I started learning SEO more seriously while trying to figure out how websites actually get traffic and how people find them through search, while also improving their overall webpage. At first I figured it was mostly about getting a page to rank higher on Google. That's only a section of it, but it's a smaller part than I expected going in.
The first tool I really dug into was Google Search Console, mainly because it gives you real, quantifiable data rather than guesses. Clicks, impressions, CTR, average position- those are the core metrics Search Console looks at. Clicks are the number of times search actually sends traffic to your webpage. Whether or not a page was clicked, impressions represent the frequency with which it appeared in results. The percentage of viewers that clicked on it is known as the click-through rate (CTR), and the page's average position indicates its approximate ranking.
When the numbers don't add up, it becomes increasingly interesting. When a page receives a lot of impressions but few clicks, it indicates that people are viewing it but aren't being persuaded enough to click on it by the title or meta description. That gap between shown and clicked is usually where the fix needs to happen. However, it could also mean that your webpage is attracting a lot of bots; in that scenario, a solution for that could be implementing human verification into your webpage.
Search Console also shows you the search queries a page shows up for, which turned out to be more useful than I expected. I started checking whether those keywords actually appear in the headings and body copy, and whether there were related questions worth adding in. You may just look at what Google is already linking the page to rather than speculating about what people might be looking for.
Before beginning, I hadn't given it much attention, but before a page appears in search results at all, Google must crawl and index it. Google does not necessarily use content just because it is published on your website. The URL Inspection tool determines if a certain page has been indexed and crawled.. The Page Indexing report is where you find the actual problems: 404s, pages Google found but never got around to indexing, stuff like that. There's also a Test Live URL feature that shows what Googlebot can actually see on a page, which matters more than you'd think for sites built with a lot of JavaScript.
I also spent time looking at backlinks using Moz. A backlink is just a link from another site pointing to yours; it can be a free backlink or a paid website that promotes your webpage, and search engines use these as a rough signal of trust. It's not really a numbers game, though; a hundred low-quality links won't do much, and one link from a respected site can matter more than all of them combined. Moz breaks this down into a few metrics: Domain Authority (DA) for the site as a whole, Page Authority (PA) for a specific page, and Spam Score for flagging risky link profiles. What surprised me is that a site can have strong overall authority while a specific page on it is still weak. So checking the page level matters just as much as checking the site as a whole.