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.
1. Products you sell
2. Services you provide
3. Information on topics in which you have deep expertise 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 draw website visitors who will become customers clients or an audience
that keeps coming back.
What you’ll learn in this guide:
1. How SEO differs from SEM and PPC?
2. Why SEO is important?
3. SEO types and specializations?
4. How SEO works?
5. How to learn SEO?
6. How is SEO similar 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 and SEM:
SEM
stands for search engine marketing or as it is more frequently known search marketing.
Search
marketing is type of digital marketing. It is an umbrella term for arrangement
of SEO and PPC activities meant to drive traffic by means of organic search and
paid search.
Put essentially search marketing is the process of in advance 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 spot confusing.
Today
many people use SEM inter suddenly with PPC (which we’ll talk about in the next
section).
This
idea seems to undercut SEO. However SEO is marketing just like PPC is
marketing.
Here
is the best way to think about SEO and SEM.
Imagine
SEM is a coin. SEO is one side of that coin. PPC is on the flip side.
SEO and 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 proffer on specific keywords or phrases that they want their ads to
appear for in the search engine results. When 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 and 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 inter
changeably. 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 interested about the history behind how SEM came to mean PPC at the exclusion of SEO you can break up earth deeper into these articles.
How Wikipedia Turned PPC / Paid Search into SEM?
Does SEM = SEO + CPC Still Add Up?
Why is SEO important?
SEO
is 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 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 does something find information research or buy
product or service their journey typically begins with search.
But
today search is incredibly uneven. 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 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 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 variety or business.
What
this all means is that improving your visibility and ranking higher in search
results than your competition can positively impact your bottom line
SEO is also incredibly important because the search engine results pages (or SERPs) are super competitive filled with search features (and PPC ads). SERP features include.
- Knowledge panels
- Featured snippets
- Maps
- Images
- Videos
- Top stories (news)
- People Also Ask
- Carousels
Another
reason SEO is critical for brands and businesses unlike other marketing
channels good SEO work is sustainable. When paid promotion ends so does the
traffic. Traffic from social media traffic is at best unreliable and fraction
of what it once was.
SEO is the foundation of holistic marketing where everything your company does matters. Once you understand what your users want you can implement that knowledge across your.
- Campaigns paid and organic
- Website content
- Social media properties
SEO
is a channel that drives the traffic you need to achieve key business goals
(e.g. conversions visits sales). It also builds trust a website that ranks well
is generally regarded as authoritative or trustworthy which are key elements
Google wants to reward with better rankings.
Types of SEO
There
are three types of SEO:
Technical SEO:
Optimizing
the technical aspects of website.
On site SEO:
Optimizing
the content on 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 consciousness and
recognition (i.e. representing and increasing its capability authority and responsibility)
and demand generation.
You
maintain 100% control over content and technical optimizations. That’s not
always true with offsite (you can’t control links from other sites or if
platforms you rely on end up shutting down or making major change) but those
activities are still key part of this SEO trinity of success.
Imagine
SEO as sports team. You need both 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 offsite optimization as ways to
attract engage and preserve loyal fan base.
Technical optimization
Optimizing
the technical elements of website is crucial and fundamental for SEO
success.
It
all starts with architecture creating website that can be crawled and indexed
by search engines. As Gary Illyes Google’s trends analyst once put it in reddit
ama make that damin 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 critical element of technical optimization. Search engines stress the
importance of pages that load quickly and provide good user experience. Elements
such as Core Web Vitals mobile friendliness and usability HTTPS and avoiding disturbing
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 audience 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 or italics ordered or 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
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 being paid 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:
Claim
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 capability to rank from simply 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 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 substantial scale. Typically this means dealing with a website or
multiple websites or 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 venture holders.
International SEO:
This
is global SEO for international businesses doing SEO for multi regional 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 premier 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 need to understand best
practices for pay walls section pages news specific structured data and more.
How does SEO work?
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 what is SEO? Page has earned massive 324203 links.
Put
basically these factors and others have helped this guide earn good character
with search engines which has helped it rank in Position 1 for years. It has
accumulated signals that exhibit it is respected and responsible and therefore
deserves to rank when someone searches for SEO.
But
let’s look at SEO more broadly. As whole SEO really works through combination
of.
People:
The
person or team dependable for doing or ensuring that the strategic considered
and operational SEO work is completed.
Processes:
The
actions taken to make the work more resourceful.
Technology:
The
platforms and tools used.
Activities:
The end product or output. Many other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is high level look at the most important knowledge and process elements.
How
search engines work?
Basically
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 authority 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 database though there’s no agreement every page on your website will be
indexed.
Ranking:
Complex
algorithms look at variety of signals to determine whether page is relevant and
of high enough quality to show when searchers enter 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.
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 and 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 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 given query (e.g. is it
commercial transactional informational or navigational) and create content that
is more likely to earn rankings or visibility.
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 road map. 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 opportunity (i.e. timelines or milestones)
- Defining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics
- Deciding how projects will be created and implemented internal external or mix
- Coordinating and communicating with internal and external stakeholders
- Choosing and implementing tools and technology
- Hiring training and structuring team
- Setting a budget
- Measuring and reporting on results
- Documenting the strategy and process
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.
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 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 terrible issues.
Analyzing assessing and reporting on performance
If
you don’t measure SEO you can’t improve it. To make data driven decisions about
SEO you will 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 will 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 behavior and your competitors are always changing.
Websites change and move and break over time. Content gets out of date. Your
processes should improve and become more efficient.
There
is 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.
How to understand SEO?
Now
that you understand more about what SEO is and how it works how can you learn
more?
Reading
(or if you prefer watching or listening to) the latest SEO news research best
practices and other developments should become one of your regular habits
whether it’s daily weekly or monthly. You should also invest in attending at
least one or two events per year.
The
opportunity and behavior of searchers are constantly evolving which means
algorithms are frequently changing to keep up. That in arrangement with new
breakthrough in technology looks no further than the explosive rise of ChatGPT
in late 2022 and the sudden addition of generative AI to search results in 2023.
Here
are some trusted resources and commands to help you grow as SEO professional.
Search Engine Land’s SEO resources:
Search
Engine Land has been covering SEO since 2006. In addition to news stories
written by our editorial staff Search Engine Land publishes contributed
articles from diverse group of subject matter experts featuring helpful SEO
tips tactics trends and analysis.
We
are subjective but we highly suggest you sign up to receive Search Engine
Land’s free email newsletter featuring roundup of the latest SEO news and
insights every weekday.
Search Engine Land also has multiple categories on topics dedicated to specific areas and platforms which you may find helpful:
- All SEO
- Bing SEO
- Content SEO
- Ecommerce SEO
- Enterprise SEO
- Google E-E-A-T
- Google algorithm updates
- Google Search Console
- Google search features
- Link building
- Local SEO
- News SEO
- Technical SEO
Search
Engine Land’s Guide to SEO Editor’s Note We are currently updating this guide
with the goal of having the chapters completely updated in the first quarter of
2024.
Search
Engine Land’s Guide to SEO walks you through the fundamentals of optimizing for
search so you can develop solid strategy to drive organic traffic to your
website.
Our
guide explains these factors in more depth and highlights tactical commands
from experts on search engine optimization that will help your website get more
visitors from organic search.
Part 1:
Types
of Search Engine Success Factors. These are the on and off site factors that
can affect your search rankings. We will also look at niche verticals in SEO
and harmless SEO tactics to avoid.
Part 2:
Content
and Search Engine Success Factors. Keep these elements in mind to create high quality
content that search engines and your target audiences will love.
Part 3:
Site
Architecture and Search Engine Success Factors. Let’s go behind the scenes and
look at the aspects of your site that make it easy for search engines to access
and influence user experience.
Part 4:
HTML
Code and Search Engine Success Factors. HTML tags and structured data help
organize information on your site and help search engines understand your
content.
Part 5:
Trust
Authority Expertise and Search Rankings. How your users engage with your site
as well as its reputation and authority helps search engines determine if it’s
worthy of showing to users.
Part 6:
Link
Building and Ranking in Search Engines. Why backlinks are still important and
what they tell search engines about your content.
Part 7:
Personalization
and Search Engine Rankings. These are the user specific elements such as
location and intent that can affect the results users see.
Part 8:
Toxins
and Search Engine Spam Penalties. Beware of SEO shortcuts. Getting caught using
these tactics can potentially result in manual action penalty or even get your site
delisted from the search index.
Part 9:
Emerging
Verticals in Search. Voice local image and video search represent new ways for
users to find what they’re looking for. While they each provide nuanced
opportunities for brands they are still based on the fundamental principles of
SEO.
Google SEO resources
SEO or Search Engine Optimization refers to
the practice of optimizing websites to improve their visibility and ranking on
search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves techniques like keyword
research content optimization and link building to attract organic traffic. SEO
helps businesses reach their target audience and increase online visibility.
Google Search
Essentials:
In
this guide Google discusses technical requirements spam policies and key best
practices.
SEO starter guide:
An
overview of SEO basics according to Google’s best practices.
Search quality evaluator guidelines:
This
document explains how Google instructs human raters to evaluate the quality of
its search results by examining the experience expertise authoritativeness and
trustworthiness of content and websites.
How to develop your SEO skills?
One
of the best ways to learn SEO is to experiment. Hand on experience is one of
the absolute best ways to advance your skills and deepen your SEO
knowledge.
Build
your own websites and make them about topics you are passionate about. Try out
various tactics and techniques. See what works and what doesn’t.
SEO
requires many other skills. Dig deeper into some of those in 13 essential
SEO skills you need to succeed.
Another
way to advance your career is by attending search conference. The Search Engine
Land team programs the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series which
has dedicated SEO track that dives into various aspects of SEO and features
some excellent speakers and presentations. SMX Advanced takes place in June and
SMX Next in November.
Beyond that there are several other options free and paid to learn SEO:
- Websites blogs and publications
- Books and ebooks
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Conferences events and meetups
- Courses
- Training and certification programs
- Groups (e.g. social media Slack)
- Newsletters
- Following experts on social media
- Forums
While
there are many reliable resources you or your clients will discover some
outdated or wrong SEO information at some point.
Bottom line:
There
are no universal truths or some big secret to SEO. The truth is you have to put
in the work in all the phases of SEO to grow your visibility clicks traffic
authority conversions sales and revenue
.