SEO courseModule 1 of 10: Start HereLesson 1.1
What SEO Is, and How Google Picks Results
SEO (search engine optimisation) is making your website easy for search engines to find, read, understand and trust, so it shows up when someone near you searches for what you do.
01What it is
Picture a library with billions of books and one librarian who has to hand over the best book for every question. SEO is making sure your book is on the shelf, has a clear title, actually answers the question, and that other people say it’s a good book.
I’m Morgan King, founder of Reyse. Before Reyse I worked in an estate agency, and I was promoted to branch manager of an underperforming branch with no management experience behind me. When I looked, the branch was missing from Google and from AI search results. People in our own area couldn’t find us.
I taught myself SEO and fixed it, one problem at a time. The branch went on to become one of the busiest agencies in the area.
That's why this course is written the way it is. I've done this from the inside, as an agent with a branch to fill, not as an outsider reading about it. Everything is explained in full, with no jargon standing in for an answer and no hype standing in for proof. Where something is uncertain, I'll say so.
It’s not one search, it’s hundreds
For an agency, SEO isn't just ranking for "estate agents [town]". Every month people near you search for valuations, rentals, areas, landlord questions, tenant questions, market prices and individual properties. Property searches are local, competitive, time-sensitive, high-value and built on trust, and this course is built around exactly that.
How a search engine works, in eight steps
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Discovery | It finds your page, through links or your sitemap |
| 2. Crawling | It visits the page and reads it |
| 3. Processing | It works out the content, links and technical details |
| 4. Indexing | It decides whether to store the page in its index (its giant catalogue) |
| 5. Retrieval | Someone searches, and it pulls out the pages that might match |
| 6. Ranking | It decides which of those are best, and in what order |
| 7. Presentation | It shows them: ordinary links, the map, images, AI summaries |
| 8. Interaction | The person clicks, reads, comes back, or searches again |
Google and Bing: same job, slightly different systems
Most of what helps on Google helps on Bing too: a site they can crawl, useful pages, relevance, authority, a good experience and no tricks. Bing also feeds Microsoft's Copilot. So don't build two strategies. Build one genuinely good website, and make sure both can read it.
The four kinds of effect
- Direct (technical): decides whether a page can be crawled, indexed or understood at all.
- Indirect: works through people, such as links, reviews, your brand and enquiries.
- Competitive: no fixed score, but decides how hard it is to beat whoever already ranks.
- Business: the effect on enquiries, valuations and instructions, which is the point of all of it.
How to read the percentages
Most lessons show a priority weight, such as Backlinks 10% or Page speed 4.25%. These are our estimate of where your time pays off most. They are not Google's or Bing's numbers: neither publishes a formula, and anyone who says they know the exact weights is guessing.
- Use them to decide what to do first when time is short.
- A small number doesn't mean safe to ignore. A noindex tag on the wrong page carries a small weight and can still switch off your whole site.
- Reviews and AI search have their own Reyse courses, so they're not weighted here. That's why the lessons add up to about 96%, not 100%.
The words you’ll see
| Term | In plain English |
|---|---|
| SERP | The search engine results page: what you see after you search |
| Organic | The unpaid results, not the ads |
| Crawl | A search engine visiting and reading a page |
| Index | The search engine's catalogue of pages it can show |
| Backlink | A link to your site from someone else's |
| Anchor text | The clickable words of a link |
| Canonical URL | The "official" address when one page can be reached at several |
| Schema | Hidden labels that tell machines what information means |
| E-E-A-T | Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: how Google describes content it can trust |
| GBP | Google Business Profile, your listing on Google Maps and Search |
| NAP | Name, Address, Phone number |
| CTR | Click-through rate: how often people who see your result click it |
| Core Web Vitals | Google's measures of loading, responsiveness and stability |
| Entity | A clearly identifiable thing: your business, a person, a place |
| Search intent | The real reason behind a search |
How every lesson works
Each lesson covers one thing. It opens with three cards: why it matters, why Google cares, and the one thing to do first. Then: what it is in plain English, a live demo where one helps, why it matters to your buyers, tenants, sellers and landlords and to Google, an agency example, how to test your own site, how to fix it, and how often to check. Mark each lesson done as you finish it and your progress is saved on your device. Most of the fixes you can do yourself; where you'll need a developer, the lesson tells you exactly what to ask for.
That's lesson 1.1
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