What is SEO: A Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Use this space to highlight the key points of your page and encourage searchers to click through to your page. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the set of practices and actions aimed at increasing a website’s organic traffic from search results. SEO is one of the most important and effective marketing channels for various types of businesses. Local SEO is a strategy to make your business more visible in local search results on search engines like Google.

Is SEO a marketing skill?

However, make sure the keyword placement sounds natural and avoid stuffing unnecessary words. However, it’s different from when you want to rank for “best webcams for streaming”. Users with this intent simply wish to compare the best webcams for streaming purposes. Meanwhile, when a user searches for “buy a JBL Bluetooth speaker” Google instantly shows eCommerce pages as the top results.

AI overviews impact traditional search engine optimization (SEO) in several ways:

Technical SEO ensures search engines can efficiently crawl, index, and rank your site. SEO plays a crucial role in ensuring your website reaches the right audience. In addition to search visibility, SEO drives quality traffic, improves user experience, and helps you stand out in search results. In the 6th chapter of our SEO guide for beginners, we will discuss backlinks – one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. If your focus keyword is “best content marketing strategy for small businesses”, it would be crazy to use it in all the on-page elements mentioned above just to tick them all off the list.

• Agencies offer a team of experts who manage all aspects of your SEO, from strategy and content creation to technical SEO and analytics.
• Using WordPress as your CMS is like giving yourself a head start when it comes to creating a search engine friendly website.
• And here’s the exciting part you don’t have to navigate this path alone.
• There are a lot of factors that go into ranking – relevancy being a critical aspect.
• If your content is really great and unique (and it should be for this strategy to work), they may link to it or share it on social media by themselves.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is most certainly something you know. It’s typically a method to use keywords to grab the interest of web search bots like Google. To improve SEO, Technical SEO digs deeper into the server and code.

So I recommend looking at the search volume numbers for your list of keywords. If that topic seems like something that you’d want to write about, add it to your list of keywords. If you’re new to SEO, or just want to get an edge on your first page competition, I recommend focusing on trending topics and keywords. Compared to most paid keyword research tools, The Google Keyword Planner isn’t that great at coming up with keyword ideas. And I share the content on social media (specifically Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) multiple times.

Besides the structural internal links, it is a good practice to also link to other relevant pages from within the page body. Yes, external backlinks are essential in SEO (more on that in the next chapter.), but having a proper structure of internal links is equally important. One of the reasons why content updates may have a positive impact on your rankings is that Google notices the frequency of updates and tends to favor frequently updated pages for some queries. The thing is that as an author, you can’t “bluff” your way through 2,000-5,000 words on your topic.

And G2 has done a great job of organizing all of these reviews and creating a container for them. This way, they can spin up thousands of landing pages and rank in search without having to create the content themselves — people leaving reviews are making the content. It’s this omnipresent approach to media that allows them to build authority with Google and maintain such strong rankings. I even ran some of their top-ranking articles through Originality AI to detect if they used any LLMs to generate the content.

What you’ll notice with local SEO terms is that when you’re searching something, the Google autocomplete always adds on “near me” to the search query. With over 3.6M monthly visitors from just SEO (8.4M/month total according to SimilarWeb), Angi has mastered the “near me” service types of keywords. However, Angi has the benefit of competing in a less competitive market. With general software topics, you’re competing with hundreds of other websites that know all the SEO best practices. People leave reviews → G2 landing pages are populated with more content → Google ranks the G2 pages → Page gets traffic → More people see it → More people leave reviews → Repeat. You have to know the technical stuff and create an omnipresent media brand.

Where to Learn More About SEO

Other off-page tactics like social media management, online reputation management, and email marketing can indirectly benefit your SEO by driving brand awareness and SEO Anomaly engagement. Search engines use complex processes and criteria to rank results, aiming to provide users with the best search experience. The term “SEO” can also refer to a person, such as a “search engine optimization expert” or similar.