SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization”, it is a process of website optimization as per search engine standards to get better rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). In this blog, we will discuss what is SEO, how SEO works, why it is important, and how you can rank your website higher on search engines like Google and Bing.

Second definition – SEO is a branch of digital marketing that caters to the audience who puts their query in the search bar of any search engine.

Target Audience for this blog are

• Website owners
• Blog writers
• SEO Learners
• Search engine optimizer
• Anyone who wants to learn about SEO in detail
• People who want to make their website search engine friendly

Why SEO is Important in 2024

Why SEO is important and why enterprises invest millions of dollars in SEO marketing. The simple answer is that SEO helps in revenue generation. Let’s have a look at the facts

• 4.9 billion people across the world use the internet
• 4 billion people search on Google search
• 60% of marketers believe that leads from SEO have a better closing rate (Hubspot)
• There are 3.5 billion searches per day on Google (Internet Live Stats)
• 39% of purchasers influenced by search (Think with Google)

With billions of searches per day starting from the search bar of a search engine, potential buyers for your product or services are looking for you on search engines. This data is what makes digital marketing and especially SEO important.

By ranking higher on search engines, you will have the following advantages

• Showcase your product and services in front of an interested buyer
• Reach directly to hyper-targeted audience
• The person searching may be in urgent need, so lead quality increases
• Increased brand awareness
• Improves credibility
• 24/7 promotions
• Better ROI in the longer run

Now you understand the importance of SEO, let’s discover more about search engines and their working before jumping into the process of improving search engine rankings or search rankings whatever you call that.

Major Search Engines

Let us discuss the major search engines first. Although there are many search engines out there, Google is at the top. SEO fundamentals and factors for ranking remain the same for all search engines with few differences.

Google

Google has a market share of a whopping 91.62% (Oberlo). Google has been dominating the search engine space for a very long time now. Google created a market for itself that became synonymous with search engines. Major SEO agencies and businesses out there focus completely on Google’s search results.

Bing

Bing has a market share of 3.31% and is owned by IT giant Microsoft. Bing is the default search engine for Microsoft Edge. In 2009, Bing replaced Microsft’s old search engine “MSN search”.

Yandex

Yandex is a Russian IT company that has a 1.84% share of the search engine market. Yandex is popular in Russia and some parts of Eastern Europe. In Russia, Yandex has 71.53% market share beating Google by 44.23%.

For more details about search engine market share – List of Top 10 Search Engines With Market Share

Search Engine Marketing vs. Optimization

One major confusion people have is the difference between Search Engine Marketing (SEM aka search marketing) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engine marketing or search marketing is an umbrella term for Search Engine Ads (SEA or aka paid search or PPC)+ Search Engine Optimization. And SEM is part of digital marketing.

SEM = SEA (or paid search) + SEO

In simple words, when you get organic search traffic it’s because of SEO, and when you get search traffic from ads it’s SEA (paid search). Both SEA (paid search) and SEO combine to create SEM.

Learn more about SEO vs. PPC – SEO vs PPC: Who is Winning the Powerful Debate

Understanding How Search Engines Work

Now when you want to optimize your website for search engines like Google, you need to know the machine first. In this section, we will talk about how search engines work. Search engines have four major steps

• Crawl
• Index
• Rank

Think of it as a mobile number you saved. You ask someone for their contact number, you feed that in your phone, and that is crawling. The software on your mobile saves it to your contact list with the given information like name, this is indexing. When you want to call, you open your dialer and put down their name and your phone will respond with all the possible contacts with a given name. Now the only difference with search engines is the majority of the factors will impact the list. Lets check the complete process

Crawling

Search engine crawls a website using web crawlers (bots or spiders). These bots collect information from a webpage and feed it to search engines. They try to collect all the possible information from a webpage, from title tags to content, internal links, and pathways.

Indexing

Once data is collected search algorithms process this data based on relevant keywords and queries and store this for future reference. This step is called indexing.

Ranking

Once the indexing process is done, your webpage is ready to be served in SERPs. Ranking is a typical process, it further splits in

• Query processing: Search engines get a query from the user and process it. Based on this process, the search algorithm matches the relevance of all the indexed pages and responds with best match results
• Feedback Loop: Based on user intentions, the search algorithm keeps learning about user behavior and frequently analyzes the results shown. In case, the search algorithm finds any content less relevant or not usable for the user, it will give ranking to other webpages with higher relevance.

This is how search engines work to provide the most relevant results to their user.

Remember, a search engine works for the user, not the business.

Components of SEOs

Now, what is SEO was previously answered, let’s dig deeper into the types of SEO. While creating any SEO strategy, we keep 3 components in mind.

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

While working on search engine optimization, we broadly segment the process under these 3 components. Each of these is crucial in its way and helps a website rank higher in search engines.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing individual web pages and making them relevant to the target audience. Under this part of search engine optimization, you deal with

• Keyword research and creating high-quality content
• HTML tags like title tags, meta description tags, image alt tags
• URL Structure
• Internal links and more
• Content readability and more

Read more about on-page SEO – On-Page SEO: What, Why and How of Onsite Optimization

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is a search engine optimization activity that you do not perform directly on your website. Many people confuse this with link building but that’s not the case. Off-page SEO consists of many factors such as

• Link building
• Brand Mentions
• Forum Engagement
• Signal from social media sites
• Content promotion on other sites
• influencer blogging or Guest blogging
• User review sites and more

Learn more about off-page SEO – Off-Page SEO:  What and How of Off-Page Strategies

Technical SEO

Here comes the trickiest part of search engine optimization, technical SEO. Previously it was part of on-page optimization but with the betterment of search engine algorithms, technical optimization in itself became an important part. Here we optimize the architecture of a website. The major factors of technical optimization are

• Sitemap and XML file
• Website structure and architecture
• Page speed optimization
• Security of a website (https)
• Redirect management

Read more in detail about technical search engine optimization – Technical SEO: What, Why & How To Implement

Stages of Basic SEO Strategy

You understand about basic SEO components, but how to approach any SEO campaign? This section is dedicated to basic SEO strategy development and campaign creation. Before jumping, SEO may work differently for different websites but the core structure will remain the same. Use the following strategy to kick off any SEO campaign.

Industry Research

Start with researching about the industry, and what type of content is served in the given industry. For example, a SaaS website is catering to its audience differently than an eCommerce website. Keep the following sequence while approaching

• Create Buyer Persona
• Do SWOT analysis
• Analyze direct competitors
• Look for industry trends
• Set clear goals and KPIs
• Create a basic website structure for product, service, and blog pages
• Define major pages based on your initial research

Once you do this, let’s move to keyword research.

Keyword Research

Your organic search traffic will depend on how good your keyword research is. Once you understand your target audience and finalize the pages. Jump into keyword research page by page using the following steps

• Start with brainstorming basic search queries and keyword ideas
• List the core keywords and research around them
• Do competitor keyword gap research for the dedicated pages
• Compile the list and sort
• Finalize seed keywords
• Include long tail keywords
• Important KPIs are: Search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent
• Group all keywords
• Make sure your keywords match the search intent

Now your keyword sheet is ready, let’s create the content.

Learn more about Keyword Research – SEO Keyword Research: What, How and Why

Creating Content

Creating content wisely is important because content will provide higher search rankings. Search engines discover content first while crawling and indexing. High-quality content provides you an edge over other websites. Points to consider while creating content

• Your content should be relevant to the audience
• No keyword stuffing at all
• Try not to use the same set of keywords for multiple contents
• Content structure and hierarchy should be maintained
• Do not make it too promotional
• Do not try to be Shakespeare, write in layman’s terms

Content is ready to be served, use these tips to create content for all the required pages or create a whole content marketing campaign, your wish.

Building High-Quality Backlinks

Your website is live with content next what? Acquiring backlinks. Try acquiring backlinks from high-quality and credible websites of your niche. Link building is a long-term process and should be performed weekly. Here are the best ways for link acquisition

• Guest Posting
• HARO (Help a reporter out)
• Link Insertion
• Resource Link Building
• Broken Link Building
• Local Citations
• Directory Submissions

Learn more about link building – SEO Backlinks 101: 25 Types of Backlinks You Need to Know

Top Ranking Factors Impacting Search Engine Results – Checklist

You learned about the components of search engine optimization (SEO), the basic strategy to get search engine traffic, and basic details about it. Let’s go one step further into search engine ranking factors. Now at this stage, you’re one of the website owners and will outsource your SEO marketing but learning more about how SEO works will not hurt you. In case, you’re an aspiring SEO, this section is your gold mine. Let’s deepen your SEO knowledge.

Keywords

As we discussed earlier, good keyword research is where our SEO success starts but some factors need to be taken care of,

Head/Seed Keyword: The head keyword is the major or short keyword around which our webpage content revolves. An example of head keywords are “shoes” or “Shoes for men”

Long Tail and Phrase Match keywords: Long tail and phrase match keywords are the keywords that contain our seed or head keywords. Examples of long tail keywords are “red shoes for men” or “red shoes for men size 9”

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords: LSI, keywords are a bit tricky. These are keywords that are conceptually related to your product or service. These can be NLP (natural language process) or synonyms of your actual term. But relevantly using these keywords will improve your content quality and increase topical relevance. Continuing with the example, the LSI keyword for “Shoes for men” can be “Men’s footwear” or “Men’s Boot”. Remember these keywords should match search intent.

Content

When Google’s index starts, content becomes the most important part. Content is used not only for service or product pages but for every page. Whether you are creating a sales page or a whole content marketing campaign, content is everywhere. Creating high-quality content is base of every SEO strategy. Following are a few points that search engines love

Length: People discover content online and they love it if it does not drag. Always write content for optimum length. Not too short that cause a lack of information and not too long that drags.

Relevance: Writing relevant content for your audience should be your prime objective. Don’t show off.

Content Usability: Structure your content properly with headings and subheadings, respecting hierarchy. Check how other websites in your niche used their content.

Readability: Nobody cares if you’re William Wordsworth, wordsmithery will not help if the content is not readable.

Freshness: Keep your content up-to-date, update it, and keep it relevant.

Website Navigation

Website navigation is a map of your website, not only users but search engines as well. Search engines discover and prioritize your web pages based on your navigation. Apart from that a good navigation helps you in

• Better crawling
• User Experience (UX)
• Internal Linking
• Website Accessibility
• Creating topical relevance
• It shows consistency

Internal Linking

Apart from navigation, another way of internal linking is through content. A good and relevant internal linking structure helps your website for

• Discovering new content
• Reducing bounce rate
• Providing context to your topic
• Passing link juice
• Passing signals to search engines about other content
• Creating topical Relevance

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, this is strongly related to your SEO success. Previously it was only EAT but later an extra E for Experience was added. It refers to Search Quality Rating Guidelines.

A few points to consider for better EEAT

• Establish expertise
• Highlight awards and recognitions
• Create in-depth content
• Maintain transparency about your business and content
• Display Privacy Policy and Contact Information
• Create a clean and user-friendly website
• Build a strong backlink profile from authority sites in your niche

User Experience and Design

As mentioned in E-E-A-T, user-friendly design and content play an important role in establishing authority and trust. Do not invest tons and tons of money in design, keep it basic yet transparent and clean.

Apart from E-E-A-T, a website with good UI/UX will help you in:

• Lower bounce rates
• Mobile-friendliness
• Higher user engagement
• Better readability
• Better accessibility
• Branding
• Good page speed

Page Load Speed

40% of users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Yes, you heard it right, 3 seconds. A fast-loading page improves

• User experience
• Bounce rates
• Dwell time
• Search rankings
• Conversion rate

You can improve page speed by

• Compressing heavy images
• Render blocking
• Minify CSS and Javascript
• Enable browser caching
• Buy good server with better response time
• Employ CDN
• Choose fast-loading fonts

HTML Tags

HTML tags help search engines to get the gist of your page. It helps to understand

• Overview of the page
• Structure and hierarchy
• Type of content
• Makes crawling easy

Title Tag: Title tagDefines the title of the page which appears in Google search results

Meta Description Tag: Description summarises your page under 160 characters. This also appears in search and helps your CTR.

Image Alt Tag: This tag is used to describe the image on a webpage in textual form. Search engines can’t see images, they understand by alt tag. With the evolution of AI, images are now can be analyzed but alt tag still plays a role in Image SEO, where your image shows up in search results under the image section of different search engines.

Header Tag: Header tags help search engines understand the page structure and hierarchy of the page.

Anchor Tag: Anchor tag helps to know about relevant pages, citations, or sources. If you use anchor tags and anchor text properly, this will boost the authority and relevance of your webpage.

CTR (Click-through rate)

CTR (Click-through rate) signals search engines whether your page is worthy to stay in search results or not. A good CTR signals that your webpage is highly relevant to the search query and it needs to be shown on top of search rankings. On the other side, a poor CTR signals that your webpage is not relevant and eventually you will lose ranking in search results. To improve CTR

• Write catchy titles and meta description
• Integrate schema properly (like ratings)

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) Structure

As the name suggests, URLs are used to locate pages. The more relevant a URL is, easy to understand the purpose of the page. Usually SEO experts keep the head keyword as URL but there are few more points to consider.

• URL should be short and memorable
• It should denote the hierarchy of a website
• Avoid special characters
• Always lowercase letters
• Avoid stop words

Sitemap File

Sitemap is a search engine’s assistant on your website. It serves all the pages of your site for search engines. You cannot put every page under navigation, so it helps search bots crawl deep and unlisted pages. It tells search bots about the freshness of your content, the last update, and more. Eventually helps deep pages to be listed in search results.

Points to consider about sitemap

• It should be updated
• Use XML format
• Regularly check for errors
• Submit to Google and other search engines.

Robots.txt

Robots file instructs Google about crawling of a website. Most people are confused about the usage of robot files. Sitemap on the other hand tells Google and other search engines to serve a list of live pages that may or may not include private pages. In case you want to block any page from being listed in search results, the robots file does that.

A few points about robots

• Helps to control crawling
• Saves crawl budget
• Manage online resources
• Protects sensitive information

Schema Markup

Schema markup aka structured data is a form of microdata that is attached with your webpage. It enhance the readability of your webpage for search engines and its representation in search results. Schema.org is a collaborative effort of Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

A few important points about structured data

• Enhance search results
• Improves CTR
• Voice search friendly

There are different types of Schema Markups

• Article
• Organization
• Local Business
• Product
• Breadcrumbs
• You can browse the whole list here – https://schema.org/Library

Backlinks

After content backlinks are the most important ranking factors. Backlinks can be explained as the number of sites linking to your website.

Good quality backlinks can help you climb higher in search results. On the other hand, bad-quality backlinks will drag you down. Google and other search engines count backlinks as authority factors but remember not every backlink is respected the same way.

Backlinks also serve as a great source of referral traffic if acquired the right way.

Some good quality backlinks

• Guest Post
• Link Insertion
• HARO
• Resource Links
• Citations

Bad Backlinks

• Created just for link-building purposes
• Links from low-quality websites
• Sitewide backlinks
• Off-topic backlinks
• Link farms and PBNs
• Paid Links

Core Web Vitals

Last on this list is core web vitals.

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics introduced by Google that measure the real-world user experience of a website. These metrics are part of Google’s page experience ranking signals and play an important role in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The three Core Web Vitals are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP measures the time it takes for the main content of a web page to load and become visible.
  Good LCP score: 2.5 seconds or faster.
• First Input Delay (FID): FID measures the time it takes for a web page to become interactive and respond to user input, such as clicking a button or scrolling.
  Good FID score: 100 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures the visual stability of a web page by quantifying the unexpected layout shifts that occur during page load.
  Good CLS score: 0.1 or less.

Optimizing Core Web Vitals can have a significant impact on SEO for several reasons:

• User Experience
• Page Experience Signals
• Competitive Advantage

To improve your Core Web Vitals, you can implement strategies such as

• Optimizing images and media
• Minimizing render-blocking resources
• Leveraging caching and compression
• Implementing performance budgets. Additionally, tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and web.dev can help you measure and identify areas for improvement in your Core Web Vitals scores.

Free SEO Tools and KPIs

There are many paid tools out there that you can use but I’m here to provide you with a list of free tools that will help you climb on search results.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword research tool by Google Ads. Primarily is a paid search keyword research tool but we can search keywords to improve organic traffic.

A few points for Keyword Planner

• This tool is for paid ads
• While discovering keywords, you can also put in other sites for keyword ideas
• Do not over-rely on this tool
• This tool will give you a range of search volumes.

More tools for keyword research

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google. A Google Search Console account is used to submit your website specifically to Google to rank on its organic search results. You can use this tool to

• Submit your website to Google
• Submit your sitemap to Google
• Find your ranking and clicks in Google’s organic search
• Check indexed pages
• Find indexing issues with your website
• Helps to fix geo-targeting

Bing Webmaster Tools

Similar to the Google Search Console, Bing has its tool for website submission, which is Bing Webmaster Tools. Both tools work nearly the same way.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another tool from Google that is used to track and analyze the traffic on the website. Analytics is used far more than just SEO. Analytics is used to check demographics, geography, devices, and more. It is widely used to understand user behavior.

Check more SEO tools here –

Important SEO KPIs for Reporting

At this point, you are capable of ranking your website higher in organic search but how will you monitor and track your progress? Here are the KPIs (Key performance indicators), to track your SEO success.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) Rankings: Always track the rankings of your targeted pages. Always check where your website is ranking in competition with other websites.

Tools used – Manual, Google Search Console

CTR: As mentioned earlier CTR is an important signal once you get rankings. If your website’s performance is continuously poor, Google will prioritize other websites over yours. Regularly track CTR and always try to improve the tags of your webpage.

Tools used – Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters

Organic Traffic: Ranking is fine but how many visited your website? Website visits from organic search are important. Many people confuse this with overall website visits but for SEO, visits from organic search results matter. In SEO, organic traffic is the most important metric.

Tools – Analytics (Organic Search)

Bounce Rate – Bounce rate is counted as how many percentages of website visitors saw only a single page of your website.

The formula for bounce rate

Bounce Rate = (Single Page Sessions / Total Sessions) x 100

The tool used – Analytics

Conversions – Traffic that does not convert is a waste of time and money. Always track your gal conversions. Conversion can be anything purchase, sign-ups, email collection, lead forms, or something. Tracking conversions helps you understand your customer behavior and you can amend as per that. Remember, calculate conversions against organic traffic, not overall traffic.

Tool used – Analytics

How SEO Changes Based Type of Website

As mentioned earlier SEO fundamentals remain the same, what changes is targeting style and strategy.

eCommerce SEO

• Focus on product page optimization (titles, descriptions, images, schema markup)
• Optimize for transactional keywords (e.g., “buy [product],” “[product] for sale”)
• Implement faceted navigation and filtering for better UX
• Optimize for local search and in-store pickup (if applicable)
• Prioritize page speed and mobile-friendliness
• Build backlinks from product reviews, supplier/manufacturer sites, and industry publications

Enterprise SEO

• Manage large-scale content optimization and website architecture
• Implement enterprise-level technical SEO (crawlability, indexation, structured data)
• Optimize for branded search and brand defense
• Leverage internal linking and siloing strategies
• Prioritize content governance and workflow processes
• Focus on complex B2B keyword targeting and content marketing

Small Business SEO

• Optimize for local search and “near me” queries
• Build citations and local business listings (Google My Business, Bing Places, etc.)
• Encourage online reviews and testimonials
• Develop location-specific content and landing pages
• Focus on on-page optimization and user experience
• Build relationships with local influencers, bloggers, and media outlets

Local SEO

• Optimize Google My Business listing with accurate NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information
• Claim and optimize local business listings on major directories (Yelp, Bing Places, etc.)
• Implement location-specific pages and content
• Build local citations and backlinks from local sources
• Encourage online reviews and customer testimonials
• Optimize for voice search and mobile-friendly experiences

News SEO

• Focus on optimizing for timely, trending, and newsworthy topics
• Implement schema markup for articles, news, and multimedia
• Optimize for query deserving freshness (QDF) and freshness algorithms
• Build authority and credibility through high-quality journalism and reporting
• Leverage social media marketing and content amplification strategies
• Optimize for voice search and featured snippets

While the core principles of SEO remain the same (technical optimization, quality content, backlinks, etc.), the specific tactics and areas of focus shift based on the website’s purpose, target audience, and business goals. Tailoring your SEO strategy to align with your website type can lead to better results and a more efficient optimization process.

If you like the article share it with the site owners and SEO learners who can benefit from this. Do share your feedback in the comments.