SEO means "search engine optimization". Essentially, SEO refers to the process of enhancing your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever individuals search for:
- Products you offer.
- Services you provide.
- Information on subjects in which you possess profound expertise and/or experience.
The greater visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely they are to be found and clicked on. The ultimate objective of search engine optimization is to attract website visitors who will transform into customers, clients, or a consistent audience.
What you will learn in this guide:
How is SEO different from SEM and PPC?
SEM and PPC are two other common terms you will frequently encounter on Search Engine Land and in the larger search marketing community.
Read below to acquire more knowledge about both of these terms and how they are related to SEO.
SEO vs. SEM
SEM stands for search engine marketing, commonly known as search marketing.
Search marketing is a form of digital marketing. It encompasses both SEO and PPC techniques aimed at driving traffic from organic search and paid search.
Simply put, search marketing involves gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both unpaid and paid efforts.
So, how does SEO differ from SEM? Technically speaking, they are not different - SEO is merely a component of SEM:
- SEO = generating organic traffic from search engines.
- SEM = generating both organic and paid traffic from search engines.
Now, this is where things become a little confusing.
Presently, many individuals use SEM interchangeably with PPC (which will be discussed in the next section).
This notion seems to undermine SEO. Nonetheless, SEO is marketing, just like PPC is marketing.
Here's a better way to understand SEO and SEM:
Imagine SEM as a coin. SEO represents one side of that coin, while PPC is the flip side.
SEO vs. PPC
PPC denotes pay-per-click, a type of digital marketing where advertisers are charged each time their ads are clicked on.
Essentially, advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases that they want their ads to appear for in search engine results. When users search for those keywords or phrases, the advertiser's ad will be displayed among the top results.
Thus, if we consider search marketing as a coin, SEO and PPC are the two sides of the same coin: SEO represents the unpaid side, while PPC represents the paid side.
It is crucial to note that "SEO vs. PPC" is not an either-or question about which one is better, as these channels complement each other. If your budget permits, it is advisable to implement both strategies.
At Search Engine Land, "SEM" is used to refer to both SEO (organic search) and PPC (paid search).
If you are interested in the history behind how "SEM" came to represent "PPC" without including SEO, you can find more information in the following articles:
Why is SEO important?
SEO is a vital marketing channel. First and foremost, organic search accounts for 53% of all website traffic.
Considering this, the global SEO industry is projected to reach a staggering $122.11 billion by 2028. SEO generates tangible business results for brands, businesses, and organizations of all sizes.
When individuals want to go somewhere, perform an action, find information, conduct research, or make a purchase, their journey typically begins with a search.
However, today's search landscape is incredibly fragmented. Users may search on traditional web search engines, social platforms, or retailer websites such as Amazon.
In fact, 61% of U.S. online shoppers start their product search on Amazon, while 49% start on a search engine like Google. Furthermore, research shows:
- 32% begin on Walmart.com.
- 20% begin on YouTube.
- 19% begin on Facebook.
- 15% begin on Instagram.
- 11% begin on TikTok.
Trillions of searches are conducted every year. Search engines serve as the primary source of traffic for websites, making it crucial to be "search engine friendly" on any platform where users can search for your brand or business.
All of this implies that improving your visibility and ranking higher in search results compared to your competitors can have a positive impact on your bottom line.
SEO is also crucial because search engine results pages (SERPs) are highly competitive, filled with various search features and PPC ads. These SERP features include:
- Knowledge panels.
- Featured snippets.
- Maps.
- Images.
- Videos.
- Top stories (news).
- People Also Ask.
- Carousels.
Another reason why SEO is critical for brands and businesses is that unlike other marketing channels, effective SEO work is sustainable. When a paid campaign ends, so does the traffic. Social media traffic, on the other hand, is at best inconsistent and represents only a fraction of what it once was.
SEO serves as the foundation of holistic marketing, where every action your company takes carries importance. Once you understand what your users desire, you can implement that knowledge across various aspects, including campaigns, website content, and social media properties.
SEO serves as a channel that drives the necessary traffic to achieve key business goals, such as conversions, visits, sales. Additionally, it helps build trust, as a well-ranking website is generally perceived as authoritative and trustworthy, qualities that Google rewards with better rankings.
Types of SEO
SEO can be categorized into three types:
- Technical SEO: Focuses on optimizing the technical aspects of a website.
- On-site SEO: Optimizes the content on a website for both users and search engines.
- Off-site SEO: Involves creating brand assets and engaging in activities that enhance brand awareness, recognition, expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and demand generation.
Although you have complete control over content and technical optimizations, the same cannot be said for off-site activities, as you cannot control external links or unexpected platform changes. Nevertheless, off-site optimization remains a crucial part of SEO success.
Think of SEO as a sports team where a strong offense and defense are necessary to secure victories. Technical optimization serves as the defense, content optimization as the offense, and off-site optimization as a means to attract, engage, and retain an audience.
Technical optimization
Optimizing the technical elements of a website is vital for SEO success.
It all starts with the website's architecture, ensuring that it can be crawled and indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes, Google's trends analyst, once stated, "MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE."
You want to make it easy for search engines to discover and access all the content on your pages, including text, images, and videos. Key technical elements involved in this include URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and more.
Additionally, user experience plays a critical role in technical optimization. Search engines emphasize the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, usability, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials all contribute to technical SEO.
Structured data, also known as schema, is another area of technical optimization. Adding structured data code to your website assists search engines in better understanding your content and improving your appearance in search results.
Web hosting services, content management systems (CMS), and site security also play a role in SEO.
Content optimization
In SEO, content must be optimized for both users and search engines. This means optimizing the content that your audience sees on the page, as well as the code that search engines interpret.
The primary goal is to publish helpful, high-quality content. This can be achieved by understanding your audience's wants and needs, as well as leveraging data and guidance provided by Google.
When optimizing content for users, ensure that it:
- Covers relevant topics within your area of expertise.
- Includes keywords that people would use to find the content.
- Is unique or original.
- Is well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors.
- Contains accurate and up-to-date information.
- Includes multimedia elements, such as images and videos.
- Outperforms your competitors in search engine result pages.
- Is easily readable, with clear structure and formatting.
For search engines, key content elements to optimize include title tags, meta descriptions, header tags (H1-H6), image alt text, and metadata for open graph and Twitter Cards.
Off-site optimization
While not strictly SEO, certain activities indirectly contribute to SEO success.
Link building, the process of acquiring backlinks to your website, is closely associated with off-site SEO. Quality backlinks from relevant, authoritative, and trusted websites can significantly impact rankings and drive traffic.
To acquire these links, you can employ various promotional strategies that align with your SEO efforts. These strategies include brand building, public relations, content marketing, social media marketing and optimization, listing management, and managing ratings and reviews.
Generally, when discussing off-site optimization, we refer to activities that do not directly impact technical ranking aspects. However, every action your brand takes matters, as you want your brand to be discoverable wherever people may search for it. Some individuals have even rebranded "search engine optimization" to "search experience optimization" or "search everywhere optimization."
SEO specialties
SEO also encompasses several subgenres, each with its own characteristics and challenges. These specialties often require additional tactics and strategies.
Five SEO specialties include:
- Ecommerce SEO: Focuses on optimizing category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structures, product images, product reviews, and schema.
- Enterprise SEO: Deals with large-scale SEO, typically involving websites with one million+ pages or organizations generating millions or billions in annual revenue. Implementing SEO changes in an enterprise setting often involves delays and coordination with multiple stakeholders.
- International SEO: Involves performing SEO for multiregional or multilingual websites, optimizing for international search engines such as Baidu or Naver.
- Local SEO: Aims to optimize websites for visibility in local organic search results, managing and obtaining reviews and business listings.
- News SEO: Focuses on quickly getting indexed by search engines and appearing in Google Discover, Google's Top Stories, and Google News. It requires understanding best practices for news-specific structured data, paywalls, and section pages.
How does SEO work?
If you found this page via a Google search, you likely searched for "what is SEO" or "SEO".
This guide is published on Search Engine Land, a reputable website with extensive expertise and experience in SEO since 2006.
Originally published in 2010, this "what is SEO" page has accumulated a remarkable 324,203 backlinks.
Put simply, various factors have contributed to this guide's reputation with search engines, leading to its consistent ranking in Position 1. The signals it has accumulated demonstrate its authority and trustworthiness, qualifying it to appear when someone searches for SEO.
However, SEO extends beyond this guide. As a whole, SEO works through a combination of:
- People: Responsible for executing and overseeing the strategic, tactical, and operational SEO work.
- Processes: Actions taken to streamline and optimize SEO tasks.
- Technology: Platforms and tools utilized in SEO efforts.
- Activities: The tangible output produced by SEO work.
Many other factors contribute to the overall functionality of SEO. The following provides a high-level overview of key elements:
Six critical areas work together in making SEO effective:
1. Understanding how search engines work
If you want people to find your business through search on any platform, you need to comprehend the technical processes behind search engine operations. This knowledge enables you to provide the right signals to improve your visibility.
There are four distinct stages of search for traditional web search engines like Google:
- Crawling: Search engines employ crawlers to discover web pages by following links and utilizing sitemaps.
- Rendering: Search engines generate a representation of the page using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS information.
- Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of discovered pages and add them to a database, although not every page on your website may be indexed.
- Ranking: Complex algorithms assess various signals to determine the relevance and quality of a page, ensuring it appears when searchers enter a query.
Optimizing for search engines other than Google, such as Facebook or Twitter, involves understanding their respective ranking factors, such as engagement or recency.
2. Researching
Research plays a key role in SEO success. Various forms of research contribute to improved performance:
- Audience research: Understanding your target audience or market, including their demographics, psychographics, pain points, and questions you can answer.
- Keyword research: Identifying and incorporating relevant and valuable search terms into your pages, assessing demand and competition.
- Competitor research: Analyzing competitors' actions, strengths, weaknesses, and content strategies.
- Brand/business/client research: Understanding your brand's goals and how SEO can help achieve them.
- Website research: Conducting SEO audits to identify opportunities and issues hindering organic search success, such as technical, content, link profiles, and E-A-T audits.
- SERP analysis: Assessing search intent for specific queries and creating content likely to rank and gain visibility.
3. Planning
An SEO strategy serves as a long-term action plan. Setting goals, aligning expectations, defining meaningful KPIs and metrics, coordinating with stakeholders, choosing and implementing tools, budgeting, and documenting the strategy and process all contribute to a solid SEO plan.
4. Creating and implementing
After conducting research and devising a plan, it is time to bring your ideas into action. This may involve creating new content, making changes or enhancements to existing pages, and removing outdated or low-quality content that no longer serves SEO goals.
5. Monitoring and maintaining
Monitoring is crucial to ensure that potential issues or disruptions are swiftly addressed. Monitoring traffic drops, slow page speeds, broken links, or site downtime allows for timely interventions.
6. Analyzing, assessing, and reporting on performance
Data-driven decision-making is essential in SEO. Collecting performance data through website analytics tools and various platforms enables you to measure progress and report on results. Performance reporting should be done at meaningful intervals, comparing current data to previous periods. This helps identify trends, opportunities, and areas needing improvement.
SEO is ongoing
SEO does not have an endpoint. Search engines, user behavior, and competitors constantly evolve. Websites change, and content becomes stale. Your processes should continuously improve, and SEO work should be dynamic and adaptive.
Ultimately, SEO requires continuous monitoring, testing, and improvement. As Bruce Clay aptly stated, "SEO will only be done when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies."
How to learn SEO
Now that you have a better understanding of what SEO is and how it works, how can you expand your knowledge?
Reading or consuming the latest SEO news, research, best practices, and developments should become a regular habit. Investing in attending relevant events and conferences is also valuable.
Searcher expectations and behaviors constantly evolve, which leads to algorithm updates. Keeping up with these changes is crucial. Here are some trusted resources and tips to help you grow as an SEO professional:
Search Engine Land's SEO resources
Search Engine Land has been covering SEO since 2006. In addition to news stories written by the editorial staff, the website features contributed articles from SEO experts, offering tips, tactics, trends, and analysis.
Signing up for Search Engine Land's free email newsletter is highly recommended. The newsletter provides daily updates on the latest SEO news and insights.
Google's SEO resources
- Google Search Essentials: A guide discussing technical requirements, spam policies, and best practices endorsed by Google.
- SEO starter guide: An overview of SEO basics based on Google's best practices.
- Search quality evaluator guidelines: An explanation of how Google instructs human evaluators to evaluate search results' quality, emphasizing experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Developing your SEO skills
Experimentation is one of the best ways to learn SEO. Hands-on experience is invaluable in advancing skills and deepening SEO knowledge. Build your own websites, focusing on topics you are passionate about. Try out different tactics and techniques, analyze results, and learn from both successes and failures.
SEO proficiency encompasses various skills. Further explore 13 essential SEO skills you need to succeed.
Attending search conferences and events is another way to advance your career. The Search Engine Land team organizes the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series, which features a dedicated SEO track offering insights into various aspects of SEO, including presentations from industry experts. Additional options for learning SEO include:
- Websites, blogs, and publications
- Books and ebooks
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Courses
- Training and certification programs
- Online communities and social media groups
- Newsletters
- Following experts on social media
- Forums
While there are many reputable resources available, it's worth being cautious. Outdated or incorrect SEO information does exist. Remember, there is no universally applicable SEO solution or single secret to success. SEO requires consistent effort and a comprehensive approach to improve visibility, increase clicks, drive traffic, build authority, and achieve conversions, sales, and revenue.
This guide was written by Danny Goodwin, Managing Editor of Search Engine Land & SMX, with over a decade of experience in the search marketing industry. Goodwin reports breaking news, provides analysis, and offers commentary on SEO and related topics.
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