Module 02 of 11
Get Found
Five accounts, one afternoon. By the end you will know what your own site already ranks for, what it would cost to buy the same attention, and whether Google thinks your business exists.
- Estimated time
- 120 min
- Tools used
Google Search Console
Semrush
Ahrefs
Google Ads
Google Business Profile
Learning objectives
By the end of this module you will be able to:
- Explain the difference between earned search visibility and bought search visibility, and when each is the right call.
- Read a Search Console report and name the queries that already bring people to your site.
- Look up a keyword’s search volume and difficulty, and say whether it is worth pursuing.
- Check which sites link to yours, and explain why that number matters.
- Find the estimated cost per click for a term you would actually bid on.
- Verify how your business appears in Google Search and Maps.
Lesson
There are exactly three ways a stranger arrives at your site: they searched for something and found you, someone paid to put you in front of them, or another human mentioned you. This module is the first two, plus the part of the third that search engines can see.
SEO is the long game and it is mostly not about keywords
Search engine optimisation means making your site the best available answer to a question someone is actually typing, and making it easy for a crawler to work that out. In practice that splits three ways.
- Technical — can a crawler reach every page, does it load quickly, does it work on a phone, is there one canonical URL per thing. As a developer this is the part you are already best at.
- On-page — does the page use the words a searcher would use, is the title tag honest and specific, does the heading structure describe the content rather than decorate it.
- Off-page — do other sites link to yours, and are those sites themselves credible. This is the part you cannot fix in an afternoon.
The pay-off is slow and compounding: a page that ranks keeps delivering visitors for years at no marginal cost. The catch is that you cannot switch it on next Tuesday because a client asked where the leads are.
SEM is the short game and it is entirely about money
Search engine marketing — paid search — puts you above the organic results for a term, and charges you every time someone clicks. It is instant, it is measurable to the cent, and it stops the moment you stop paying.
The decision between the two is not philosophical. Ask how urgently you need the traffic, how long the term will stay valuable, and what a click is worth to you. A term you will still want in three years, with a click worth two euros, is an SEO project. A term you need traffic on this month, with a click worth two hundred euros, is an ad.
Social discovery is a different kind of search
People also find things on social platforms, but the mechanism is not a query — it is a feed deciding what to show. That changes what works: search rewards the complete answer, feeds reward the thing worth stopping for.
The practical consequence is that content does not transfer between them unchanged. A thorough guide is a good search asset and a bad post. The same guide cut into one surprising claim with a screenshot is a good post and a thin page. Module 10 is about doing that conversion deliberately.
Tools in this module
Google Search Console
Find Out What You Already Rank For
Google Search Console is the only report where the numbers come from Google itself rather than from someone modelling Google. It shows the actual queries that put your pages in front of people, how often they were shown, how often they were clicked, and where you sat in the results.
It is free, it requires proving you own the domain, and it starts collecting from the day you verify — so the sooner you add a site, the more history you have later.
Almost everyone guesses wrong about what their site ranks for. The queries you were built to win are usually not the queries bringing people in, and the gap between the two is the most useful list of content ideas you will get for free.
Your mission
Add a site you own — raimonvibe.eu, or another project — to Search Console, verify it, then open Performance and read the query list. Sort by impressions, not clicks, so you see the terms you appear for but nobody clicks.
Open Search Console(opens in a new tab)What is one keyword in that list that surprised you — either because you never wrote for it, or because you rank far better or worse on it than you expected?
High impressions with almost no clicks usually means your title tag is not answering the question the searcher asked.
Semrush
Size Up a Keyword Before You Chase It
Semrush estimates how many people search a term each month and how hard it would be to rank for it, alongside what your competitors already rank for. Search Console tells you where you are; Semrush tells you where you could go.
The two numbers that matter are volume and difficulty. High volume with high difficulty is a term dominated by sites with budgets. Modest volume with low difficulty, on a term that describes exactly what you sell, is the one worth writing for.
Keyword difficulty is a proxy for how many well-linked pages already answer that query. It is the single number that stops you spending a fortnight on a page that was never going to reach page one.
Your mission
Open the free Keyword Overview tool and look up a term related to what you build — "static website", "Next.js developer", "web development freelance" or similar. Note the volume and the difficulty score, then look at the related terms it suggests.
Open Keyword Overview(opens in a new tab)What search volume and difficulty did your term come back with — and given those two numbers, would you actually write a page for it?
Write down the term, the volume, the difficulty, and a yes or no. The yes/no is the part you will want later.
Ahrefs
See Who Is Already Linking to You
Ahrefs is the alternative to Semrush, and it is strongest on backlinks — the links from other sites pointing at yours. Its free backlink checker will show you the top links to any domain without an account.
Backlinks matter because search engines treat them as other people vouching for you. Ten links from real, relevant sites beat a thousand from directories nobody reads, and a link from a site in your field is worth more than one from a general-purpose list.
Backlinks are the hardest part of SEO to fake and the hardest to build, which is exactly why they carry weight. Knowing your current count also tells you whether a difficulty score is realistic for you specifically.
Your mission
Run your own domain through the free backlink checker and read the referring domains. Then run one competitor — someone who ranks for the term you looked up in Semrush — and compare.
Open the backlink checker(opens in a new tab)Did you find any backlinks you did not know about? Where did they come from, and is there a pattern you could deliberately repeat?
Conference listings, GitHub profiles, client sites and directory entries are the usual surprises for developers.
Google Ads
Price the Attention You Would Have to Buy
Google Ads places paid results above the organic ones and charges per click. The part you need today is the Keyword Planner, which is free and works without ever running an ad or spending money.
It gives you an estimated cost per click for a term. That figure is the market’s own valuation of a visitor for that query — which makes it useful even if you never intend to advertise.
Cost per click is the fastest read on commercial intent. A term costing four euros a click has businesses making money from it; a term costing four cents does not, however many people search it. That tells you which SEO targets are worth the effort.
Your mission
Open Keyword Planner, choose "Discover new keywords", and enter a term related to your services. Read the estimated cost per click and the competition rating — no ad, no budget, no campaign needed.
Open Keyword Planner(opens in a new tab)What is the estimated cost per click for your term? Multiply it by the clicks you would need to win one job — is that number smaller or larger than what the job pays?
If ten clicks produce one enquiry and one in three enquiries becomes a job, you need about thirty clicks per job. Multiply.
Google Business Profile
Check Whether Google Thinks You Exist
Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts a business into Maps and into the panel beside search results: hours, location, photos, reviews, a link to your site.
It matters more than its effort suggests, because it is the one place where you control what Google shows for your own name — and for anyone nearby searching for what you do.
Local and branded searches convert far better than generic ones: the person searching your name has already decided to look you up. A missing or wrong profile loses the easiest visitors you will ever get.
Your mission
Go to Google Business Profile and either set up your business or check the profile that already exists. Then search your own business name in a private window and look at what appears beside the results.
Open Business Profile(opens in a new tab)Is your business currently showing up when you search your own name? If it is, what is wrong or missing in what Google displays?
Check the site link, the description and the category first — those are the three that are most often stale.
Quiz
True or false: good SEO work should show up in your traffic within a few days.
True or false: a hundred links from unrelated directory sites are worth more than five links from well-regarded sites in your field.
A client needs enquiries for a service they are launching in three weeks, on a term with high commercial value. What do you recommend first?
You maintain a documentation page that has ranked steadily for three years and costs nothing to keep. A term related to it has low difficulty and a four-euro cost per click. What is the strongest move?
Match each piece of content to the channel it is actually suited to.
Pick the matching item for each row.
- A 2,000-word guide answering one specific technical question
- A single surprising before-and-after screenshot
- A short thread reacting to news in your field the day it breaks
- A listing with your opening hours, location and photos
Which of these are technical SEO concerns rather than content ones?
Select every answer that applies.
Given everything you looked up today — your real queries, one keyword’s volume and difficulty, your backlink count and one cost per click — what is the single term you would commit to over the next three months, and would you chase it with SEO or buy it?
Score: 0 / 6
Recap
Before you move on, the things worth keeping:
- Search Console is the only report with Google’s own numbers, and the queries in it are almost never the ones you expected.
- Volume tells you how many people are asking; difficulty tells you whether you can realistically be the answer. You need both before committing to a term.
- Backlinks are other people vouching for you — relevance beats volume, and they are the slowest part of SEO to build.
- Cost per click is the market pricing a visitor. Use it to judge commercial intent even when you have no intention of advertising.
- The SEO-versus-ads decision comes down to urgency, how long the term stays valuable, and what a click is worth. Ads are also the cheapest way to find out which terms deserve SEO.
- A Business Profile controls what Google shows for your own name, which is the highest-converting search you have.