What is SEO?

Distinguishing SEO from SEM and PPC

SEM and PPC are terms commonly encountered in the realm of search engine marketing, including discussions on platforms like Search Engine Land and within the broader marketing community. SEM, an acronym for search engine marketing, also known as search marketing, encompasses both SEO and PPC efforts aimed at driving traffic through organic and paid search methods. In essence, search marketing involves securing visibility and traffic from search engines through a combination of organic and paid strategies. Now, let's clarify the differences between SEO and SEM. Strictly speaking, they are not distinct entities; rather, SEO constitutes one component of SEM:

• SEO involves driving organic traffic from search engines.
• SEM entails driving both organic and paid traffic from search engines.

SEM and PPC are terms commonly encountered in the realm of search engine marketing, including discussions on platforms like Search Engine Land and within the broader marketing community. SEM, an acronym for search engine marketing, also known as search marketing, encompasses both SEO and PPC efforts aimed at driving traffic through organic and paid search methods. In essence, search marketing involves securing visibility and traffic from search engines through a combination of organic and paid strategies. Now, let's clarify the differences between SEO and SEM. Strictly speaking, they are not distinct entities; rather, SEO constitutes one component of SEM:

• SEO involves driving organic traffic from search engines.
• SEM entails driving both organic and paid traffic from search engines.

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. 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 a paid campaign ends, so does the traffic. Traffic from social media traffic is at best unreliable – and a 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 then 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 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:

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:
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 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.

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, Processes, Technology, and Activities

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:

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

• Rendering

• Indexing

• Ranking

But optimizing for Google search is different from optimizing for search other platforms like YouTube or Amazon.

Researching: Research is a key part of SEO. Some forms of research that will improve SEO performance include:

• Audience research

• Keyword research

• Competitor research

• Brand/business/client research

• Website research

• SERP analysis

Planning: An SEO strategy is your long-term action plan. You need to set goals – and a plan for how you will reach them. Your SEO plan may include things such as:

• Setting goals and expectations

• Defining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics

• Deciding how projects will be created and implemented

• Coordinating and communicating with 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

Creating and Implementing: Once all the research is done, it’s time to turn ideas into action. That means:

• Creating new content

• Recommending or implementing changes or enhancements to existing pages

• Removing old, outdated or low-quality content

Monitoring and Maintaining: You need to know when something goes wrong or breaks on your website. Monitoring is critical.

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’ll need to use:

• Website analytics

• Tools and platforms

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.

Conclusion

In conclusion, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a multifaceted discipline that requires a deep understanding of search engine algorithms, user behavior, and technical aspects of website optimization. By leveraging a combination of people, processes, technology, and activities, SEO aims to improve a website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive organic traffic.

From understanding how search engines work to conducting thorough research, planning strategic initiatives, creating and implementing optimized content, monitoring website performance, and analyzing data to make informed decisions, SEO encompasses a wide range of activities. It is a continuous process that evolves alongside search engine algorithms and user preferences.

Ultimately, the goal of SEO is to enhance a website's online presence, attract relevant traffic, and achieve business objectives such as increased conversions, sales, or brand awareness. By staying informed about industry trends, adapting to algorithm changes, and employing effective SEO strategies, businesses can establish a strong digital footprint and remain competitive in today's online landscape.