What Is SEO?

The acronym SEO stands for "search engine optimisation." SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the act of making changes to your website in order to better position it when users search for:


    The acronym SEO stands for "search engine optimisation." SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the act of making changes to your website in order to better position it when users search for:

    • the things you market.
    • services that you offer.
    • Details about subjects in which you have extensive knowledge and/or experience.

    Your pages are more likely to be seen and clicked on the more visible they are in search results. The ultimate objective of search engine optimisation is to assist in attracting website visits who will convert into clients, customers, or a loyal audience.


    What distinguishes SEO from SEM and PPC?
    The phrases SEM and PPC are also frequently used in the greater search marketing community as well as here on Search Engine Land. 


    Continue reading to discover more about these two concepts and how they apply to SEO.

    SEO vs SEM

    SEM, or search marketing as it is more formally known, stands for search engine marketing. 

    Digital marketing includes search marketing. It is a catch-all phrase for the collection of SEO and PPC efforts designed to increase traffic from both organic and paid search.

    Search marketing, to put it simply, is the act of increasing exposure and traffic through search engines through both paid and unpaid initiatives.



    Then how are SEO and SEM different? Technically speaking, they are the same thing; SEO is just a portion of SEM:
    • Driving organic search engine traffic is referred to as SEO. 
    • SEM stands for generating both organic and paid search engine traffic. 
    Now, this is where things start to get a little murky. 

    Many individuals today confuse PPC (which we'll discuss in the next section) and SEM. 

    This notion appears to undermine SEO. But just like PPC, SEO is a form of marketing.

    The ideal way to approach SEO and SEM is as follows:

    Consider SEM to be a coin. One side of the coin is SEO. The opposite is PPC. 


    PPC vs. SEO
    PPC, or pay-per-click, is a form of online advertising in which advertisers are compensated each time one of their adverts is clicked.

    In essence, advertisers place bids on particular terms or phrases for which they want their advertising to show up in search engine results. The advertiser's ad will show up among the top results when a user searches for one of those terms or phrases. 

    SEO and PPC are two sides of the same coin, with SEO being the unpaid side and PPC being the paid side, if we think of search marketing in this way again. 

    Another crucial issue is that since SEO and PPC are complementing channels, it's crucial to avoid thinking of them as "SEO vs. PPC" (i.e., which is better). It's not a binary choice. 


    Why is SEO important?
    An important marketing channel is SEO. First and foremost, 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search.

    That is a significant factor in the estimated $122.11 billion worldwide SEO market by 2028. For brands, corporations, and organisations of all sizes, SEO produces tangible commercial results.

    Every time a person wants to do something, go somewhere, learn something, gather data, do research, or purchase a good or service, their journey usually starts with a search. 

    However, search is highly dispersed today. Users can conduct searches on social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok, classic web search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing, or shop websites like Amazon. 


    Types of SEO
    Three categories of SEO exist:

    1. Technical SEO involves improving a website's technical components.
    2. On-site SEO is the process of making website content more user- and search engine-friendly.
    3. Off-site SEO: Developing brand assets, such as individuals, marks, values, vision statements, catchphrases, and colours, as well as actions that will ultimately increase brand recognition and awareness (by showcasing and escalating its know-how, authority, and dependability) and demand generation.
    Both content and technical optimisations remain entirely in your hands. Off-site activities are still an important component of this SEO trinity of success, even though that isn't always the case (you can't control links from other websites or if platforms you depend on shut down or undergo significant changes). 

    Consider SEO like a team of athletes. To win, you need both a powerful offence and defence, as well as fans (sometimes referred to as an audience). Consider off-site optimisation as a strategy to attract, engage, and keep a devoted following while technical optimisation is your offence, content optimisation is your defence.

    1. Technical SEO
    A website's technical elements must be optimised if SEO is to be successful. 

    Building a website that search engines can crawl and index is the first step in the process. Google's trends analyst Gary Illyes once said in a Reddit AMA: "MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE." 

    You should make it simple for search engines to find and access all of the content (including text, images, and videos) on your pages. What technical details important in this case: URL organisation, external and internal links, and more.

    Technical optimisation also includes experience as a crucial component. The significance of pages that load quickly and offer a positive user experience is emphasised by search engines. Core web essentials, mobile usability and friendliness, HTTPS, and avoiding obtrusive


    2. On- Page Content Optimization
    Your content must be optimised for both people and search engines if you want to succeed with SEO. This implies that you must optimise both the code and the content that search engines and your audience will actually see on the page.


    Always strive to publish high-quality, helpful content. You may achieve this by using a combination of your knowledge of your audience's preferences and requirements, data, and Google's recommendations.

    When creating material that is people-friendly, you should:

    • 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/italics, ordered/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

    3. Off-Page SEO
    Even while some actions fall beyond the purview of "SEO" in the strictest sense, they can nonetheless be aligned with and indirectly aid in SEO success.

    The activity most closely connected with off-site SEO is link building, which is the practise of obtaining links to a website. Having a variety of links pointing at your website from relevant, reliable, and trustworthy websites can have a positive impact on your website's rankings and traffic. Link quantity is not as important as link quality, thus getting plenty of high-quality links is the objective.

    How did you obtain those links, too? Numerous website promotion strategies work in conjunction with SEO initiatives. These consist of:

    • 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.


    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. 

    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 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.