What Is SEO & How Does It Work? The SEO Quick Beginner’s Guide

What is SEO in digital marketing?

SEO in digital marketing is a strategy that focuses on your website’s presence in the search results. It involves various techniques to help you improve your rankings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component of your digital marketing strategy. It can help more members of your target audience discover your business online, so you can expand your reach and increase your revenue.

On this page, we’ll cover the basics of SEO and answer some common questions, including:

• What is SEO?
• How does SEO work?
• How do search engines work?
• What are the benefits of SEO in digital marketing?
• How does SEO in digital marketing compare to SEM and PPC?
• What are the types of SEO?

What is SEO?

SEO is a strategy that focuses on your website’s presence in search results on search engines like Google. It involves using various techniques to improve your website to help both search engines and consumers better understand your website.

How does SEO work?

When you implement an SEO strategy, you optimize your website to show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords and phrases related to your business. You’ll also submit your website URLs to Google (and other search engines) so they can show up in the SERPs.

With SEO, you’ll implement techniques that improve your website’s user experience to ensure that your site gives your audience answers to their queries. These improvements will send positive signals to search engines that your website provides value to users.

As a result, search engines will rank your website higher in the SERPs, and you’ll have more chances at traffic, leads, and sales.

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How do search engines work?

The hub of SEO — the search engine framework — is the key to understanding why SERPs showcase certain pages over others. Search engines are intricate systems that study all the websites across the Internet and organize the information for you.

So, how do search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo digest such an immense amount of data? Search engines go through three steps — crawling, indexing, and ranking — to yield the strongest results.

The anatomy of a search result

Let’s start by exploring what a search engine results page (SERP) looks like. A SERP consists of paid and organic results.

Paid results consist of websites that have paid Google to appear at the top of the search results. You can identify them by the “Sponsored” tag that appears above the title.

After the three paid results, you’ll see the full list of organic results that make up the rest of the page. These results consist of websites that haven’t paid to appear in the results. Google picked these websites to appear based on a number of ranking factors, like relevance, keyword targeting, user experience, and more.

Crawling and indexing

Search engines use special bots or search crawlers to inspect all the nooks and crannies of the Internet.

They find websites by “crawling” from URL to URL, and as they move through pages, the bots scrutinize the main text and supplementary parts of the page.

Search bots collect these details in a comprehensive index, and they’re sorted into categories based on the title, URL, media, and text. This pool of websites gets dipped into later when someone searches related words.

The crawling mechanism also follows the links on pages, which act as trails across the web. If your website isn’t easy for the crawlers to locate, it can remain invisible to search engines and be left off the index.

Ranking

The contents of the index then serve as candidates for searches, and further algorithms determine how well it matches search terms or “keywords.”

If the page is informative, reliable, and meets a variety of other standards, it has a better ranking.

Organic and paid results

There are also two types of results you’ll find — organic and paid results. The difference between organic search and paid search is organic search is free, and paid search is paid.

When you submit a search to a search engine, the results display paid and organic listings — paid listings will have the word “Ad” attached to them. Click on a paid listing, and the advertiser will pay for that click. Click on an organic listing, and the website owner will pay nothing.

SEO is all about improving your rankings in organic search results.

What are the benefits of SEO in digital marketing?

SEO is an essential strategy that can help your business grow and reach new heights.

Check out more benefits of SEO in digital marketing below:

• Boost online visibility: SEO helps you boost your online visibility and brand awareness. When you implement an SEO strategy for your business, your website will appear higher in the search results. That means more members of your target audience discover your business online.
• Increase website traffic: You can drive more traffic to your website when you increase your rankings in the SERPs. As a result, more users visit your website, read your content, and check out your products and services to increase sales and revenue for your business.
• Stand out from competitors: SEO enables you to outrank your biggest competitors in the search results. That means you can boost your credibility as an expert in your field to outshine your competitors and attract new customers.

SEO is a valuable strategy that enables you to acquire new customers and continuously promote your products and services online to drive more sales and revenue for your business.

What are the types of SEO?

Before you start implementing an SEO strategy for your company, it’s essential to first understand the different types of SEO in digital marketing, also known as the pillars of SEO.

Here are the types of SEO in digital marketing:

1. 1. On-page SEO
   2. Off-page SEO
   3. Technical SEO

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1. On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to optimizations that take place directly on your website to improve your SEO. With on-page SEO, you focus on ensuring that your website is easy to use and provides value to users by answering their questions and giving them solutions to their queries.

Here are a few elements you can focus on optimizing with on-page SEO:

• Keywords
• URLs
• Title tags
• Header tags
• Meta descriptions

On-page SEO enables you to improve your website to help users and search engines better understand your website. For example, by optimizing your titles, you can inform search engines and users about your page’s topic. As a result, you can increase your rankings and encourage users to click on your site.

2. Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to optimizations that take place outside of your website. With off-page SEO, you focus on your website’s authority. While your website or domain authority isn’t an official Google ranking factor, it can help boost your rankings by creating a site with valuable content that people and websites link back to.

This process can involve earning links from other websites, shares on social media platforms, and other mentions of your website across the Internet. Off-page SEO can include:

• Creating accurate, valuable, and high-quality content
• Sharing your content on social media
• Connecting with influencers
• Reaching out to other websites to host something that you’ve written

Your authority can determine whether search engines and users view your business as an expert in your field. And a high authority will help your online reputation and search rankings blossom.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to optimizations that make your website easy for search engine crawlers and users to use and understand. Search engine crawlers index pages and websites for search engines. In other words, search engine crawlers help search engines store your page and website data to use for future searches.

With technical SEO, you focus on optimizing the back-end of your website, such as your:

• Page load speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Navigation
• And more

Your page design, navigation, and loading speed impacts how easily your audience and crawlers can use and understand your website. When your website loads quickly and ensures that users can easily find the information they need, you can help your site rank higher in the SERPs.

How does SEO in digital marketing compare to SEM and PPC?

While exploring SEO strategies, you might come across the terms search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you’re wondering what these terms are and how they differ from SEO, we’ve got you covered.

SEO vs. SEM

Like we discussed above, SEO focuses on improving your website’s rankings in the organic search results. These are the results that display below the sponsored (paid) results.

SEM, on the other hand, is an umbrella term that focuses on improving your rankings in the both the organic and paid results. As a result, if you implement a SEM strategy, you’ll find yourself launching ads that appear at the top and bottom of the search results.

SEO vs. PPC

PPC is a digital advertising strategy that involves launching ads on search engines like Google. It’s often referred to as paid search.

With PPC, you’ll bid on keywords and phrases that you want your website to appear for in the search engine results.

So, PPC focuses on the paid side of search engine marketing, while SEO focuses on the organic (free) side.

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