Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

At its core, SEO is the process of ranking a website as high as possible in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) of search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing, particularly for the most relevant and valuable keywords to your target demographic, driving qualified traffic to your site.¹

How Do You Do SEO?

When considering how to optimize a website to rank higher in search results, there are two audiences to consider: Search Engines and the Website’s Target Audience.

At the end of the day, search engines are businesses. They (ideally) provide users with the ability to search for and find info they need, when, how, and where they need it. Successful search engines are able to collect lots of attention in a concentrated place (SERPs), where people are searching for keywords and looking through the results. Search engine companies can then rent out space on the SERP to advertisers to place ads in front of users. Search engines want to give users the best experience possible to keep them coming back for more, so they can exchange their attention and data with advertisers for as much money as possible.

To optimize a website so that it ranks better in search engine results, it is important to understand what it is that search engine companies believe keeps users coming back to their service.

On the other hand, the target audience of a website – the group of people that do or ideally would engage with a website – consists of people that conduct searches on a search engine with a certain goal in mind AKA a specific Search Intent. Whether a person wants to learn something, go to a specific website, or compare purchase options and then make an online purchase, they come to search engines with a problem for which they intend to find a solution for among some website/web page.

To optimize a website so that it ranks better in search engine results, it is fundamental to tailor the content and experience to best satisfy the search intent of its target audience.

For somebody that is trying to improve a site’s rankings, this can be summarized as follows:

Successfully improving the SERP rankings of a website requires an understanding of what search engines demand from websites, as well as what your target audience demands from websites. The intersection of these demands requires a website that is technically sound, with content, design, and an overall experience that both the search engine and audience deem to be appropriate and of high value.

The 3 Pillars of SEO

With a conceptual understanding of where to start with Search Engine Optimization, the next step is to understand what functional tasks actually would need to be undertaken to improve the rankings of a website. (Keep in mind: Basics of Marketing does not intend to provide the exact steps to every process in marketing. Rather, the intent is to provide a clear understanding of why and how things are done to create a strong foundation for further learning.)

Most every task and process of SEO largely falls into one of three categories: The 3 Pillars of SEO

Technical SEO – Accessibility/Usability/Crawlability/Indexability
On-Page SEO – Maximizing Value for Audiences
Off-Page SEO – Authority & Reputation

Technical SEO mainly concerns enabling search engines to crawl and index a site, ensuring a site can be delivered from servers to a user, and mitigating technical issues, such as slow load speed, broken URLs, and cyber security threats.² The goal of Technical SEO is to ensure accessibility of a site and the best user experience possible.

On-Page SEO primarily consists of optimizing site content to be as high value as possible for your two audiences: search engines and target audiences. Functionally, this involves conducting keyword research and implementing keywords properly on-page, creating content that emphasizes E-E-A-T principles while satisfying users’ search intent, using appropriate metadata, and implementing effective internal linking, to name a few things.

Off-page SEO focuses on building authority and reputation for a website via external signals, namely backlinks and social signals. Just like a personal reputation, the trustworthiness and credibility of a website are influenced by the quantity and quality of its connections.

Sidenote: With the existence of Social Media search functions and ecommerce search functions like on Amazon as well, it’s important to note that SEO typically refers to optimizing websites for major consumer search engines, but the same principles are relevant to other search functions as well.