Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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Search
engines recommend SEO efforts that benefit both the user search experience and
page’s ranking, by featuring content that fulfils user search needs. This
includes the use of relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and
headlines (H1), featuring descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of
numbers, and schema markup to specify the page's content meaning, among other
SEO best practices.
Search engines help people find what they’re
looking for online. Whether researching a product, looking for a restaurant, or
booking a vacation, search engines are a common starting point when you need
information. For business owners, they offer a valuable opportunity to direct
relevant traffic to your website.
Search
engine optimization
(SEO) is the practice of orienting your website to rank higher on a search
engine results page (SERP) so that you receive more traffic.
The aim is typically to rank on the first page of Google results for search
terms that mean the most to your target audience. So, SEO is as much about understanding
the wants and needs of your audience as it is about the technical nature of how
to configure your website.
What Is SEO –
Search Engine Optimization?
SEO stands for “search engine
optimization.” In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving your website
to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines
whenever people search for:
- Products you sell.
- Services you provide.
- Information on topics in which you have
deep expertise and/or experience.
The better visibility your pages
have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked on.
Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to help attract website
visitors who will become customers, clients or an audience that keeps coming
back.
What you’ll learn in this guide:
- How SEO differs from SEM and PPC
- Why SEO is important
- SEO types and specializations
- How SEO works
- How to learn SEO
How is SEO different from SEM and
PPC?
SEM and
PPC are two other common terms you will read about a lot here on Search Engine Land
and hear about in the larger search marketing community.
Read on to
learn more about both of these terms and how they’re related to SEO.
SEO vs. SEM
SEM stands
for search engine marketing – or, as it is more commonly known, search marketing.
Search marketing is a
type of digital marketing. It is an umbrella term for the combination of SEO
and PPC activities meant to drive traffic via organic search and paid search.
Put
simply, search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from
search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.
So how do
SEO and SEM differ? Technically they aren’t different – SEO is simply
one-half of SEM:
- SEO =
driving organic traffic from search engines.
- SEM =
driving organic and paid traffic from search engines.
Now, this
is where things get a bit confusing.
Today,
many people use SEM interchangeably with PPC (which we’ll talk about in the
next section).
SEO vs. PPC
PPC stands
for pay-per-click – a type of digital marketing where advertisers are charged
whenever one of their ads gets clicked on.
Basically,
advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases that they want their ads to
appear for in the search engine results. When a user searches for one of those
keywords or phrases, the advertiser’s ad will appear among the top
results.
So again,
if we think of search marketing as a coin, SEO and PPC are two sides of the
same coin – SEO is the unpaid side, PPC is the paid side.
Another
key point: it’s important never to think of it as “SEO vs. PPC” (i.e., which
one is better) because these are complementary channels. It’s not an either-or
question – always choose both (as long as your budget allows it).
As we
mentioned before, the terms SEM and PPC are used within the industry
interchangeably. However, that isn’t the case here on Search Engine Land.
Whenever
we mention “SEM,” it will be because we’re referring to both SEO (organic
search) and PPC (paid search).
If you’re
curious about the history behind how “SEM” came to mean “PPC” at the exclusion
of SEO, you can dig deeper into these articles:
Why is SEO important?
SEO is a
critical marketing channel. First, and foremost: organic search delivers 53% of all website
traffic.
That’s one big reason why the global SEO industry is forecast to
reach a staggering $122.11 billion by 2028. SEO drives real business results
for brands, businesses and organizations of all sizes.
Whenever
people want to go somewhere, do something, find information, research or buy a
product/service – their journey typically begins with a search.
But
today, search is incredibly fragmented. Users may search on traditional
web search engines (e.g., Google, Microsoft Bing), social platforms (e.g.,
YouTube, TikTok) or retailer websites (e.g., Amazon).
In fact,
61% of U.S. online shoppers start their product search on Amazon,
compared to 49% who start on a search engine like Google. Also of note from
that same research:
- 32% start
on Walmart.com.
- 20%
start on YouTube.
- 19%
start on Facebook.
- 15%
start on Instagram.
- 11%
start on TikTok.
Trillions of searches are conducted every year. Search is
often the primary source of traffic for websites, which makes it essential to
be “search engine friendly” on any platform where people can search for
your brand or business.
Types of SEO
There are
three types of SEO:
- Technical
SEO: Optimizing the technical aspects of a website.
- On-site
SEO: Optimizing the content on a website for users and
search engines.
- Off-site
SEO: Creating brand assets (e.g., people,
marks, values, vision, slogans, catchphrases, colors) and doing things
that will ultimately enhance brand awareness and recognition (i.e.,
demonstrating and growing its expertise, authority and trustworthiness)
and demand generation.
You
maintain 100% control over content and technical optimizations. That’s not
always true with off-site (you can’t control links from other sites or if
platforms you rely on end up shutting down or making a major change), but those
activities are still a key part of this SEO trinity of success.
Imagine
SEO as a sports team. You need both a strong offense and defense to win – and
you need fans (a.k.a., an audience). Think of technical optimization as your
defense, content optimization as your offense, and off-site optimization as
ways to attract, engage and retain a loyal fanbase.
Technical optimization:
Optimizing
the technical elements of a website is crucial and fundamental for SEO
success.
It all
starts with architecture – creating a website that can be crawled and
indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes, Google’s trends analyst, once put it
in a Reddit AMA: “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.”
You want
to make it easy for search engines to discover and access all of the content on
your pages (i.e., text, images, videos). What technical elements matter here:
URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and more.
Experience
is also a critical element of technical optimization. Search engines stress the
importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience.
Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS, and
avoiding intrusive interstitials all matter in technical SEO.
Another
area of technical optimization is structured data (a.k.a., schema). Adding this
code to your website can help search engines better understand your content and
enhance your appearance in the search results.
Plus, web
hosting services, CMS (content management system) and site security all play a
role in SEO.
Content optimization:
In SEO,
your content needs to be optimized for two primary audiences: people and search
engines. What this means is that you optimize the content your audience will
see (what’s actually on the page) as well as what search engines will see (the
code).
The goal,
always, is to publish helpful, high-quality
content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your
audience’s wants and needs, data and guidance provided by Google.
When
optimizing content for people, you should make sure it:
- Covers
relevant topics with which you have experience or expertise.
- Includes
keywords people would use to find the content.
- Is
unique or original.
- Is
well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors.
- Is up
to date, containing accurate information.
- Includes
multimedia (e.g., images, videos).
- Is
better than your SERP competitors.
- Is
readable – structured to make it easy for people to understand the
information you’re sharing (think: subheadings, paragraph length, use
bolding/italics, ordered/unordered lists, reading level, etc.).
For search
engines, some key content elements to optimize for are:
- Title
tags
- Meta
description
- Header
tags (H1-H6)
- Image
alt text
- Open
graph and Twitter Cards metadata
on-page SEO
On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO)
refers to the practice of optimizing webpages to improve a website’s search
engine rankings and earn organic traffic.
Why is on-page
SEO important
On-page SEO refers to any
practices that include optimizing content on web pages for both search engines
and users. Right off the bat, the term probably is a pretty vague phrase to
most people. I know it was to me when I first heard it. In the world of search
engine optimization, there are three main activities that can help your website
get more traffic and visibility from the search engine results pages:
1.
Try to
attract other websites to link to yours (i.e., “link
building”).
2.
Create
content (such as blog posts, webpages, videos, and infographics).
3.
Optimize
your website code, content, site structure, meta tags, and other “on-page”
elements to be “search engine friendly.”
There are several reasons
on-page SEO is important:
It increases your website’s overall SEO
efficiency.
While it’s true that link building
can help your website rise in the search engines, proper on-page SEO can help
you convert more from results pages (by
having properly crafted title tags and meta descriptions) and even help you win
those neck-in-neck battles on the first page of Google search results.
Off-site optimization:
There are
several activities that may not be “SEO” in the strictest sense, but
nonetheless can align with and help contribute indirectly to SEO success.
Link
building (the process of acquiring links to a website) is the activity most
associated with off-site SEO. There can be great benefits (e.g., rankings,
traffic) from getting a diverse number of links pointing at your website from
relevant, authoritative, trusted websites. Link quality beats link quantity –
and a large quantity of quality links is the goal.
And how do
you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that
synergize with SEO efforts. These include:
- Brand building and brand marketing: Techniques designed to boost recognition and
reputation.
- PR:
Public
relations techniques designed to earn editorially-given links.
- Content marketing: Some popular forms include creating videos,
ebooks, research studies, podcasts (or being a guest on other podcasts)
and guest posting (or guest blogging).
- Social media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand’s handle on any and all
relevant platforms, optimize it fully and share relevant content.
- Listing management: Claiming, verifying and optimizing the
information on any platforms where information about your company or
website may be listed and found by searchers (e.g., directories, review
sites, wikis).
- Ratings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to
them.
Generally,
when talking about off-site, you’re talking about activities that are not going
to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical
standpoint.
However,
again, everything your brand does matters. You want your brand to be found
anywhere people may search for you. As such, some people have tried to rebrand
“search engine optimization” to actually mean “search experience optimization”
or “search everywhere optimization.”
SEO specialties
Search
engine optimization also has a few subgenres. Each of these specialty areas is
different from “regular SEO” in its own way, generally requiring additional
tactics and presenting different challenges.
Five such SEO
specialties include:
- Ecommerce SEO: Additional SEO elements include optimizing
category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking
structures, product images, product reviews, schema and more.
- Enterprise SEO: This is SEO on a massive scale. Typically this
means dealing with a website (or multiple websites/brands) with 1 million+
pages – or it may be based on the size of the organization (typically
those making millions or billions in revenue per year). Doing enterprise
also typically means delays trying to get SEO changes implemented by the
dev team, as well as the involvement of multiple stakeholders.
- International SEO: This is global SEO for international businesses
– doing SEO for multiregional or multilingual websites – and
optimizing for international search engines such as Baidu or Naver.
- Local SEO: Here,
the goal is to optimize websites for visibility in local organic search
engine results by managing and obtaining reviews and business listings,
among others.
- News SEO: With
news, speed is of utmost importance – specifically making sure you get
into Google’s index as quickly as possible and appear in places such as
Google Discover, Google’s Top Stories and Google News. There’s a need to
understand best practices for paywalls, section pages, news-specific
structured data, and more.
How does SEO work?
If you
found this page via Google search, you likely searched Google for [what is seo]
or [seo].
This guide
is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative website with great expertise
on and experience in the topic of SEO (we’ve been covering all SEO changes, big
and small since 2006).
Originally
published in 2010, our “what is SEO” page has earned a whopping 324,203
links.
Put
simply, these factors (and others) have helped this guide earn a good
reputation with search engines, which has helped it rank in Position 1 for
years. It has accumulated signals that demonstrate it is authoritative and
trustworthy – and therefore deserves to rank when someone searches for
SEO.
But let’s
look at SEO more broadly. As a whole, SEO really works through a combination
of:
- People: The
person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic,
tactical and operational SEO work is completed.
- Processes: The actions taken to make the
work more efficient.
- Technology: The
platforms and tools used.
- Activities: The
end product, or output.
Many other
things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most
important knowledge and process elements.
Six critical areas, in combination, make SEO work:
1. Understanding how search engines work
Simply, if
you want people to find your business via search – on any platform – you need
to understand the technical processes behind how the engine works – and
then make sure you are providing all the right “signals” to influence that
visibility.
When
talking about traditional web search engines like Google, there are four
separate stages of search:
- Crawling: Search
engines use crawlers to discover pages on the web by following links and
using sitemaps.
- Rendering: Search
engines generate how the page will look using HTML, JavaScript and CSS
information.
- Indexing: Search
engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages it has discovered
and add them to a database (though there’s no guarantee every page on your
website will be indexed).
- Ranking: Complex
algorithms look at a variety of signals to determine whether a page is
relevant and of high-enough quality to show when searchers enter a query.
But
optimizing for Google search is different from optimizing for search other
platforms like YouTube or Amazon.
Let’s take
Facebook, for example, where factors such as engagement (Likes, comments,
shares, etc.) and who people are connected to matter. Then, on Twitter, signals
like recency, interactions, or the author’s credibility are important.
And
further complicating things: search engines have added machine learning
elements in order to surface content – making it even harder to say “this” or
“that” resulted in better or worse performance.
2. Researching
Research
is a key part of SEO. Some forms of research that will improve SEO performance
include:
- Audience research: It’s important to understand your
target audience or market. Who are they (i.e., their demographics and psychographics)?
What are their pain points? What questions do they have that you can
answer?
- Keyword research: This process helps you identify and
incorporate relevant and valuable search terms people use into your pages
– and understand how much demand and competition there is to rank for
these keywords.
- Competitor research: What are your competitors doing? What
are their strengths and weaknesses? What types of content are they
publishing?
- Brand/business/client research: What are their goals – and how can
SEO help them achieve those goals?
- Website research: A variety of SEO audits can uncover
opportunities and issues on a website that are preventing success in
organic search. Some audits to consider: technical SEO, content, link
profile and E-E-A-T.
- SERP analysis: This will help you understand the
search intent for a given query (e.g., is it commercial, transactional,
informational or navigational) and create content that is more likely to
earn rankings or visibility.
3. Planning
An SEO
strategy is your long-term action plan. You need to set goals – and a plan for
how you will reach them.
Think of
it your SEO strategy as a roadmap. The path you take likely will change and
evolve over time – but the destination should remain clear and unchanged.
Your SEO
plan may include things such as:
- Setting
goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and expectations (i.e., timelines/milestones).
- Defining
and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics.
- Deciding
how projects will be created and implemented (internal, external or a
mix).
- Coordinating
and communicating with internal and external stakeholders.
- Choosing
and implementing tools/technology.
- Hiring,
training and structuring a team.
- Setting
a budget.
- Measuring
and reporting on results.
- Documenting
the strategy and process.
4. Creating and implementing
Once all
the research is done, it’s time to turn ideas into action. That means:
- Creating new content: Advising your content team on what
content needs to be created.
- Recommending or implementing changes or
enhancements to existing pages: This
could include updating and improving the content, adding internal links,
incorporating keywords/topics/entities, or identifying other ways to
optimize it further.
- Removing old, outdated or low-quality
content: The types of content that aren’t ranking well,
driving converting traffic or helping you achieve your SEO goals.
5. Monitoring and maintaining
You need
to know when something goes wrong or breaks on your website. Monitoring is
critical.
You need
to know if traffic drops to a critical page, pages become slow, unresponsive or
fall out of the index, your entire website goes offline, links break, or any
other number of potential catastrophic issues.
6.
Analysing, assessing and reporting on performance
If you
don’t measure SEO, you can’t improve it. To make data-driven decisions about
SEO, you’ll need to use:
- Website analytics: Set up and
use tools (at minimum, free tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search
Console and Bing Webmaster Tools) to collect performance data.
- Tools and platforms: There are many “all-in-one” platforms (or suites)
that offer multiple tools, but you can also choose to use only select SEO
tools to track performance on specific tasks. Or, if you have the
resources and none of the tools on the market do exactly what you want,
you can make your own tools.
After
you’ve collected the data, you’ll need to report on progress. You can create
reports using software or manually.
Performance
reporting should tell a story and be done at meaningful time intervals,
typically comparing to previous report periods (e.g., year over year). This
will depend on the type of website (typically, this will be monthly, quarterly,
or some other interval).
SEO is ongoing
SEO never
ends. Search engines, user behaviour and your competitors are always changing.
Websites change and move (and break) over time. Content gets stale. Your
processes should improve and become more efficient.
Bottom
line: There’s always something you can be monitoring, testing or improving. Or,
as Bruce Clay put it: SEO will only
be done when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies.
Why SEO focuses on Google
To many
people, the term “search engine” is synonymous with Google, which has about 92% of the global search engine market. Because Google is the dominant search engine, SEO typically
revolves around what works best for Google. It’s useful to have a clear
understanding of how Google works and why.
What
Google wants
Google is designed to deliver the best search experience to its
users, or searchers. That means providing the most relevant results, as quickly
as possible.
The
2 core elements of the search experience are the search term (the user input)
and the search results (the output).
Let’s
say you search “Mailchimp guides and tutorials.” This is a clear, unambiguous
search. Google understands what you’re asking for, and it delivers a useful
page as the top organic result—Mailchimp’s own page with that title.
From
Google’s perspective, this is a very good search result and a positive user
experience, because it’s likely that the user will click the top result and be
happy with the outcome.
The
role of SEO
The goal of SEO is to raise your ranking in organic search results.
There are different practices for optimizing AdWords, shopping, and local
results.
While
it may appear that so many competing elements taking up real estate on SERPs
push the organic listings down, SEO can still be a very
powerful, lucrative effort.
Considering
that Google
processes billions of search queries daily, organic search results
are a very large slice of a very large pie. And while there is some up-front
and ongoing investment required to secure and maintain organic rankings, every
click that sends traffic to your website is completely free.
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