What is SEO Marketing?

SEO is not just about being visible it’s about being the first one found.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s about improving your website so that it shows up better in search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex Search, Yahoo & Baidu. When people search for things like:

Products you sell
Services you offer
Information on topics you know a lot about

Search Engine Optimization helps your website appear higher in the search results. The higher your site appears, the more people will see and click on it. The main goal of SEO is to attract visitors who might become your customers, clients or regular audience.

What You’ll Learn in This Guide:

The difference between SEO, SEM and PPC
The importance of SEO
The various types and specializations within SEO
The workings of SEO
How to learn SEO

How is SEO Different from SEM & PPC?

You will often come across the terms SEM and PPC here on Sid Web Solutions and in the broader search marketing world. Let’s dive into what these terms mean and how they relate to SEO.

SEO vs. SEM

SEM stands for search engine marketing often referred to as search marketing.

Search marketing is a type of digital marketing that includes both SEO and PPC. It aims to drive traffic to websites through both unpaid (organic) and paid search efforts.

In simple words, search marketing is about getting more visitors and attention from search engines through both paid ads and free methods.

So, how do SEO and SEM differ? Technically, they are not different – SEO is a part of SEM:

SEO means getting free traffic from search engines.
SEM means getting traffic from search engines through both free and paid methods.

Now, this can get a bit confusing.

Many people today use SEM to mean the same thing as PPC (which we’ll discuss next).

This can make it seem like SEO is less important but that’s not true. Both SEO and PPC are forms of marketing.

Think of SEM as a coin, SEO is one side and PPC is the other side.

SEO vs. PPC

What is PPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click a type of digital marketing where advertisers pay each time someone clicks on their ad.

Advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases they want their ads to show up for in search engine results. When a user searches for one of those keywords the advertiser’s ad appears among the top results.

To visualize it, think of search marketing as a coin:

SEO is the unpaid side.
PPC is the paid side.

Why Choose Both?

It’s important not to think of it as “SEO vs. PPC” to decide which is better. They work best together. If your budget allows use both because they complement each other.

In the industry, SEM and PPC are often used interchangeably. However, here on Sid Web Solutions:

SEM refers to both SEO (organic search) and PPC (paid search).

Why is SEO Important?

SEO isn’t Just Science, It’s the Poetry of the Internet. Write Well, Rank High!

SEO is a key marketing channel for several reasons. Most importantly, organic search accounts for 53% of all website traffic.

This is a major reason why the global SEO industry is expected to reach $122.11 billion by 2028. SEO delivers tangible business results for brands, businesses and organizations of all sizes.

Whenever people want to go somewhere, do something, find information, research or buy a product/service their journey usually starts with a search.

However, search is now highly fragmented. Users might search on traditional web search engines like Google and Bing, social platforms like YouTube and TikTok or retailer websites like Amazon.

In the U.S. 61% of online shoppers start their product search on Amazon, while 49% start on a search engine like Google. Here are some other key points from the same research:

32% start on Walmart.com
20% start on YouTube
19% start on Facebook
15% start on Instagram
11% start on TikTok

Every year, trillions of searches are conducted. Since search is often the main way people find websites, it’s important to make sure your brand or business is easy to find on any platform where people might look for it.

Improving your visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a positive impact on your bottom line.

SEO is also crucial because search engine results pages (SERPs) are highly competitive filled with search features and PPC ads. Some common SERP features include:

Knowledge panels
Featured snippets
Maps
Images
Videos
Top stories (news)
People Also Ask
Carousels

SEO is important for several reasons:

Sustainability: Unlike other marketing channels good SEO work is sustainable. When a paid campaign ends, so does its traffic. Social media traffic is often unreliable and not as impactful as it once was.
Holistic Marketing Foundation: SEO is the backbone of holistic marketing. It ensures that everything your company does matters. By understanding what your users want, you can apply that knowledge across:

Paid and organic campaigns
Website content
Social media properties

Driving Traffic: SEO is a channel that brings in the traffic needed to achieve key business goals like conversions, visits and sales.
Building Trust: A website that ranks well is seen as authoritative and trustworthy. These are important factors that Google rewards with better rankings.

Types of SEO

Effective SEO is Like Having a Good Friend in Every City, Making Sure You’re Never Hard to Find

There are three main types of SEO:

Technical SEO: This involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website to improve its performance and visibility to search engines.
On-site SEO: This focuses on optimizing the content on a website for both users and search engines. It includes things like keywords, meta tags and content quality.
Off-site SEO: This involves activities outside your website that boost brand awareness and recognition. It includes creating brand assets (like slogans, colors and values) and enhancing your brand’s expertise, authority and trustworthiness through things like backlinks and social media engagement.

You have full control over technical and on-site optimizations. However, off-site SEO can be less predictable because you can’t control external links or changes on other platforms. Despite this, off-site activities are essential for a successful SEO strategy.

Think of SEO as a sports team. You need a strong defense (technical SEO), a powerful offense (content optimization) and a loyal fanbase (off-site optimization) to win.

Technical Optimization

Optimizing the technical aspects of a website is essential for SEO success.

First, focus on your website’s architecture. It needs to be easily crawled and indexed by search engines. As Google’s trends analyst Gary Illyes emphasized, “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.” This means making it simple for search engines to find and access all your content including text, images and videos. Key elements to consider are URL structure, navigation and internal linking.

User experience is also crucial. Search engines prioritize pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Important factors include:

Core Web Vitals (page load speed, interactivity and visual stability)
Mobile-friendliness and usability
HTTPS for security
Avoiding intrusive interstitials (pop-ups that interfere with user experience)

Another important area is structured data also known as schema. Adding this code to your website helps search engines understand your content better and can improve how your site appears in search results.

Finally, web hosting services, the content management system (CMS) you use and site security all impact your SEO. Ensuring these elements are optimized will help improve your site’s performance and visibility in search results.

Content Optimization

In SEO, you need to optimize content for both people and search engines. This means focusing on what your audience sees on the page and what search engines see in the code.

The main goal is to publish helpful high-quality content. Achieve this by understanding your audience’s needs, using data and following Google’s guidelines.

When optimizing content for people ensure it:

Covers relevant topics where you have experience or expertise.
Includes keywords that people would use to find the content.
Is unique and original.
Is well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors.
Contains up-to-date and accurate information.
Includes multimedia elements like images and videos.
Is better than what your competitors offer on SERPs.
Is readable, with good structure using subheadings, short paragraphs, bolding/italics, lists and appropriate reading levels.

For search engines focus on these key elements:

Title tags
Meta descriptions
Header tags (H1-H6)
Image alt text
Open graph and Twitter Cards metadata

By optimizing these aspects you can improve your content’s visibility and performance in search results.

Off-Site Optimization

Off-site optimization involves activities that while not strictly SEO can indirectly boost your SEO success.

Link building or acquiring links to your website is a key off-site SEO activity. Quality links from relevant, authoritative websites can improve your rankings and increase traffic. The goal is to get a large number of high-quality links.

To acquire these links you can use various promotion methods that work well with SEO such as:

Brand Building & Marketing: Techniques to boost recognition and reputation.
Public Relations (PR): Earn editorial links through PR techniques.
Content Marketing: Create videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts or guest posts to attract links.
Social Media Marketing & Optimization: Secure and optimize your brand’s handle on relevant platforms and share relevant content.
Listing Management: Claim, verify and optimize your information on directories, review sites and wikis.
Ratings & Reviews: Encourage, monitor and respond to ratings and reviews.

While these activities may not directly impact your technical SEO they help your brand be found wherever people search for you. This broader approach is sometimes called “search experience optimization” or “search everywhere optimization.”

SEO Specialties

SEO has several subgenres each with unique tactics and challenges. Here are five key specialties:

Ecommerce SEO

Ecommerce SEO focuses on:

Optimizing category pages
Product pages
Faceted navigation
Internal linking structures
Product images
Product reviews
Schema markup

Enterprise SEO

Enterprise SEO is for large-scale websites often with over a million pages or for big organizations making millions or billions in revenue. Challenges include:

Implementing SEO changes due to delays with development teams
Involvement of multiple stakeholders

International SEO

International SEO is for global businesses with multiregional or multilingual websites. It includes:

Optimizing for international search engines like Baidu or Naver
Adapting SEO strategies for different regions and languages

Local SEO

Local SEO aims to optimize websites for local search results. Key activities include:

Managing and obtaining reviews
Business listings
Local citations

News SEO

News SEO focuses on speed and getting content indexed quickly by Google. It involves:

Appearing in Google Discover, Top Stories and Google News
Understanding best practices for paywalls, section pages and news-specific structured data

Each of these specialties requires unique approaches and presents different challenges compared to regular SEO.

How Does SEO Work?

SEO works through a combination of:

People: The person or team responsible for strategic, tactical and operational SEO tasks.
Processes: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.
Technology: The platforms and tools used in SEO.
Activities: The final product or output of the SEO work.

These elements along with many others contribute to how SEO functions effectively. Here’s a high-level overview of the most important knowledge and process elements.

Here are six key areas that together make SEO effective:

1. Understanding How Search Engines Work

To make your business visible on search platforms you need to understand how search engines operate and provide the right signals to improve visibility.

For traditional web search engines like Google there are four main stages:

Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to find pages on the web by following links and using sitemaps.
Rendering: Search engines create a visual representation of the page using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of discovered pages and add them to a database. Not every page gets indexed.
Ranking: Algorithms evaluate various signals to determine the relevance and quality of a page for specific search queries.

Optimizing for Google differs from optimizing for platforms like YouTube, Amazon, Facebook or Twitter each of which has unique factors influencing search results.

2. Researching

Research is crucial for SEO. Key types of research include:

Audience Research: Understand your target audience, their demographics, needs and questions you can answer.
Keyword Research: Identify and use relevant search terms people use and assess their demand and competition.
Competitor Research: Analyze your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses and content strategies.
Brand/Business/Client Research: Align SEO with their goals to help achieve them.
Website Research: Conduct SEO audits to find opportunities and issues. Audits can be technical, content-related, link profile analysis and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
SERP Analysis: Understand search intent (commercial, transactional, informational, navigational) and create content that meets these intents to improve rankings and visibility.

3. Planning

An SEO strategy is your long-term action plan with clear goals and a path to reach them. Your plan should be flexible but keep the end goals in sight. Your SEO plan may include:

Setting goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and expectations (timelines/milestones)
Setting and aligning important KPIs and metrics
Deciding whether projects will be handled internally, externally or a combination of both
Coordinating and communicating with stakeholders
Choosing and implementing tools/technology
Hiring, training and structuring a team
Setting a budget
Measuring and reporting results
Documenting the strategy and process

4. Creating & Implementing

After research it’s time to act. This includes:

Creating New Content: Advising your content team on what to create.
Updating Existing Pages: Improving content, adding internal links, incorporating keywords/topics and optimizing further.
Removing Outdated Content: Getting rid of content that isn’t ranking well or helping achieve SEO goals.

5. Monitoring & Maintaining

It’s crucial to know when something goes wrong on your website. Monitoring involves:

Tracking traffic drops on critical pages
Ensuring pages load quickly and are responsive
Checking that pages stay indexed
Ensuring the website stays online
Fixing broken links and other potential issues

6. Analyzing, Assessing & Reporting on Performance

To improve SEO you must measure it. Use the following to make data-driven decisions:

Website Analytics: Set up tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to collect performance data.
Tools and Platforms: Choose from various SEO tools or create your own if needed to track specific tasks.

After collecting data report on progress. Reports can be created using software or manually and should tell a story. Compare current performance to previous periods (e.g., year-over-year) at meaningful intervals (monthly, quarterly, etc.).

These steps help maintain and improve your SEO performance over time.

SEO is Ongoing

SEO is a continuous process. Search engines, user behavior and competitors are always changing. Websites evolve, content gets outdated and processes need constant improvement.

There’s always something to monitor, test or improve.

Bruce Clay said, SEO will only be done when Google stops changing and all your competition disappears.

How to Learn SEO

Now that you understand what SEO is and how it works here’s how you can learn more:

Stay Updated: Regularly read, watch or listen to the latest SEO news, research, best practices and developments. Make it a habit to check in daily, weekly or monthly.
Attend Events: Invest in attending at least one or two SEO events or conferences each year.

Search behavior and algorithms are always changing and new technology is constantly emerging. For example, ChatGPT’s rise in late 2022 and the integration of generative AI into search results in 2023 show how quickly things can evolve.

By staying informed and engaged with the SEO community, you’ll be better equipped to keep up with these changes and apply the latest strategies and techniques.

Developing Your SEO Skills

One of the best ways to learn SEO is through experimentation. Hands-on experience is invaluable for advancing your skills and deepening your SEO knowledge.

Build Your Own Websites: Create websites about topics you are passionate about.
Experiment: Try different tactics and techniques.
Learn from Experience: Observe what works and what doesn’t.

By practicing and testing various strategies on your own projects, you’ll gain practical insights and improve your SEO abilities.

There are no universal truths or big secrets in SEO. The key is to put in the effort across all phases of SEO to increase your visibility, clicks, traffic, authority, conversions, sales and revenue.

Wondering how much it costs to develop a website? The price depends on what you need—design, features & functionality all play a role in determining the total cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SEO in Digital Marketing?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process used in digital marketing to enhance the visibility of a website in search engine results. This involves optimizing web content with keywords, improving site structure and gaining backlinks to increase organic (non-paid) traffic.

What is Local SEO Marketing?

Local SEO focuses on optimizing a website to be found in local search results. This is crucial for businesses that serve a specific geographic area. Techniques include optimizing Google My Business profiles, using location-specific keywords and managing online reviews.

What is SEO & Digital Marketing?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a component of digital marketing which encompasses all online strategies used to promote a business. Digital marketing includes SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing and more.

What is SEO & SEM Marketing?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focuses on increasing organic search visibility, while SEM (Search Engine Marketing) involves using paid search ads to increase website traffic. Together, they form a comprehensive approach to online marketing.

What is an SEO Marketing Strategy?

An SEO marketing strategy involves planning and executing steps to improve a website’s search engine ranking. This includes keyword research, on-page optimization, content creation, link building and technical SEO.

What is Content Marketing in SEO?

Content marketing in SEO involves creating and sharing valuable relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. This content helps improve search engine rankings by providing answers to user queries and generating backlinks.

What is Article Marketing in SEO?

Article marketing in SEO involves writing and publishing articles on various platforms to promote a website. These articles typically include targeted keywords and links back to the website to boost its search engine ranking.

What is Better, SEO or Digital Marketing?

SEO is a subset of digital marketing. While SEO focuses specifically on improving search engine rankings, digital marketing encompasses all online promotional activities. The best approach often includes both SEO and other digital marketing strategies.

What is Email Marketing in SEO?

Email marketing in SEO refers to using email campaigns to support SEO efforts. This includes sending newsletters with content that links back to the website, promoting new blog posts and encouraging social shares to increase traffic and backlinks.

What is Off-Page SEO in Digital Marketing?

Off-page SEO involves activities done outside the website to improve its search engine ranking. This includes building backlinks, social media marketing and influencer outreach to boost the website’s authority and relevance.

What is On-Page SEO in Digital Marketing?

On-page SEO involves optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic. Techniques include optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, headings, content and internal links to enhance user experience and search visibility.

What is Organic SEO Marketing?

Organic SEO marketing focuses on obtaining natural search engine rankings through non-paid methods. This includes creating high-quality content, optimizing website structure and earning backlinks naturally without using paid ads.

What is SEO Affiliate Marketing?

SEO affiliate marketing involves optimizing affiliate marketing content to rank higher in search engines. Affiliates use SEO techniques to drive organic traffic to their promotional content increasing the chances of earning commissions from sales.

What is SEO & PPC in Marketing?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aims for organic search traffic, while PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising involves paying for ads to appear in search results. Combining both can provide a balanced approach, capturing both paid and organic traffic.

Without SEO, Your Website is a Hidden GEM – Unseen.