Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s visibility in search engine results. The goal is to increase traffic to a website by ranking it higher in search results.
What Is SEO – Search Engine Optimization?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and helps search engines understand your website’s content and connect it with users by delivering relevant, valuable results based on their search queries.
The goal of SEO is to rank on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) for the most relevant and valuable keywords to your target demographic, driving qualified traffic to your site.
SEO is considered a digital marketing practice and can be applied to any website. It helps improve a site’s visibility on search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing. Whether your site promotes products, offers services, or shares expert knowledge on a specific topic, SEO can help drive traffic and increase online visibility.
Types of SEO and specializations
Imagine SEO as a sports team. To win, you need a strong offense and defense. But you also need fans (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 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.
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.