SEO stands for \u201csearch engine optimization.\u201d In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for:<\/p>\n
Products you sell.
\nServices you provide.
\nInformation on topics in which you have deep expertise and\/or experience.
\nThe better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked on. Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to help attract website visitors who will become customers, clients or an audience that keeps coming back.<\/p>\n
What you\u2019ll learn in this guide:<\/p>\n
Read on to learn more about both of these terms and how they\u2019re related to SEO.<\/p>\n
SEM stands for search engine marketing \u2013 or, as it is more commonly known, search marketing.<\/p>\n
Search marketing is a type of digital marketing. It is an umbrella term for the combination of SEO and PPC activities meant to drive traffic via organic search and paid search.<\/p>\n
Put simply, search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.<\/p>\n
So how do SEO and SEM differ? Technically they aren\u2019t different \u2013 SEO is simply one-half of SEM:<\/p>\n
SEO = driving organic traffic from search engines.
\nSEM = driving organic and paid traffic from search engines.
\nNow, this is where things get a bit confusing.<\/p>\n
Today, many people use SEM interchangeably with PPC (which we\u2019ll talk about in the next section).<\/p>\n
This idea seems to undercut SEO. However, SEO is marketing, just like PPC is marketing.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the best way to think about SEO and SEM:<\/p>\n
Imagine SEM is a coin. SEO is one side of that coin. PPC is on the flip side.<\/p>\n
PPC stands for pay-per-click \u2013 a type of digital marketing where advertisers are charged whenever one of their ads gets clicked on.<\/p>\n
Basically, advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases that they want their ads to appear for in the search engine results. When a user searches for one of those keywords or phrases, the advertiser\u2019s ad will appear among the top results.<\/p>\n
So again, if we think of search marketing as a coin, SEO and PPC are two sides of the same coin \u2013 SEO is the unpaid side, PPC is the paid side.<\/p>\n
Another key point: it\u2019s important never to think of it as \u201cSEO vs. PPC\u201d (i.e., which one is better) because these are complementary channels. It\u2019s not an either-or question \u2013 always choose both (as long as your budget allows it).<\/p>\n
As we mentioned before, the terms SEM and PPC are used within the industry interchangeably. However, that isn\u2019t the case here on Search Engine Land.<\/p>\n
Whenever we mention \u201cSEM,\u201d it will be because we\u2019re referring to both SEO (organic search) and PPC (paid search).<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re curious about the history behind how \u201cSEM\u201d came to mean \u201cPPC\u201d at the exclusion of SEO, you can dig deeper into these articles:<\/p>\n
How Wikipedia Turned PPC \/ Paid Search Into SEM
\nDoes SEM = SEO + CPC Still Add Up?
\nWhy is SEO important?
\nSEO is a critical marketing channel. First, and foremost: organic search delivers 53% of all website traffic.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Whenever people want to go somewhere, do something, find information, research or buy a product\/service \u2013 their journey typically begins with a search.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
What this all means is that improving your visibility, and ranking higher in search results than your competition, can positively impact your bottom line,<\/p>\n
SEO is also incredibly important because the search engine results pages (or SERPs) are super competitive \u2013 filled with search features (and PPC ads). SERP features include:<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
Campaigns (paid and organic).
\nWebsite content.
\nSocial media properties.
\nSEO is a channel that drives the traffic you need to achieve key business goals (e.g., conversions, visits, sales). It also builds trust \u2013 a website that ranks well is generally regarded as authoritative or trustworthy, which are key elements Google wants to reward with better rankings.<\/p>\n
There are three types of SEO:<\/p>\n
Technical SEO: Optimizing the technical aspects of a website.
\nOn-site SEO: Optimizing the content on a website for users and search engines.
\nOff-site SEO: Creating brand assets (e.g., \u200b\u200bpeople, 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.
\nYou maintain 100% control over content and technical optimizations. That\u2019s not always true with off-site (you can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Imagine SEO as a sports team. You need both a strong offense and defense to win \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Optimizing the technical elements of a website is crucial and fundamental for SEO success.<\/p>\n
It all starts with architecture \u2013 creating a website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes, Google\u2019s trends analyst, once put it in a Reddit AMA: \u201cMAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Plus, web hosting services, CMS (content management system) and site security all play a role in SEO.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s actually on the page) as well as what search engines will see (the code).<\/p>\n
The goal, always, is to publish helpful, high-quality content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your audience\u2019s wants and needs, data and guidance provided by Google.<\/p>\n
When optimizing content for people, you should make sure it:<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 and a large quantity of quality links is the goal.<\/p>\n
And how do you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that synergize with SEO efforts. These include:<\/p>\n
Brand building and brand marketing: Techniques designed to boost recognition and reputation.
\nPR: Public relations techniques designed to earn editorially-given links.
\nContent marketing: Some popular forms include creating videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts (or being a guest on other podcasts) and guest posting (or guest blogging).
\nSocial media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand\u2019s handle on any and all relevant platforms, optimize it fully and share relevant content.
\nListing 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).
\nRatings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to them.
\nGenerally, when talking about off-site, you\u2019re talking about activities that are not going to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical standpoint.<\/p>\n
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 \u201csearch engine optimization\u201d to actually mean \u201csearch experience optimization\u201d or \u201csearch everywhere optimization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Search engine optimization also has a few subgenres. Each of these specialty areas is different from \u201cregular SEO\u201d in its own way, generally requiring additional tactics and presenting different challenges.<\/p>\n
Five such SEO specialties include:<\/p>\n
Ecommerce SEO: Additional SEO elements include optimizing category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structures, product images, product reviews, schema and more.
\nEnterprise SEO: This is SEO on a massive scale. Typically this means dealing with a website (or multiple websites\/brands) with 1 million+ pages \u2013 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.
\nInternational SEO: This is global SEO for international businesses \u2013 doing SEO for multiregional or multilingual websites \u2013 and optimizing for international search engines such as Baidu or Naver.
\nLocal 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.
\nNews SEO: With news, speed is of utmost importance \u2013 specifically making sure you get into Google\u2019s index as quickly as possible and appear in places such as Google Discover, Google\u2019s Top Stories and Google News. There\u2019s a need to understand best practices for paywalls, section pages, news-specific structured data, and more.<\/p>\n
If you found this page via Google search, you likely searched Google for [what is seo] or [seo].<\/p>\n
This guide is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative website with great expertise on and experience in the topic of SEO (we\u2019ve been covering all SEO changes, big and small since 2006).<\/p>\n
Originally published in 2010, our \u201cwhat is SEO\u201d page has earned a whopping 324,203 links.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 and therefore deserves to rank when someone searches for SEO.<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s look at SEO more broadly. As a whole, SEO really works through a combination of:<\/p>\n
People: The person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic, tactical and operational SEO work is completed.
\nProcesses: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.
\nTechnology: The platforms and tools used.
\nActivities: The end product, or output.
\nMany other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most important knowledge and process elements.<\/p>\n
Six critical areas, in combination, make SEO work:<\/p>\n
1. Understanding how search engines work
\nSimply, if you want people to find your business via search \u2013 on any platform \u2013 you need to understand the technical processes behind how the engine works \u2013 and then make sure you are providing all the right \u201csignals\u201d to influence that visibility.<\/p>\n
When talking about traditional web search engines like Google, there are four separate stages of search:<\/p>\n
Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to discover pages on the web by following links and using sitemaps.
\nRendering: Search engines generate how the page will look using HTML, JavaScript and CSS information.
\nIndexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages it has discovered and add them to a database (though there\u2019s no guarantee every page on your website will be indexed).
\nRanking: 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.
\nBut optimizing for Google search is different from optimizing for search other platforms like YouTube or Amazon.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s take Facebook, for example, where factors such as engagement (Likes, comments, shares, etc.) and who people are connected to matter. Then, on Twitter, signals like recency, interactions, or the author\u2019s credibility are important.<\/p>\n
And further complicating things: search engines have added machine learning elements in order to surface content \u2013 making it even harder to say \u201cthis\u201d or \u201cthat\u201d resulted in better or worse performance.<\/p>\n
2. Researching
\nResearch is a key part of SEO. Some forms of research that will improve SEO performance include:<\/p>\n
Audience research: It\u2019s 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?
\nKeyword research: This process helps you identify and incorporate relevant and valuable search terms people use into your pages \u2013 and understand how much demand and competition there is to rank for these keywords.
\nCompetitor research: What are your competitors doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What types of content are they publishing?
\nBrand\/business\/client research: What are their goals \u2013 and how can SEO help them achieve those goals?
\nWebsite 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.
\nSERP 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.<\/p>\n
3. Planning
\nAn SEO strategy is your long-term action plan. You need to set goals \u2013 and a plan for how you will reach them.<\/p>\n
Think of it your SEO strategy as a roadmap. The path you take likely will change and evolve over time \u2013 but the destination should remain clear and unchanged.<\/p>\n
Your SEO plan may include things such as:<\/p>\n
Setting goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and expectations (i.e., timelines\/milestones).
\nDefining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics.
\nDeciding how projects will be created and implemented (internal, external or a mix).
\nCoordinating and communicating with internal and external stakeholders.
\nChoosing and implementing tools\/technology.
\nHiring, training and structuring a team.
\nSetting a budget.
\nMeasuring and reporting on results.
\nDocumenting the strategy and process.<\/p>\n
4. Creating and implementing
\nOnce all the research is done, it\u2019s time to turn ideas into action. That means:<\/p>\n
Creating new content: Advising your content team on what content needs to be created.
\nRecommending 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.
\nRemoving old, outdated or low-quality content: The types of content that aren\u2019t ranking well, driving converting traffic or helping you achieve your SEO goals.<\/p>\n
5. Monitoring and maintaining
\nYou need to know when something goes wrong or breaks on your website. Monitoring is critical.<\/p>\n
You need to know if traffic drops to a critical page, pages become slow, unresponsive or fall out of the index, your entire website goes offline, links break, or any other number of potential catastrophic issues.<\/p>\n
6. Analyzing, assessing and reporting on performance
\nIf you don\u2019t measure SEO, you can\u2019t improve it. To make data-driven decisions about SEO, you\u2019ll need to use:<\/p>\n
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.
\nTools and platforms: There are many \u201call-in-one\u201d 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 own tools.
\nAfter you\u2019ve collected the data, you\u2019ll need to report on progress. You can create reports using software or manually.<\/p>\n
Performance reporting should tell a story and be done at meaningful time intervals, typically comparing to previous report periods (e.g., year over year). This will depend on the type of website (typically, this will be monthly, quarterly, or some other interval),<\/p>\n
SEO never ends. Search engines, user behavior and your competitors are always changing. Websites change and move (and break) over time. Content gets stale. Your processes should improve and become more efficient.<\/p>\n
Bottom line: There\u2019s always something you can be monitoring, testing or improving. Or, as Bruce Clay put it: SEO will only be done when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies.<\/p>\n
Now that you understand more about what SEO is and how it works \u2013 how can you learn more?<\/p>\n
Reading (or, if you prefer, watching or listening to) the latest SEO news, research, best practices and other developments should become one of your regular habits, whether it\u2019s daily, weekly or monthly. You should also invest in attending at least one or two events per year.<\/p>\n
The expectations and behavior of searchers are constantly evolving, which means algorithms are constantly changing to keep up. That, in combination with new breakthroughs in technology (look no further than the explosive rise of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the sudden addition of generative AI to search results in 2023).<\/p>\n
Here are some trusted resources and tips to help you grow as an SEO professional.<\/p>\n
Search Engine Land\u2019s SEO resources
\nSearch Engine Land has been covering SEO since 2006. In addition to news stories written by our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes contributed articles from a diverse group of subject matter experts featuring helpful SEO tips, tactics, trends and analysis.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re biased, but we highly suggest you sign up to receive Search Engine Land\u2019s free email newsletter featuring a roundup of the latest SEO news, and insights every weekday.<\/p>\n
Search Engine Land also has multiple categories on topics dedicated to specific areas and platforms which you may find helpful:<\/p>\n
Search Engine Land\u2019s Guide To SEO walks you through the fundamentals of optimizing for search so you can develop a solid strategy to drive organic traffic to your website.<\/p>\n
Our guide explains these factors in more depth, and highlights tactical tips from experts on search engine optimization that will help your website get more visitors from organic search.<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s SEO resources<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Google Search Essentials: In this guide, Google discusses technical requirements, spam policies and key best practices.
\nSEO starter guide: An overview of SEO basics, according to Google\u2019s best practices.
\nSearch 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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