What Is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO, or “search engine optimization,” is the practice of enhancing your website to improve its visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and others. This involves various strategies to help your site rank higher in search results when users look for:

– The products or services you offer

– Information relevant to your business or industry

– Topics where you have specialized knowledge or expertise

By improving your site’s visibility, you increase the chances of attracting more visitors who are searching for what you provide. The ultimate aim of SEO is to drive more traffic to your website, helping you gain potential customers or clients and building a loyal audience who returns to your site. Effective SEO not only helps you get found but also ensures that your site stands out from the competition, making it easier for users to discover and engage with your content.

In this guide, you will learn:

– The differences between SEO, SEM, and PPC

– The importance of SEO

– Various types and specializations within SEO

– How SEO functions

– How to start learning SEO

How is SEO different from SEM and PPC?

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) are key concepts often mentioned on Search Engine Land and within the broader search marketing industry. This guide will delve into what these terms mean, their roles in digital marketing, and how they connect with SEO. Understanding these relationships will help clarify how SEM and PPC complement SEO efforts to drive traffic and improve online visibility.

SEO vs. SEM

SEM, or search engine marketing, refers to the broader practice of improving visibility on search engines through both SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) methods.

In simple terms, search marketing covers all activities aimed at driving traffic to your site through both paid and unpaid search results.

SEO focuses on attracting organic traffic from search engines, while SEM encompasses both organic and paid strategies to boost visibility.

There’s often confusion because SEM is sometimes used interchangeably with PPC, which may seem to overshadow SEO. However, SEO is an integral part of SEM, alongside PPC.

Think of SEM as a coin: SEO is one side, and PPC is the other. Both sides work together to enhance your overall search marketing efforts.

SEO vs. PPC

PPC, or pay-per-click, is a type of digital advertising where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.

Advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases related to their business. When users search for those terms, the ads appear in the search results. The advertiser pays for each click their ad receives.

In the context of search marketing, think of it like a coin: SEO is the unpaid side, while PPC is the paid side.

It’s important to view SEO and PPC as complementary rather than competing strategies. Ideally, you should use both if your budget permits.

The term SEM (search engine marketing) is often used to cover both SEO and PPC. However, in some discussions, SEM might be used to refer specifically to PPC. For more on this, you can explore how SEM evolved to focus on PPC and its relationship with SEO in articles like:

– How Wikipedia Turned PPC into SEM

– Does SEM = SEO + CPC Still Add Up?

Why is SEO important?

SEO is a vital marketing channel, delivering 53% of all website traffic. This significant share is one reason why the global SEO industry is expected to reach $122.11 billion by 2028. SEO helps brands, businesses, and organisations of all sizes achieve real results.

When people want to go somewhere, find information, or make a purchase, their journey usually starts with a search. However, search is now highly fragmented. Users may search on traditional engines like Google and Bing, social platforms like YouTube and TikTok, or retailer websites such as Amazon.

For example, 61% of U.S. online shoppers begin their product searches on Amazon, while 49% start on Google. Additionally:

– 32% start on Walmart.com

– 20% on YouTube

– 19% on Facebook

– 15% on Instagram

– 11% on TikTok

With trillions of searches conducted annually, it’s crucial to be visible on any platform where people search for your brand or business. Improving your search visibility and ranking higher than competitors can have a positive impact on your bottom line.

The search engine results pages (SERPs) are highly competitive, filled with various search features and PPC ads, including:

– Knowledge panels

– Featured snippets

– Maps

– Images

– Videos

– Top stories

– People Also Ask

– Carousels

SEO is essential because, unlike other marketing channels, it offers sustainable results. Once a paid campaign ends, so does the traffic, and social media traffic can be inconsistent and limited.

SEO supports a comprehensive marketing strategy, integrating with your campaigns, website content, and social media efforts. It drives the traffic needed to meet key business goals like conversions and sales, and builds trust by ensuring your website ranks well, which Google rewards with better rankings.

Types of SEO

SEO comprises three main types:

Technical SEO: Focuses on improving the technical aspects of a website to ensure it functions well and is easy for search engines to crawl.
On-site SEO: Involves optimizing the website’s content to make it relevant and useful for both users and search engines.
Off-site SEO: Includes efforts to build brand recognition and authority through activities outside your website. This might involve creating valuable brand assets and working on reputation management to boost brand awareness and trust.

You have full control over technical and on-site optimizations, but off-site activities are less controllable, such as acquiring links from other sites or dealing with changes on platforms you use. Despite this, off-site SEO remains crucial for a successful strategy.

Think of SEO like a sports team: technical SEO is your defense, on-site SEO is your offense, and off-site SEO helps attract and maintain a loyal audience.

Technical optimization

Optimizing the technical aspects of a website is essential for SEO success.

It begins with website architecture—ensuring that the site can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes from Google emphasized in a Reddit AMA: “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.”

The goal is to make it straightforward for search engines to find and access all your content, including text, images, and videos. Key technical elements include URL structure, navigation, and internal linking.

User experience is also vital for technical optimization. Search engines prioritise sites that load quickly and offer a good user experience. Important factors here include Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive pop-ups.

Structured data, or schema markup, is another aspect of technical SEO. Adding this code helps search engines understand your content better and can improve how your site appears in search results.

Additionally, web hosting, your content management system (CMS), and site security are important factors in SEO.

Content optimization

In SEO, content must be optimized for both users and search engines. This means improving what your audience sees (the content on the page) and what search engines see (the underlying code).

The main goal is to provide helpful, high-quality content. Achieve this by understanding your audience’s needs, using data, and following Google’s recommendations.

For user-focused content, ensure it:

– Covers relevant topics based on your expertise.

– Uses keywords that people are likely to search for.

– Is original and unique.

– Is well-written, with no grammatical or spelling errors.

– Provides accurate, up-to-date information.

– Includes multimedia elements like images and videos.

– Outperforms competitors in search results.

– Is structured for readability, using subheadings, bullet points, and clear formatting.

For search engines, focus on optimizing:

– Title tags

– Meta descriptions

– Header tags (H1-H6)

– Image alt text

– Open graph and Twitter Cards metadata

Off-site optimization

Some activities may not be strictly “SEO,” but they can still support SEO efforts indirectly and contribute to overall success.

Link building, which involves acquiring links from other websites, is commonly associated with off-site SEO. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to links. The goal is to gain links from relevant and authoritative sites, which can boost rankings and drive traffic.

To achieve this, consider these complementary methods:

– Brand Building and Marketing: Enhance recognition and reputation through various branding techniques.

– Public Relations (PR): Use PR to earn editorial links from reputable sources.

– Content Marketing: Create valuable content such as videos, ebooks, research studies, and podcasts. Guest posting on other blogs can also be effective.

– Social Media Marketing: Secure and optimise your brand’s profiles on relevant social platforms and share valuable content.

– Listing Management: Claim and optimise your business listings on directories, review sites, and wikis.

– Ratings and Reviews: Obtain, monitor, and respond to reviews.

While these activities don’t directly affect technical SEO, they contribute to your brand’s visibility across various search platforms. Some prefer to use terms like “search experience optimisation” or “search everywhere optimisation” to reflect the broader impact of these efforts.

SEO specialties

SEO encompasses several subgenres, each with unique requirements and challenges beyond standard SEO.

Here are five key SEO specialties:

– Ecommerce SEO: Focuses on optimizing category and product pages, internal linking, product images, reviews, schema, and faceted navigation to enhance visibility and user experience on ecommerce sites.

– Enterprise SEO: Involves SEO for large-scale websites or organizations with millions of pages or significant revenue. Challenges include coordination with multiple stakeholders and dealing with delays in implementing changes.

– International SEO: Targets global SEO for businesses with multiregional or multilingual sites, including optimization for international search engines like Baidu or Naver.

– Local SEO: Aims to improve visibility in local search results through effective management of reviews, business listings, and local content.

– News SEO: Focuses on rapidly indexing news content, appearing in Google Discover, Top Stories, and Google News. It involves understanding news-specific practices, including paywalls and structured data.

Each specialty requires tailored strategies to address its specific needs and goals.

How does SEO work?

If you landed on this page from a Google search, you likely used terms like “what is SEO” or “SEO.”

SEO broadly involves:

– People: The individuals or teams handling SEO strategy and execution.

– Processes: The methods used to make SEO work more efficient.

– Technology: The tools and platforms supporting SEO efforts.

– Activities: The specific tasks and outputs of SEO.

This overview covers the key elements of SEO, providing a broad understanding of how it functions.

Six critical areas, in combination, make SEO work:

1. Understanding How Search Engines Work

To ensure people find your business through search engines, you need to grasp the technical aspects of how these engines operate and provide the right signals to boost your visibility.

For traditional web search engines like Google, the process involves four main stages:

– Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to find pages by following links and using sitemaps.

– Rendering: They generate a view of the page using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

– Indexing: The engines analyze and store the content and metadata of the pages in a database. However, not every page may be indexed.

– Ranking: Algorithms evaluate various signals to decide if a page is relevant and high-quality enough to display in search results.

Optimizing for Google is different from optimizing for other platforms like YouTube or Amazon. For instance, on Facebook, engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares) and user connections are crucial. On Twitter, factors such as recency, interactions, and the author’s credibility matter.

Moreover, search engines now use machine learning to surface content, adding complexity to determining what influences performance.

2. Researching

Research plays a crucial role in SEO. Key research areas that can boost SEO performance include:

– Audience Research: Understand your target audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, and questions they need answers to.

– Keyword Research: Identify relevant search terms to use on your pages and assess their demand and competition levels.

– Competitor Research: Analyze your competitors’ strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and the types of content they produce.

– Brand/Business/Client Research: Determine your brand or client’s goals and see how SEO can help achieve them.

– Website Research: Conduct various SEO audits (technical, content, link profile, E-E-A-T) to find and address issues affecting your site’s performance.

– SERP Analysis: Understand the search intent behind queries (commercial, transactional, informational, or navigational) to create content that ranks well.

3. Planning

An SEO strategy serves as your long-term action plan. It involves setting clear goals and outlining how you will achieve them.

Think of your SEO strategy as a roadmap. While the route may change over time, your ultimate goal should stay consistent.

Your SEO plan might include:

– Setting goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and timelines/milestones.

– Defining KPIs and metrics to track progress.

– Deciding on project creation and implementation (whether internal, external, or a mix).

– Coordinating with internal and external stakeholders.

– Choosing and implementing tools and technology.

– Hiring, training, and structuring a team.

– Allocating budget.

– Measuring and reporting results.

– Documenting the strategy and process.

4. Creating and Implementing

After completing your research, it’s time to put your plans into action. This involves:

– Creating new content: Guiding your content team on what new content needs to be produced.

– Recommending or making changes to existing pages: This might involve updating content, adding internal links, integrating relevant keywords, or making other improvements.

– Removing outdated or low-quality content: Eliminating content that isn’t performing well, driving traffic, or helping meet SEO objectives.

5. Monitoring and Maintaining

Monitoring is essential to catch and address issues quickly. You need to be aware of problems such as:

– Traffic drops on key pages.

– Pages that become slow, unresponsive, or disappear from the index.

– The website going offline.

– Broken links or other critical issues.

6. Analyzing, Assessing, and Reporting on Performance

To improve SEO, you must measure it. Use the following to track performance:

– Website analytics: Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools to gather data.

– Tools and platforms: Choose from various SEO tools or suites, or create custom tools if needed.

After collecting data, create reports to track progress. These reports should highlight key insights and be produced at regular intervals, such as monthly or quarterly, depending on the website’s needs. Comparing current data to previous periods helps in understanding performance trends.

How to learn SEO

Now that you have a better grasp of SEO and its workings, how can you deepen your knowledge?

Staying updated with the latest SEO news, research, best practices, and developments should become a regular part of your routine, whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly. Attending one or two industry events each year is also beneficial.

Searcher behaviour and expectations are always changing, leading to frequent algorithm updates. Additionally, new technologies, like the rise of ChatGPT and the integration of generative AI in search results, are reshaping the landscape.

Here are some reliable resources and tips to help you advance as an SEO professional:

Search Engine Land’s SEO Resources

Search Engine Land has been covering SEO since 2006. Alongside news articles from our editorial team, we feature contributed content from various experts offering valuable SEO tips, tactics, trends, and analysis.

We recommend subscribing to Search Engine Land’s free email newsletter for daily updates on the latest SEO news and insights.

Our site includes several categories focusing on specific areas of SEO, which you may find useful:

– 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

Google’s SEO Resources

– Google Search Essentials: This guide covers technical requirements, spam policies, and key SEO best practices as outlined by Google.

– SEO Starter Guide: An overview of SEO basics according to Google’s guidelines.

– Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines: A document explaining how Google trains human evaluators to assess the quality of search results based on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Developing Your SEO Skills

The best way to learn SEO is through hands-on experience. Build your own websites on topics you are interested in, experiment with different tactics, and observe what works and what doesn’t.

SEO involves various skills. For a deeper understanding, explore the 13 essential SEO skills you need.

Attending search conferences can also advance your career. The Search Engine Land team organises the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) series, which includes dedicated SEO tracks with expert speakers and presentations. SMX Advanced occurs in June and SMX Next in November.

Additional ways to enhance your SEO knowledge include:

– Websites, blogs, and publications

– Books and ebooks

– Videos

– Podcasts

– Webinars

– Conferences, events, and meetups

– Online courses

– Training and certification programs

– Online groups (e.g., social media, Slack)

– Newsletters

– Following experts on social media

– Forums

Be cautious, as some sources may provide outdated or incorrect SEO information. Remember, there are no “universal” truths or secrets in SEO. Success comes from putting in the work across all SEO phases to improve visibility, clicks, traffic, authority, conversions, sales, and revenue.