summary that now sits at the top of most informational queries.
Conversational AI follows a similar path in a different order. The model reads the question, rewrites it into several queries, retrieves sources from the web, reads what it retrieved, synthesizes an answer and credits a few pages. Anyone asking what is SEO in 2026 should understand that the contest is now double: win the position in the list, and win the citation inside the answer.
Search behaviour changed too. Queries went from two words to full sentences carrying context, budget and constraints. That rewards companies with specific, detailed content and punishes the ones with a three paragraph services page.
05Structure
The four pillars of SEO
Every SEO project rests on four pillars. A weak pillar caps the other three, which is why an audit comes before content in nearly every diagnosis we run.
1. Technical
Crawling, indexing, URL architecture, speed, Core Web Vitals, redirects, canonicals and structured data. The foundation: without it the engine cannot read what you published.
2. Content
The answer itself. Intent mapping, service and product pages, guides, comparisons, and the depth that makes your page preferable to your competitor's.
3. Authority
Links from relevant sites, press mentions and consistent information about your brand across the web. The vote of confidence that breaks a tie between two good pages.
4. Experience
What happens after the click: a page that loads fast, works on a phone, delivers what the title promised and carries the visitor to a conversion without friction.
06Pillar 1
What is technical SEO, and why it comes first
Technical SEO is the work that guarantees a search engine can reach, read, understand and store every page that matters. It is the least visible front and the one that unblocks the most stalled results.
What we check in every audit, roughly in the order it tends to hurt:
Index coverage. How many pages exist, how many Google indexed and which ones it chose to ignore. A store with 40,000 SKUs and 6,000 indexed pages has an architecture problem, not a content problem.
Architecture and internal links. Click depth to the product, navigation, pagination, faceted filters spawning infinite URLs, and orphan categories with nothing linking to them.
Canonicals, pagination and parameters. The most common cause of silent cannibalization in ecommerce.
Speed and Core Web Vitals. LCP, INP and CLS measured on field data, not just in the lab.
Redirects. Chained 301s, internal links pointing at redirects, and old URLs returning 404 after a careless migration.
Rendering. JavaScript sites that only assemble content in the browser need extra care, because the crawler does not always wait.
Tooling supports the judgement, it does not replace it: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush and DataForSEO are part of the routine, with the Netlinks App crawler tracking what changes between cycles. The full service is at technical SEO, and the starting snapshot at SEO audit.
07Pillar 2
Content: answering better than whoever ranks first
SEO content is not about publishing more, it is about publishing the right asset for each intent. It starts with keyword mapping, which groups search demand into four intents:
Informational. The person wants to understand. Guides, tutorials, glossaries, concept comparisons. High volume, and the material AI models most often draw on.
Commercial. The person is comparing. Service pages, vendor comparisons, proof, case studies, pricing where it fits.
Transactional. The person is ready to buy. Product pages, categories, quote requests, contact.
Navigational. The person is looking for you. About, support, login.
From there, each term becomes a page with an owner and a date, inside a silo: one pillar page covers the broad topic, satellite pages cover the angles, and they all link to each other. Two of your own pages fighting for the same term wastes authority, and it is the single most common flaw in an old corporate blog.
On depth: there is no magic word count. There is covering the whole question, including the questions the reader would ask next, with verifiable data and concrete examples. That is how this guide was written.
When two pages answer a question equally well, trust breaks the tie. A link from a relevant site is still the strongest trust signal on the web, and a press mention is worth double: it produces a link, it produces branded search, and it repeats your information in an independent source, which is exactly what language models look for before they assert anything.
What actually builds authority:
Editorial links, earned because the content deserves citing. Original research, calculators, definitive guides, free-standing tools.
Digital PR, with an angle a journalist can use and a spokesperson available. That is what our authority practice executes.
Entity consistency. Name, address, phone, leadership, service area and description identical everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, press, industry directories.
A clean profile. Links bought on private blog networks, automated exchanges and unvetted directories create risk and nothing else.
Authority is the slowest pillar and the one that best protects a position once won. A site with a solid link profile survives the algorithm updates that flatten competitors who only had content. Details at link building agency.
09Technical edge
Structured data: the SEO almost nobody ships
Structured data is how you tell a machine what exists on your page: that this is a product with a price and stock, a service with a coverage area, a company with an address and opening hours, an article with an author and a date, a question with an answer.
It is the most neglected layer in the market and the one paying best right now, for two reasons. In Google it unlocks the rich results that take more screen space and earn more clicks. In AI answers it removes ambiguity: the model does not have to guess whether that number is a price, a rating or a phone number.
The types that move the needle most on a company website:
Organization and LocalBusiness, so the engine knows who you are and where you operate.
Service and Product, with coverage, availability and ratings where they exist.
Article and BreadcrumbList, for editorial content and navigation.
FAQPage, with the questions visible on the page, never hidden for the markup alone.
Netlinks marks up the entire site, validates before it ships, monitors for broken schema on every release and reviews it each cycle. The full service is at structured data.
10Scope
What is local SEO
Local SEO makes a company appear when a search carries geographic context, either because the person typed a city or because the engine used their location. It is what decides who lands in the map pack with the three highlighted businesses.
The signals that matter here are different from classic SEO:
A complete Google Business Profile, with the right primary category, hours, real photos, and products and services described.
Reviews, weighted by volume, recency and whether the owner replies.
Proximity and relevance between the searcher and your address.
Consistent name, address and phone across the web.
A city page with original content, not the same template with the city name swapped.
Multi-location businesses need one page per location, with address, team, parking, service area and local proof. The full service is at local SEO.
11Scope
International SEO: one language, one URL, one market
Companies selling abroad hit the same three problems every time: which domain structure to use, how the engine knows which version to show in each country, and who writes the content.
The rule we apply: one language, one URL. Every version gets its own address, with reciprocal hreflang between them and a self-referencing canonical. A country domain (.co.uk, .com.br) sends a stronger country signal; subfolders on a single domain (/en/, /es/) concentrate authority and cost less to maintain. Both work when executed properly.
What almost never works is translating pages word for word. Search volume, vocabulary and competition change completely between markets: the winning term in one language may not exist in another. Content for a foreign market is written from that market's keyword research, with authority built in that country's publications.
Netlinks plans and executes in three languages, with operations in Belo Horizonte, London, Santiago and Panama City. The full picture is at international SEO, and structural moves at website migration.
12Extension
GEO: SEO extended into AI answers
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the work of appearing inside AI generated answers: being the source ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Copilot cites when someone asks about your market.
The good news for anyone already investing in SEO is that the foundation is shared. Deep content, authority, structured data and speed serve both. What changes is format and measurement:
Format. The model lifts short, self-contained passages. A paragraph that answers the question directly, with a number and a source, gets cited far more often than a text that reaches the point in paragraph six.
Consensus. Before asserting anything, the model checks the claim against other sources. Being right in one place counts for little.
Measurement. There is no average position. There is citation: which models mention your brand, for which questions, and next to which competitor.
That is why we run GEO inside the same contract and the same report as SEO, never as a separate product. The full guide is at what is GEO, the service at GEO for AI search, and the tracking at AI monitoring.
13Timelines
How long SEO takes to work
Badly negotiated expectations are what kill SEO projects in month four. The table below reflects the averages we see across our portfolio, assuming an existing site with some traffic. A brand new domain with no history and no links usually adds two to three months to every row.
Workstream
First signal
Full effect
Technical fixes to indexing and speed
2 to 6 weeks
2 to 3 months
Optimizing pages that already rank
3 to 8 weeks
3 months
New long-tail page
4 to 10 weeks
3 to 4 months
Head term, high competition
3 to 4 months
6 to 12 months
Authority and digital PR
2 to 3 months
6 to 12 months
Structured data and rich results
1 to 4 weeks
2 months
AI citation (GEO)
4 to 12 weeks
4 to 6 months
A well executed migration
recovery in 4 to 8 weeks
3 months
14Decision
How to hire: agency, consultancy or in-house
All three models work. What changes is who carries execution, how much of your team's time it consumes, and what happens when the person responsible goes on holiday.
Agency
Consultancy
In-house
What you buy
Execution at volume: content, links, fixes
Technical judgement: what to do, in what order, against what target
Owned capability, available every day
Strength
Scale and publishing cadence
Calculated priority and course correction
Deep knowledge of the product and the customer
Risk
Becoming a delivery factory with no strategy
A handsome plan nobody executes
SEO always losing to whatever is urgent
Typical cost
Monthly retainer by scope
Smaller retainer, more hours from your team
Salaries, tooling and training
Choose it when
You want finished work handed to you
You have a team and need direction
Search is the primary channel and volume justifies it
How Netlinks delivers
A full team executing, you approve in the App
A senior consultant inside your project
We train and unblock the team you already have
15Pitfalls
Six mistakes that kill an SEO project
These are the failures that show up most often in the diagnoses we run, at companies of every size.
Publishing without mapping
A blog with 300 articles and no optimized commercial page. Volume without buying intent produces traffic that never converts and a cost nobody can defend.
Ignoring the technical layer
Investing in content while half the site sits outside the index. It is paying for a shop window the search engine cannot open.
Buying network links
A cheap package of links on sites with no real audience. It buys three months of illusion and leaves a profile that later has to be cleaned up.
Migrating without a plan
Replacing a site or a domain with no redirect map. The fastest and most expensive way to lose everything that was built.
Changing vendors every quarter
SEO compounds. Restarting the strategy with every new supplier resets the learning cycle and sends the site back to the starting line.
Measuring the wrong number
Celebrating a ranking nobody searches for, or traffic that never becomes a conversation. The number that matters is revenue influenced by organic.
16Vocabulary
Glossary: 20 SEO terms in one line each
The minimum needed to hold your own with any search vendor.
Term
What it means
SERP
The search results page, including every block it displays.
Crawling
The search engine bot following links and downloading pages.
Indexing
A page entering the engine's database and becoming eligible to appear.
Robots.txt
The file telling bots which paths they may crawl.
Sitemap.xml
The list of URLs you want the engine to know about.
Canonical
The tag naming the official version of duplicated content.
301 redirect
A permanent address change that carries the old page's signals.
Core Web Vitals
Experience metrics: loading, responsiveness and visual stability.
LCP
Time until the largest visible element finishes loading.
INP
How quickly the page responds to a visitor's interactions.
Search intent
What the person actually wants when they type that query.
Long tail
Specific queries with lower volume and higher conversion.
Cluster or silo
A set of pages on one topic, tied together by internal links.
Cannibalization
Two of your pages competing for the same term and splitting the strength.
Backlink
A link from another website pointing to yours.
Anchor text
The clickable text of a link, describing its destination.
Structured data
Markup that tells a machine what exists on the page.
E-E-A-T
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: Google's quality criteria.
AI Overview
The AI generated summary at the top of Google's results.
GEO
Optimization for appearing inside generative AI answers.
17The deliverable
What you receive
Finished work, approved by you in the App and shipped. Not a report that only describes the problem.
Executive diagnosis
The technical and competitive picture of the site, the opportunity calculation per topic and the order of attack, presented live to your team.
Keyword map
Terms grouped by intent and destination page, with volume, difficulty and who ranks today. It becomes the backlog for the year.
Technical fixes shipped
Indexing, speed, architecture, redirects and schema. Every request to your developers arrives specified, with the test written out.
Published content
Service pages, product pages and guides produced, reviewed by a senior specialist and approved by you before they go live.
Authority earned
Editorial links and press angles executed by the authority practice, with a record of every placement and the outlet it ran in.
Live reporting in the App
Rankings, traffic, citations across dozens of AI models, speed and the delivery queue, 24 hours a day, with no waiting for a month-end deck.
18How it works
From the audit to the page going live
The same path on every project, with an owner and a date on each step.
01
Diagnostic conversation
One meeting to understand the business, the sales cycle, the margin per product and what has already been tried. No commitment.
02
Audit and mapping
A full crawl of the site, a competitive read and a keyword map by intent. Two to three weeks.
03
Plan by impact
Every workstream gets an estimate of gain and of effort. The order comes from that crossing, with a stated timeline per line.
04
Execution with oversight
Content, pages, technical fixes, structured data and authority go into production with a specialist reviewing.
05
Approval in the App
You approve every deliverable before it ships and see the full history of what was done, when and by whom.
06
Measurement and course correction
The plan is adjusted monthly against the month's data. Every quarter the leadership team gets the executive read.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is SEO, in one sentence?
SEO is the work of making a website found and chosen in unpaid search results and in AI generated answers, so it earns qualified visits repeatedly without paying per click.
What is the difference between SEO and paid search?
Paid search delivers visits the same day and stops the day the budget stops. SEO takes weeks or months to mature and keeps producing visits afterwards with no cost per click. The two complement each other: ads cover the short term while organic matures.
How long does SEO take to show results?
Technical fixes and new long-tail pages usually move rankings within 30 to 60 days. Head terms in competitive markets are a quarterly effort, with full effect between 6 and 12 months. The estimate for each workstream comes out of the diagnosis, with volume and difficulty on the table.
Does SEO still work with AI Overviews and ChatGPT?
It does, and the job got bigger. AI Overviews and the assistants cite sources, and the sources they cite are well ranked, well structured pages with authority. What changed is that there are now two prizes: the position in the list and the citation inside the answer. See what is GEO.
Do I need a blog to do SEO?
Not always. Many B2B companies gain more from optimizing service, product and solution pages than from publishing articles. A blog earns its place when your market has real informational demand and when it feeds commercial pages through internal links.
How many words should a page have?
There is no magic number. There is covering the whole question, including the questions the reader would ask next, better than whoever ranks first today. A contact page does its job in 150 words; a category guide may need 3,000.
Can I do SEO myself, without an agency?
You can, and the basics pay: Search Console configured, titles and descriptions written for intent, decent speed, honest content and a complete Google Business Profile. The ceiling shows up in architecture, structured data, authority and competitive markets, which need paid tooling and a dedicated routine.
How much does SEO cost?
It depends on the size of the site, the competitiveness of the sector and how much of the execution sits with the vendor. Be wary of a fixed price quoted before the diagnosis: without knowing the technical state and keyword difficulty, the number is a guess. At Netlinks the diagnosis is run with no commitment and the investment is presented alongside the plan.
Will changing my website destroy my SEO?
Only when the migration is unplanned. With a 301 redirect map, preserved URLs, ported content and post-launch monitoring, the dip is small and recovery lands in 4 to 8 weeks. Without a plan, the loss can be permanent. See website migration.
How do I know whether my SEO is working?
Read four numbers together: rankings on the terms that matter, qualified organic traffic, conversions from organic, and citations of your brand in AI answers. Rankings alone mislead. In the Netlinks App all four sit on one screen, updated 24 hours a day, next to the delivery queue. See technology.
Tell us what your company sells and to whom. One of the three looks at your scenario, points out what is holding organic back today and shows where we would start.
A review of your site and your market, with no commitment
An answer from a senior specialist within 24 business hours
A direct conversation: what can be done, in what order and how deep
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