LET'S MAKE A DIGITAL LIFESTYLE
LET'S MAKE A DIGITAL LIFESTYLE
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of improving your website to increase visitors from Google, Microsoft Bing and other search engines, whenever people search for:
The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and visited.
This introductory guide will explain in more detail what SEO is and what it entails in 2024.
Technology is constantly evolving, which means that websites – and the way they are structured – evolve. So do the devices we use to access search engines.
A web search can be voice activated and a click may be a tap on a mobile phone screen. Even the results we see from our search engine of choice may be summarized by artificial intelligence (AI).
We will explain all these different aspects of SEO as well as provide resources for your continued learning.
SEM and PPC are two other common terms you will read about often here on Search Engine Land and hear about in the larger search marketing community.
It can also be helpful to distinguish what SEO is from what it is not.
Here, we’ll explain the difference in terminologies, what these abbreviations mean and how they extend to different disciplines.
SEM stands for search engine marketing – or, as it is more commonly known, search marketing.
Search marketing is a type of digital marketing. It is an umbrella term for the combination of SEO and PPC (pay-per-click, e.g. Google Ads) activities that drive traffic via organic search and paid search, respectively.
So how do SEO and SEM differ? Technically they aren’t different – SEO is simply one-half of SEM:
Here’s the best way to think about SEM, SEO and PPC:
Imagine SEM is a coin. SEO is one side of that coin. PPC is on the flip side.
PPC: stands for pay-per-click – a type of digital marketing where advertisers are charged whenever one of their ads gets clicked on.
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’s ad (paid listing) will appear among the top results.
So again, if we think of search marketing as a coin, SEO and PPC are two sides of the same coin:
Some people have debated “SEO vs. PPC” – which channel is more valuable or has a better return on investment (ROI). However, SEO and PPC are complementary digital marketing channels. Ideally, you should always choose both (as long as your budget allows it).
As we mentioned before, the terms SEM and PPC are used within the industry interchangeably. However, that isn’t the case here on Search Engine Land.
Whenever we mention “SEM,” it will be because we’re referring to both SEO (organic search) and PPC (paid search).
If you’re curious about the history behind how “SEM” came to mean “PPC” at the exclusion of SEO, you can dig deeper in these articles:
SEO is a critical marketing channel.
With such incredible audience reach, there’s no surprise that in turn, 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. This is because the act of searching, or the search user interface (be it a typed, voiced or image query format) has become second nature for internet users worldwide, as the primary way to access the information sought, within the sea of billions of webpages (4.3 billion pages on the indexed web, as of September 2024).
Whenever people want to go somewhere, do something, find information, research or buy a product/service – their journey typically begins with a search.
However, search is incredibly fragmented – particularly for consumer-intent activities. 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).
In fact, last year 56% of U.S. online shoppers started their product search on Amazon, compared to 46% who started on a search engine like Google. Also of note from that same research:
Another interesting aspect of this data compared to the previous years is the growth in social sources, particularly TikTok, as a place to search for both products and knowledge searches (think “how to do X” types of search activities).
In fact, when it comes to Gen Z a staggering 51% of women in this age group prefer to start a search on TikTok above all other online sources of information according to a 2023 study.
Trillions of searches are conducted every year. Search is often the primary source of traffic for websites, which makes it essential to be “search engine friendly” on any platform where people can search for your brand or business.
What this all means is that improving your visibility, and ranking higher in search results than your competition, can positively impact your bottom line,
SEO is also incredibly important because the search engine results pages (or SERPs) are super competitive – filled with search features (and PPC ads). SERP features include:
Another reason SEO is critical for brands and businesses: unlike other marketing channels, good SEO work is sustainable. When a paid campaign ends, so does the traffic. Traffic from social media traffic is at best unreliable – and a fraction of what it once was.
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:
Organic search is a channel that drives the traffic you need to achieve key business goals (e.g., conversions, visits, sales). It also builds trust – a website that ranks well is generally regarded as authoritative or trustworthy, which are key elements Google wants to reward with better rankings.
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:
You maintain 100% control over content and technical optimizations. That’s not always true with off-site (you can’t 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.
Optimizing the technical elements of a website is crucial and fundamental for SEO success.
It all starts with architecture – creating a website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes, Google’s trends analyst, once put it in a Reddit AMA: “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.”
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). Key technical elements include URL structure, navigation and internal linking.
User experience is another critical part of technical optimization. Search engines stress the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good page experience. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS and avoiding intrusive interstitials all matter in technical SEO.
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.
Plus, web hosting services, CMS (content management system) and site security all play a role in SEO.
In SEO, your content needs to be optimized for two primary audiences: people and search engines. This means optimizing the content your audience will see (what’s actually on the page) as well as what search engines will see (the code).
The goal is always to publish helpful, high-quality content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your audience’s wants and needs, data and Google’s guidance.
When optimizing content for people, you should make sure it:
For search engines, some key content elements to optimize for are:
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is an emerging specialty within content optimization. GEO is about optimizing your content for visibility in AI-driven search engines (or answer engines) including Google’s AI Overviews and Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and SearchGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity.
Several activities may not be “SEO” in the strictest sense but nonetheless can align with and help contribute indirectly to SEO success.
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. A large quantity of quality links is the goal.
How do you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that synergize with SEO efforts. These include:
Generally, when talking about off-site, you’re talking about activities that are not going to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical standpoint.
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 “search engine optimization” to actually mean “search experience optimization” or “search everywhere optimization.”
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:
If you found this page via Google, you likely searched for something along the lines of [what is seo?]
This guide is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative website with expertise and experience in SEO topics (we’ve been covering all SEO changes, big and small, since 2006).
Originally published in 2010, this What is SEO page has earned hundreds of thousands of links.
Put simply, these factors (and others) have helped this guide earn a good reputation with search engines, which has helped it rank in a top 1-3 organic search position in most search engines, for a number of years. It has accumulated signals that demonstrate it is authoritative and trustworthy – and therefore deserves to rank when someone searches for SEO.
But let’s look at SEO more broadly. As a whole, SEO really works through a combination of:
Many other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most important knowledge and process elements.
Six critical areas, in combination, make SEO work:
If you want people to find your business via search – on any platform – you need to understand the technical processes behind how the engine works – and then make sure you are providing all the right “signals” to influence that visibility.
When talking about traditional web search engines like Google, there are four separate stages of search:
However, optimizing for Google search is different from optimizing for search other platforms like YouTube or Amazon.
Let’s 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’s credibility are important.
And further complicating things: search engines have added machine learning elements in order to surface content – making it even harder to say “this” or “that” resulted in better or worse performance.
Research is a key part of SEO. Some forms of research that will improve SEO performance include:
An SEO strategy is your long-term action plan. You need to set goals – and a plan for how you will reach them. Think of your SEO strategy as a roadmap. The path you take likely will change and evolve over time – but the destination should remain clear and unchanged.
Your SEO plan may include things such as:
Once all the research is done, it’s time to turn ideas into action. That means:
You need to know when something goes wrong or breaks on your website. Monitoring is critical.
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 potential catastrophic issues.
If you don’t measure SEO, you can’t improve it. To make data-driven decisions about SEO, you’ll need to use:
After you’ve collected the data, you’ll need to report on progress. You can create reports using software or manually.
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),
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.
SEO constantly evolves in a number of ways, perhaps most importantly because it is a service and a practice employed at the coalface of how humans interact with information on the web.
What is most important about this, is to consider the web and search engines in the wider context of society.
Libraries, for example, have existed for thousands of years. There is both documentary and archaeological record from as far back as the seventh century BC of the existence of these places to house the collected wisdom of cultures.
In this context, the web (as an information repository and record of dank memes) is still in its infancy. In fact, Google as a search engine has only existed since September 1998.
The web, and the ways we search and retrieve what we want from it, are new in the context of human memory and behavior.
We access search engines through technology devices like computers, mobile phones and home assistants. As technology evolves, so does our behavior in how we use and apply it.
This has implications for how search engines evolve their product capabilities and appearances, which in turn means adaptive changes for what constitutes SEO.
Here are some of the main ways SEO evolves:
We have mentioned that technical SEO is one of the main types (or focuses) within SEO. In the past decade, significant changes have occurred in technology, shifting the focus of SEO work to include tasks and tactics that didn’t even exist a decade ago.
In the three specific areas of rapid change above, SEO practice must match pace, or fail. Within each of these three areas there are a multitude of component changes, features and technologies that we now consider an everyday part of SEO.
While technology and the way we use it in everyday life is also a part of societal change, there are additional considerations in the way that society is changing outside of technology that also require SEO considerations and strategic change and development.
SEO has taken center stage in recent years as both technology and society have evolved due to progress and innovation as well as for reactive reasons in response to challenges.
The SEO market will grow from $75.13 billion in 2023 to $88.91 billion in 2024 at an annual growth rate of 18.3%, reaching $170 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 17.6%, according to the 2024 Research and Markets SEO Services report.
It is no wonder, then, that SEO is also a well-established professional service, considering the ubiquity of search engines and search as an activity, combined with mobile phones’ capabilities and the ever-changing economic climate.
SEO is a marketing discipline and a job title. You can “do” SEO as well as “be” an SEO (search engine optimizer).
There are myriad roles and responsibilities within SEO, as well as many specialisms that reflect the different types of SEO and the skills and capabilities required.
Understanding how to get started with a career in SEO can be slightly overwhelming at first. Unlike more established professions (e.g., law, accounting) there aren’t universally established and recognized formal high-education courses or professional qualifications.
There are many ways to get started. We’ve collated a number of further resources below.
Now that you understand more about what SEO is and how it works – how can you learn more?
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’s daily, weekly or monthly. You should also invest in attending at least one or two events per year.
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).
Here are some trusted resources and tips to help you grow as an SEO professional.
Search 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.
We’re biased, but we highly suggest you sign up to receive Search Engine Land’s free email newsletter featuring a roundup of the latest SEO news, and insights every weekday.
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