What Is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Best Practices (2024)

What are the main goals of SEO?

While every SEO campaign can have unique goals, most online publishers are united in wanting to achieve some or all of the five following results from their investment in optimization:

1. More visibility in the SERPs

The majority of Google users stay within the first page of Google’s results to find an answer to their query and 75% will click on either the first or second result on the page. Because of this behavior, one major goal of SEO is to rank more highly in the results for more searches. The more visible your content is, the better its chances of being found and chosen by the public.

At this stage in your learning it’s important for you to know that website owners shouldn’t pursue the myth of #1 search engine rankings, because entities like Google will show different results to different users based on the location of their devices and even minor differences in the language of their queries. A better goal than being #1 is to be highly visible to your focus audience for your most important searches across multiple SERP styles and features.

2. More traffic to your website and other assets

When searchers reach your site via clicking on the organic SERPs, this is known as “traffic”. Whether the click-thru-rate (CTR) to your website pages from the SERPs impacts organic rankings in Google is a matter of ongoing controversy and debate in the SEO industry. Bing confirms that they use both CTR and bounce rate (how quickly people leave your web page after landing on it) as ranking factors. But though the precise details of search engine algorithms remain secret, it stands to reason that a goal of SEO work is to bring more traffic from the SERPs to your online assets.

3. Better quality traffic to your website and other assets

While winning a slew of traffic from the SERPs may, at first, sound like a dream come true to any site owner, it will typically only impact basic business goals if this traffic converts into sales or other key actions. For example, an independently-owned doughnut shop in San Francisco might achieve first page rankings in Google for sourdough doughnuts. It might go viral on social media for a funny or unusual marketing campaign and make it into mainstream news. It might receive national or even international traffic from these rankings and efforts, but when its product is only actually available to be purchased by customers in its city, most of this traffic will not convert to sales and may be only nominally supportive of the viability of the company.

Because of this, a better goal than hoping for lots of traffic to your digital assets is to use SEO to strategize on how to win the most qualified traffic for what you offer, because this will typically have the highest conversion rate. High quality organic traffic depends on search engines determining that your content is highly relevant for the queries you discover are most likely to result in conversions, whether your conversions are defined as sales, filling out forms, phone calls, leads, or even just customers spending more time on your website. You can access further learning on measuring traffic quality in this blog post tutorial by Adriana Stern.

4. Greater intelligibility to the public

One of the best things you can do in learning about SEO is to understand it as a form of customer service. Google rewards content that is useful to the public. In fact, their 2022 Helpful Content algorithm update largely focused on how they reward sites that make a habit of publishing content that is of true use to searchers. For decades, Google has urged site owners to create content for people rather than for search engines.

SEO can help your site be more intelligible, discoverable, and usable to its potential visitors. Optimization influences both what your content looks like when shown within the SERPs and what your content looks and behaves like when searchers click through to your digital assets. Providing good service and a great user experience to the public is one of the most practical reasons to invest in SEO.

5. Greater intelligibility to search engines

In order for search engines to feature and reward your content so that you can earn the visibility, traffic, and conversions you need, your website and other assets need to be intelligible to the crawlers/spiders/bots that entities like Google and Bing use to crawl and index digital content. This is achieved by multiple SEO efforts that can be broken down into:

  • On-page SEO, which chiefly consists of how you optimize specific elements of a website page so that its contents are relevance are clear

  • Technical SEO, which chiefly consists of managing the technical backend of your website so that it can be effectively crawled, indexed, and understood by search engines.

  • Off-page SEO, which chiefly consists of how you earn links, citations, notice, and press from third parties, thereby building up the authority of your digital assets

Taken altogether, these three areas of SEO work to ensure that search engines can match your content to their perceived intent of searchers’ queries. The better search engines can understand your content, the better your chances of achieving high, broad, and highly-converting rankings. We’ll look into each of these three concepts more deeply next.

What Is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Best Practices (2024)

FAQs

What is SEO and how does it work? ›

SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.

What are the top 5 SEO strategies? ›

Try our new free SEO checker at SEO.com
  • Maintain a Fast, Mobile-friendly Website.
  • Target Long-tail Keywords.
  • Optimize Local Listings.
  • Create Helpful Content (and Optimize It for SEO)
  • Re-optimize Past Content.
  • And Remember — Measure Your ROI.
  • Help Your Business Improve Its Leads, Sales, and Revenue with SEO.

Which is a SEO search engine optimization method? ›

A formal definition of SEO:

Search engine optimization is a set of technical and content practices aimed at aligning a website page with a search engine's ranking algorithm so it can be easily found, crawled, indexed, and surfaced in the SERP for relevant queries.

How can I do SEO easily? ›

Help Google find your content
  1. Check if Google can see your page the same way a user does.
  2. Don't want a page in Google's search results?
  3. Use descriptive URLs.
  4. Group topically similar pages in directories.
  5. Reduce duplicate content.
  6. Expect your readers' search terms.
  7. Avoid distracting advertisements.
  8. Link to relevant resources.

What is an example of an SEO strategy? ›

Examples of on-page SEO strategies include performing keyword research, producing and promoting high-quality content, and optimizing your website's internal linking strategies, title tags, meta tags, and even images.

How do you explain SEO to dummies? ›

In practice, SEO is the art and science of matching your content - webpages, products and services-with what people are searching for online. It's a great way to ensure that your business, website, products and pages are easily found online via searches. Without SEO, no one will know you exist online.

What is SEO for beginners? ›

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving the performance, experience, and authority of your website so it can gain better visibility in search engines like Google. Specifically, SEO is about ranking higher in organic (unpaid) search results. Not paid or sponsored results.

How much does SEO cost per month? ›

How much does SEO cost? While many businesses pay between $1,500 to $5,000 per month for SEO, you could pay as little as $100 per month or upwards of $30,000, depending on several factors. SEO service pricing can vary largely depending on the size of your business, the scope of your project, and your SEO provider.

What are the 3 core must haves of SEO? ›

Learn the three essential pillars of SEO success: authority, relevance, and user experience. Explore how optimizing these factors can skyrocket your website's search rankings.

What are the 4 P's of SEO? ›

It is essential to apply the 4 P's “product,” “price,” “place” and “promotion” in the SEO strategy to improve online visibility and attract targeted traffic. In this way, the offer not only matches the target audience, but the content is also optimally displayed in search engine results.

What are the 3 C's of SEO? ›

Simply put, the fundamentals of SEO can be boiled down to The 3 Cs: content, code and credibility.

How does the SEO work? ›

SEO utilizes things like keywords, internal and external links, and optimized content to help search engines find content and rank websites higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

What is SEO in simple words? ›

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” 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: Products you sell.

What is the best SEO practice off-page or on-page? ›

On-page SEO focuses on optimizing parts of your website that are within your control, while off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your domain through content creation and earning backlinks from other websites.

What is the best structure for SEO? ›

The best SEO-friendly URL structure is hierarchical, which moves from general pages, with optimized URLs, to more specific ones. Hierarchical navigation is tree-like in nature. The home page is at the top, underneath which are category pages that can be further broken into different sub-categories.

How do I get the best results from SEO? ›

Five Ways to Improve Your Site's Ranking (SEO)
  1. Publish Relevant, Authoritative Content. We believe that on-page SEO is the key to improving search engine success on Google and other search engines. ...
  2. Update Your Content Regularly. ...
  3. Metadata. ...
  4. Have a link-worthy site. ...
  5. Optimize for mobile and execute technical SEO.

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