SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization". Simply put, SEO is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines when people search for:
- The products you sell.
- Services provided by you.
- Information about topics for which you have in-depth knowledge and/or experience.
The more visible your page is in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked on. Ultimately, the goal of SEO is to attract website visitors to become customers, customers, or an audience that keeps coming back.
1. Why is Search Engine Optimization Important?
SEO is an important marketing channel. First, organic search provides 53% of all website traffic.
This is one of the main reasons why the global SEO industry is projected 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, do research, or buy a product/service, their journey usually starts with a search.
But today, search is very fragmented. Users can search on traditional web search engines (such as Google, Microsoft Bing), social platforms (such as YouTube, TikTok), or retailer websites (such as Amazon).
In fact, 61% of U.S. online shoppers start their product search with Amazon, compared to 49% of those who start their search with a search engine like Google. The same study is also worth noting:
- 32% start with Walmart.com.
- 20% starts with YouTube.
- 19% started with Facebook.
- 15% started with Instagram.
- 11% started with TikTok.
Trillions of searches are performed each year. Search is often the main source of website traffic, which is why it is imperative to be "search engine friendly" on any platform where people can search for your brand or business.
This all means that increasing your visibility and ranking higher than your competitors in search results can have a positive impact on your bottom line.
SEO is also very important because the search engine results pages (or SERPs) are extremely competitive - full of search functionality (and PPC advertising). SERP features include:
- Knowledge board.
- Highlighted cutouts.
- Card.
- Picture.
- Video.
- Headlines (news).
- People also ask.
- Carousel.
Another reason why SEO is critical to brands and businesses: Unlike other marketing channels, good SEO work is sustainable. When the paid campaign ends, so does the traffic. Traffic from social media is unreliable at best — and now a fraction of what it used to be.
SEO is the foundation of overall marketing and everything your business does matters. Once you understand your users' needs, you can implement this knowledge in your organization:
- Activities (paid and organic).
- Website content.
- Social media attributes.
SEO is a channel that drives the traffic you need to achieve important business goals (eg conversions, visits, sales). It also inspires trust – well-ranked sites are often seen as authoritative or trustworthy, a key element that Google hopes to reward with better rankings.
2. Types of SEO
There are three types of search engine optimization:
- Technical SEO: Optimizing the technical aspects of your website.
- On-site SEO: Optimizing website content for users and search engines.
- Off-site SEO: Create brand assets (e.g. people, brand, values, vision, slogan, tagline, colors) and capture the things that ultimately drive brand awareness and recognition (i.e. demonstrate expertise, authority, and credibility and remove). ) and demand generation.
You retain 100% control over content and technical optimization. This isn't always true off-site (you don't have control over links from other sites, or if a platform you rely on ends up shutting down or undergoing major changes), but these activities are still an important part of the holy grail of SEO success.
Think of SEO like a sports team. You need a strong offense and a strong defense to win -- and you need fans (aka spectators). Think of technical optimization as a defense, content optimization as an attack, and off-site optimization as a way to attract, engage and keep a loyal following.
2.1. Technology optimization
Optimizing the technical elements of a website is the key and foundation of SEO success.
It all starts with architecture - building a website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. As Google's trend analyst Gary Illyes once said in a Reddit AMA, "Make the damn site crawlable."
You want to make it easier for search engines to find and access all the content on your pages (e.g. text, images, videos). Which technical elements are important here: URL structure, navigation, internal linking, etc.
Experience is also a key element in technical optimization. Search engines emphasize the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Elements such as core web vitality, mobile friendliness and usability, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials are important in technical SEO.
Another area of technical optimization is structured data (aka schema). Adding this code to your website can help search engines better understand your content and improve your appearance in search results.
Additionally, web hosting services, CMS (content management systems), and site security all play a role in SEO.
2.2. Content optimization
With SEO, your content needs to be optimized for two main audiences: people and search engines. This means optimizing what your audience will see (the actual content on the page) and what the search engines will see (the code).
The goal is always to publish useful, quality content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your audience's needs, data, and guidance from Google.
When optimizing your content for people, make sure to:
- Cover relevant topics in which you have experience or expertise.
- Include keywords that people use to find content.
- Be unique or original.
- Well written, free of grammatical and spelling errors.
- Is current and contains accurate information.
- Include multimedia (eg images, video).
- Be better than your SERP competitors.
- Readability - structure makes it easy for people to understand the information you share (think: subheadings, paragraph lengths, use of bold/italics, ordered/unordered lists, reading level, etc.).
For search engines, some important content elements to optimize are:
- Title tag
- Meta description
- Header tags (H1-H6)
- Image Alt Text
- Open Graph and Twitter Card Metadata
2.3. Off-site optimization
There are several activities that may not be strictly "SEO" but are still consistent with and can indirectly contribute to SEO success.
Link building (the process of acquiring links to your website) is the activity most often associated with off-page SEO. Getting varying numbers of links to your site from relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy sites can bring great benefits (e.g. rankings, traffic). Link quality trumps link quantity - lots of high quality links is our goal.
How do you get these links? There are various methods of website promotion that are consistent with SEO efforts. These include:
- Brand Building and Brand Marketing: Tips for Raising Visibility and Reputation.
- PR: A PR technique aimed at getting links provided by editors.
- Content marketing: Some popular forms include producing videos, ebooks, research, podcasts (or guest podcasts), and guest posting (or guest blogging).
- Social Media Marketing and Optimization: Capture your brand on all relevant platforms, fully optimize and share relevant content.
- Listing Management: Claim, verify and optimize information across all platforms where searchers can list and find information about your business or website (e.g. directories, review sites, wikis).
- Ratings and Comments: Receive, monitor and act on them.
When you say off-site, you're generally talking about activities that don't directly affect your ranking from a purely technical standpoint.
But again, everything your brand does matters. You want your brand to be found everywhere people search for you. So some people try to rename "search engine optimization" to something that actually means "optimizing the search experience" or "optimizing for search everywhere."
2.4. SEO professional
Search engine optimization also has some sub-genres. Each of these areas of expertise differs from "normal SEO" in its own way, often requiring additional strategies and presenting different challenges.
Five such SEO specialties are:
- Ecommerce SEO: Other SEO elements include category page optimization, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structure, product images, product reviews, schema, and more.
- Enterprise SEO: This is SEO at scale. Typically this means you're dealing with a site (or multiple sites/brands) with over 1 million pages - or it can be based on the size of the organization (typically one with millions or billions in annual revenue). Businesses also often mean delays in trying to get development teams to implement SEO changes, as well as multi-stakeholder engagement.
- International SEO: This is global SEO for international companies - SEO for multi-regional or multilingual websites - and optimization for international SEOs like Baidu or Naver.
- Local SEO: This is about optimizing your website's visibility in local organic search engine results by managing and collecting reviews and business listings, etc.
- News SEO: When it comes to news, speed is of the essence - especially getting you into the Google index and appearing in places like Google Discover, Google's Top Stories, and Google News as quickly as possible. It is necessary to understand best practices for paywalls, partial pages, message-specific structured data, etc.
3. How does search engine optimization work?
If you found this page through a Google search, you probably did a Google search for [what is SEO] or [seo].
This guide is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative site with extensive expertise and experience in SEO (we cover every SEO change, big and small, since 2006).
Originally published in 2010, our What's SEO page has received a whopping 324,203 links.
In short, these factors (and others) have helped this guide earn a solid reputation with search engines, which has helped it rank #1 for years. It accumulates signals that it is authoritative and trustworthy - and therefore worthy of ranking when someone searches for SEO.
But let's look at SEO in a broader sense. Overall, SEO does work through a combination of:
- People: The people or teams responsible for performing or ensuring strategic, tactical, and operational SEO efforts.
- Process: Actions taken to improve work efficiency.
- Technology: Platforms and tools used.
- Activity: Final product or output.
There are many other things about how SEO works. Below is an overview of key knowledge and process elements.
Six key areas combine to make SEO work:
3.1. Understand how search engines work
If you want people to find your business via search - on any platform - you need to understand the technical process behind how search engines work, and then make sure you provide all the right "signals" to influence this visibility.
For a traditional web search engine 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: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS information is used by search engines to generate the appearance of a page.
- Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages they find and add them to their databases (although there is no guarantee that every page on your site will be indexed).
- Ranking: Sophisticated algorithms look at various signals to determine whether a page is relevant and of sufficient quality to show up when a searcher types in a query.
However, optimizing for Google search is not the same as optimizing for search on other platforms like YouTube or Amazon.
Take Facebook as an example, where factors like engagement (likes, comments, shares, etc.) and connecting with people are important. Then, signals like topicality, engagement, or the author's credibility matter on Twitter.
To complicate matters further, search engines have added elements of machine learning to surface content -- making it harder to say that "this" or "that" resulted in better or worse performance.
3.2. Research
Research is an important part of SEO. Some forms of research to improve SEO performance are:
- Audience Research: Knowing your audience or market is important. Who are they (ie, their demographic and psychographic characteristics)? What are their pain points? What questions do they have that you can answer?
- Keyword research: This process helps you identify relevant and valuable search terms to incorporate into your pages - and understand the demand and competition to rank for those keywords.
- Competitive Research: What Are Your Competitors Doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What type of content are they posting?
- Brand/Business/Customer Research: What are their goals - how can SEO help them achieve them?
- Website Research: Various SEO audits can uncover opportunities and issues on a website that are preventing it from being successful in organic search. Some audits to consider: technical SEO, content, link profile, and EEAT.
- SERP Analysis: This helps you understand the search intent of a particular search query (for example, is it commercial, transactional, informational, or navigational) and create content that is more likely to rank or gain visibility.
3.3. Planning
An SEO strategy is your long-term plan of action. You need to set goals - and a plan to achieve them.
Think of your SEO strategy as a roadmap. The path you choose may change and evolve over time - but the goals should remain clear and constant.
Your SEO plan can include the following:
- Set goals (e.g. OKRs, SMARTs) and expectations (e.g. timelines/milestones).
- Definition and alignment of meaningful KPIs and metrics.
- Decide how to create and implement the project (internal, external, or hybrid).
- Coordination and communication with internal and external stakeholders.
- Tool/technology selection and implementation.
- Hire, train and build your team.
- Set a budget.
- Measure and report results.
- Documentation of policies and procedures.
3.4. Create and implement
With all the research done, it's time to put your ideas into action. this means:
- Create new content: Consult your content team on what content needs to be created.
- Suggesting or implementing changes or improvements to existing pages: This may include updating and improving content, adding internal links (including keywords/topics/entities), or identifying other opportunities for further optimization.
- Remove old, outdated, or low-quality content: types of content that rank poorly, drive converting traffic, or help you meet your SEO goals.
3.5. Monitoring and maintenance
You need to know when your website is experiencing issues or outages. Monitoring is critical.
You need to know if traffic to critical pages is dropping, if pages are slowing down, becoming unresponsive or not being indexed, if your entire site is crashing, if links are breaking, or if other potentially catastrophic issues are happening .
3.6. Performance Analysis, Evaluation and Reporting
If you don't measure SEO, you can't improve it. To make data-driven decisions about SEO, you need to use:
- Web Analytics: Set up and use tools (at least free ones like 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 a variety of tools, but you can also choose to use only select SEO tools to track performance for specific tasks. Or, if you have the resources and nothing on the market does exactly what you need, you can make your own.
After collecting data, you need to report on your progress. You can generate reports using software or manually.
A performance report should tell a story and be done over meaningful time intervals, usually with comparisons to previous reporting periods (e.g. year-over-year). This depends on the type of site (usually monthly, quarterly, or some other time interval).
4. SEO in progress
SEO never stops. Search engines, user behavior, and your competitors are all constantly changing. Websites change and shift (and break) over time. Content becomes outdated. Your processes should improve and become more efficient.
Conclusion: There is always something you can monitor, test or improve. Or, as Bruce Clay said: SEO isn't done until Google stops changing things and all your competitors are dead.
5. Frequently Asked Questions
5.1. What is the meaning of SEO in business?
SEO in business refers to the use of search engine optimization techniques and strategies to improve a business's online visibility and ranking on search engine results pages. The goal of SEO in business is to attract more qualified traffic to a business's website, improve user experience and engagement, and ultimately, increase sales and revenue.
5.2. How can SEO benefit businesses?
SEO can benefit businesses by helping them reach a larger audience, increase their online credibility and authority, and attract more qualified leads to their website. By optimizing their website for search engines, businesses can improve their visibility and attract customers who are actively searching for their products or services.
5.3. What are some common SEO strategies used in business?
Some common SEO strategies used in business include keyword research and optimization, on-page optimization, content creation and optimization, link building, local SEO, and e-commerce SEO. These strategies are designed to help businesses improve their online visibility, attract more qualified traffic to their website, and ultimately, increase their sales and revenue.
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