What Is SEO – Search Engine Optimization? (2023)

Search Engine Optimization (2023)

Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the process of improving your website's visibility on search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing. This is achieved by optimizing your website's content and structure to make it more relevant to the search terms used by potential visitors.

In simple terms, SEO involves making sure that your website appears at the top of search results when people search for:

- The products you sell

- The services you provide

- Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience.

The higher your website's visibility in search results, the more likely it is that people will visit your site and become customers, clients, or an audience that keeps coming back. Ultimately, the goal of SEO is to attract the right kind of traffic to your website and turn them into loyal customers.

Explain SEO, SEM, and PPC differences

In the world of search marketing, you may come across the terms SEM and PPC quite frequently. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, and PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. Both of these terms are related to SEO, and if you want to learn more about them, keep reading.

SEO vs. SEM

SEM, or search engine marketing, is a type of digital marketing that combines both SEO and PPC activities to drive traffic through organic and paid search. Its primary goal is to gain traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.

While SEO is solely dedicated to driving organic traffic, SEM includes both organic and paid traffic from search engines. However, many people use SEM interchangeably with PPC, which is incorrect. Both SEO and PPC are marketing strategies that can be used to achieve different business goals.

To put it simply, SEM is a coin, and SEO and PPC are its two sides. While SEO is a vital component of SEM, it is important to understand that both SEO and PPC can be used in conjunction to achieve better marketing results.

SEO vs. PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a digital marketing strategy where advertisers pay for each click their ads receive. Advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases they want their ads to appear for in search engine results. When users search for those keywords or phrases, the advertiser's ad will appear among the top results.

SEO and PPC are two sides of the same coin in search marketing. SEO is the unpaid side, while PPC is the paid side. However, it's important to note that they are complementary channels, and it's not an either-or question. It's recommended to choose both if your budget allows it.

SEM and PPC are often used interchangeably within the industry, but not at The SEO Company. Whenever we use the term "SEM," we're referring to both SEO (organic search) and PPC (paid search). If you're interested in learning more about how "SEM" came to mean "PPC" in the industry, you can find more information in articles.

Why is SEO crucial?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial marketing channel that can help businesses of all sizes drive real business results. Organic search is responsible for delivering 53% of all website traffic, which makes it the primary source of traffic for most websites. As a result, the global SEO industry is projected to reach a staggering $122.11 billion by 2028.

When people want to find information, research or buy a product/service, their journey typically begins with a search. However, the search is now incredibly fragmented, as 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). For instance, 61% of U.S. online shoppers start their product search on Amazon, while 49% start on a search engine like Google.

As a result, it's essential to be "search engine friendly" on any platform where people can search for your brand or business, as trillions of searches are conducted every year. Improving your visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can positively impact your bottom line.

The search engine results pages (or SERPs) are super competitive and filled with search features (and PPC ads). SERP features include knowledge panels, featured snippets, maps, images, videos, top stories (news), people also ask, and carousels. Therefore, it's critical to have a good SEO strategy in place to improve your visibility and attract more traffic to your website.

One of the best things about SEO is that good SEO work is sustainable. Unlike other marketing channels, when a paid campaign ends, so does the traffic. Social media traffic is also unreliable and a fraction of what it once was. With SEO, you can build a solid foundation for your marketing efforts that will continue to drive traffic to your website for months and even years to come.

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, and social media properties. By doing so, you can drive the traffic you need to achieve key business goals (e.g., conversions, visits, sales) and build trust. A website that ranks well is generally regarded as authoritative or trustworthy, which are key elements that Google rewards with better rankings.

Types of Search Engine Optimization (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 such as logos, values, and vision to enhance brand recognition and demand generation by demonstrating expertise and trustworthiness.

It is important to note that you have complete control over the content and technical optimizations of your website. However, this may not be the case with off-site optimizations, as you cannot control links from other websites or changes made by the platforms you depend on. Nevertheless, off-site optimizations are still an integral part of the SEO process.

You can think of SEO as a sports team that requires both a strong offence and defence to win, as well as loyal fans. Technical optimization is akin to the defence, while content optimization is the offence. Off-site optimization is what helps you attract, engage, and retain a loyal audience or fanbase.

Technical Optimization

Optimizing the technical aspects of a website is essential for achieving success in search engine optimization (SEO). The first step is to create a website architecture that is easily crawled and indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes, Google's trends analyst once said, "MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE." This means making it simple for search engines to find and access all the content on your pages, including text, images, and videos. The key technical elements that matter in this regard include URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and more.

User experience is another crucial factor in technical optimization. Search engines emphasize the significance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Technical aspects 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 this code to your website can help search engines better understand your content and enhance your appearance in search results. Additionally, web hosting services, CMS (content management system), and site security all play a role in SEO success.

Content optimization

When it comes to SEO, your content should be optimized for two main audiences: people and search engines. This means that you need to optimize the content for your audience (what's actually on the page) and for what search engines will see (the code).

The primary goal is to publish high-quality and helpful content. You can achieve this by understanding your audience's needs, using data and guidance provided by Google.

When optimizing content for people, you should ensure that it:

- Covers relevant topics that you have experience or expertise in.

- Includes keywords that 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 and contains accurate information.

- Includes multimedia, such as images and videos.

- Is better than your SERP competitors.

- Is readable and structured to make it easy for people to understand the information you're sharing. This includes subheadings, paragraph length, 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

Off-site optimization

Some activities may not fall under the strict definition of SEO, but can still indirectly contribute to its success. The process of acquiring links to a website, also known as link building, is one such activity that is closely associated with off-site SEO. Good link-building practices can result in several benefits such as higher rankings and increased traffic. However, it's important to note that link quality is more important than link quantity. The goal should be to get a large quantity of quality links from relevant, trusted and authoritative websites.

So, how do you go about acquiring these links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that work well in synergy with your SEO efforts. These methods 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: There are various popular forms of content creation, such as videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts (including guest appearances) and guest blogging.
Social media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand’s handle on any relevant platforms, optimize it fully and share relevant content.
Listing management: It's important to claim, verify, and optimize your business information on various platforms where it can be found by searchers such as directories, review sites, and wikis.
Ratings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to them.

In general, when referring to off-site activities, one is usually talking about actions that do not directly influence one's ability to rank from a purely technical perspective. However, it is important to bear in mind that everything a brand does is significant. One's brand needs to be discoverable wherever people may search for them. For this reason, some people have attempted to redefine "search engine optimization" to mean "search experience optimization" or "search everywhere optimization".

SEO specialities

There are various subgenres of search engine optimization requiring additional tactics and presenting different challenges.

In the world of SEO, different specialities require different approaches. Here are some of those specialities and what they entail:

- E-commerce SEO: This involves optimizing category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structures, product images, product reviews, schema, and more for online stores.

- Enterprise SEO: This is SEO on a massive scale. It's typically done for websites with 1 million+ pages or for organizations that generate millions or billions in revenue per year. Dealing with multiple stakeholders and the development team can cause delays in implementing SEO changes.

- International SEO: This involves optimizing for multilingual or multiregional websites and search engines such as Baidu or Naver.

- Local SEO: The goal is to optimize a website for visibility in local organic search results. This is achieved by managing and obtaining reviews, creating business listings, and more.

- News SEO: With news, speed is of utmost importance, as you need to get into Google's index as quickly as possible. Best practices for paywalls, section pages, and news-specific structured data must be taken into account.

Can you explain how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works?

You probably landed on this page by searching for "what is SEO" or simply "SEO" on Google. This guide is published on The SEO Company website, an authoritative source with great expertise and experience in the field of SEO. We've been keeping track of all SEO changes, major and minor, since 2006. This "What is SEO" guide was originally published in 2010 and has managed to earn an impressive total of 324,203 backlinks. All these factors, among others, have contributed to this guide's good reputation with search engines, which has allowed it to rank in the number one position for years. The guide has accumulated signals that demonstrate its authority and trustworthiness, making it well-deserving of a high ranking when someone searches for SEO. So, let's take a broader look at SEO. As a whole, SEO works by utilizing a combination of factors.

People: The person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic, tactical and operational SEO work is completed.
Processes: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.
Technology: The platforms and tools used.
Activities: The end product, or output.

SEO is a complex process that involves multiple factors. However, six critical areas contribute to SEO success:

1. Understanding how search engines work

If you want more people to find your business through online platforms, you must understand how search engines work and provide the right signals to improve your visibility. In the case of traditional web search engines like Google, there are four stages of search that you need to be aware of.

Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to discover pages on the web by following links and using sitemaps.
Rendering: Search engines generate how the page will look using HTML, JavaScript and CSS information.
Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages it has discovered and add them to a database (though there’s no guarantee every page on your website will be indexed).
Ranking: Complex algorithms look at a variety of signals to determine whether a page is relevant and of high enough quality to show when searchers enter a query.

Optimizing for Google search is not the same as optimizing for other platforms like YouTube or Amazon. For instance, Facebook prioritizes engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments as well as connections among users. In contrast, Twitter values recency, interactions, and the credibility of the author. Moreover, search engines have integrated machine learning techniques to surface content, which makes it more challenging to determine what factors contribute to better or worse performance.

2. Researching

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

Audience research: It’s important to understand your target audience or market. Who are they (i.e., their demographics and psychographics)? What are their pain points? What questions do they have that you can answer?
Keyword research: This process helps you identify and incorporate relevant and valuable search terms people use into your pages – and understand how much demand and competition there is to rank for these keywords.
Competitor research: What are your competitors doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What types of content are they publishing?
Brand/business/client research: What are their goals – and how can SEO help them achieve those goals?
Website research: A variety of SEO audits can uncover opportunities and issues on a website that are preventing success in organic search. Some audits to consider: technical SEO, content, link profile and E-E-A-T.
SERP analysis: This will help you understand the search intent for a given query (e.g., is it commercial, transactional, informational or navigational) and create content that is more likely to earn rankings or visibility.

3. Planning

Creating an effective SEO strategy involves developing a long-term plan of action that includes setting clear goals and outlining the steps you will take to achieve them. Think of your strategy as a roadmap that may change and evolve, but always with a clear and unchanged destination in mind. Your SEO plan may include various elements such as:

Setting goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and expectations (i.e., timelines/milestones).
Defining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics.
Deciding how projects will be created and implemented (internal, external or a mix).
Coordinating and communicating with internal and external 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.

4. Creating and implementing

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

Creating new content: Advise your content team on what content needs to be created.
Recommending or implementing changes or enhancements to existing pages: This could include updating and improving the content, adding internal links, incorporating keywords/topics/entities, or identifying other ways to optimize it further.
Removing old, outdated or low-quality content: The types of content that aren’t ranking well, driving converting traffic or helping you achieve your SEO goals.

5. Monitoring and maintaining

Monitoring your website for issues is crucial. It is important to be aware of any possible problems that arise, such as a drop in traffic to a critical page, slow or unresponsive pages, pages falling out of the index, broken links, or any other potential catastrophic issues. Being vigilant about monitoring can help you quickly identify and address any problems, minimizing any negative impact on your website and maximizing its performance.

6. 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: Set up and use tools (at minimum, free tools such as 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 multiple tools, but you can also choose to use only select SEO tools to track performance on specific tasks. Or, if you have the resources and none of the tools on the market do exactly what you want, you can make your tools.

After collecting all the required data, it's crucial to showcase your progress by creating a report. You can either use software or prepare the report manually. It should be created at regular intervals, comparing the data with the previous periods (like year over year), and should convey a compelling story. The intervals should be selected based on the type of website, which is typically monthly, quarterly, or some other regular interval.

SEO is ongoing

SEO is an ongoing process that requires constant attention. This is because search engines, user behaviour and your competitors are always changing. Websites also change and move, which can lead to broken links and other issues. Content can become stale over time, so it's important to stay on top of it. In addition, your processes should always be improving and becoming more efficient. In other words, there's always something you can be monitoring, testing or improving. As Bruce Clay once said, SEO will only be done when Google stops changing things and your competition no longer exists.

How to learn SEO

Learning more about SEO can be done by keeping up with the latest news, research, best practices, and other developments. This should become a habit, whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly. Attending one or two events per year can also help you stay up-to-date with the constantly evolving expectations and behaviour of searchers, which in turn can affect search engine algorithms.

Breakthroughs in technology, such as the explosive rise of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the sudden addition of generative AI to search results in 2023 have further emphasized the importance of staying up-to-date with the latest SEO developments.

Here are some trusted services and tips to help you grow as an SEO professional.

The SEO Company SEO Resources & Services

The SEO Company has been covering SEO since 2021. In addition to news stories written by our editorial staff, The SEO Company publishes contributed articles from a diverse group of subject matter experts featuring helpful SEO tips, tactics, trends and analysis.

We’re biased, but we highly suggest you sign up to receive featuring a roundup of the latest SEO news, and insights every weekday.

The SEO Company also has multiple categories on topics dedicated to specific areas and platforms which you may find helpful:

All SEO
Bing SEO
Content SEO
E-commerce SEO
Enterprise SEO
Google: E-E-A-T
Google algorithm updates
Google Search Console
Google search features
Link building
Local SEO
News SEO
Technical SEO

The SEO Company Guide To SEO

Looking to optimize your website for search engines and drive more organic traffic? Look no further than The SEO Company Guide to SEO. Our comprehensive guide covers the fundamentals of search engine optimization, providing in-depth explanations of the key factors that influence rankings. Plus, we've included tactical tips from experts in the field to help you get the most out of your optimization efforts and attract more visitors to your site through organic search. With our guide, you'll have all the tools you need to create a solid SEO strategy and start seeing results.

Google’s SEO resources 2023

Google Search Essentials: In this guide, Google discusses technical requirements, spam policies and key best practices.
SEO starter guide: An overview of SEO basics, according to Google’s best practices.
Search quality evaluator guidelines: This document explains how Google instructs human raters to evaluate the quality of its search results by examining the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of content and websites.

Developing your SEO skills

Learning SEO can be most effective when you experiment with it yourself. The hands-on experience can help you improve your skills and knowledge of SEO.

To begin, build websites that revolve around topics that you are passionate about. Try out different tactics and techniques and observe what works best and what does not.

SEO requires a variety of other skills as well. It is essential to delve deeper into the 13 necessary SEO skills you need to succeed.

Attending a search conference can also help you advance your career. The SEO Company team organizes the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series, which includes a dedicated SEO track that explores various aspects of SEO and features some excellent speakers and presentations. SMX Advanced occurs in June, while SMX Next is in November.

Furthermore, there are several other options (free and paid) available for learning SEO.

Websites, blogs and publications.
Books and ebooks.
Videos.
Podcasts.
Webinars.
Conferences, events and meetups.
Courses.
Training and certification programs.
Groups (e.g., social media, Slack).
Newsletters.
Following experts on social media.
Forums.

It's important to be cautious when researching SEO. Although there are many trustworthy resources, outdated or inaccurate SEO information may be encountered by you or your clients. The bottom line is that there are no "universal" truths or big secrets to SEO. The truth is, that you have to put in the effort during all phases of SEO to increase your visibility, clicks, traffic, authority, conversions, sales, and revenue.

Feel free to contact him whenever you need any kind of help. I can make this sentence clearer by mentioning the name of the person you should contact.