SEO Roadmap
Four steps, in sequence. Each one is a full guide, free and ungated, and each assumes the one before it. If you are starting from nothing, start at step one and work down.
The sequence
Most SEO reading is a pile of tactics with no stated prerequisites, which is why people learn keyword research before they can read a crawl report. These four are ordered by what each one needs you to already know. Skipping ahead is allowed; it is just slower.
Where search actually sits inside a marketing operation: the demand that exists, the channels around it, and how the parts feed each other rather than compete.
Why here: First, because SEO learned in isolation produces rankings nobody asked for. Knowing what the channel is for comes before knowing how to run it.
How search works from zero: crawling and indexing, the page types that earn signups, technical foundations, AI search, and what a realistic timeline looks like.
Why here: Second, because everything after this assumes you can read a crawl, tell a page type from a template, and recognise a result that is going to take six months.
The full research process: market research, 15+ free sources, validating that demand is real, then scoring and clustering it into something you can publish against.
Why here: Third, because research is the first step that produces a decision. Do it before the fundamentals are in place and you will target keywords the site cannot yet win.
Being written. It picks up where research stops: turning a validated keyword set into pages, and measuring whether they earned anything.
Why here: Listed here rather than left off, because the sequence has a fourth step whether or not the guide is finished, and a roadmap that hides its gaps is not a roadmap.
Once the roadmap runs out, the writing continues in the blog: traditional SEO for the mechanics, AI SEO for visibility inside AI answers. The working files behind all of it are in free SEO resources.