Before you jumpstart the SEO or Search Engine Optimization process, it is important for you to understand that SEO is indeed quite complex.
There are different types of SEO available to your business. However, regardless of the type, SEO has one goal: to enhance the website’s visibility on search engines and drive traffic to the site.
In this blog, I will talk about the different types of SEO and how you can use each of them for your business.
What are the types of SEO?
Before we learn about what are the types of SEO, let us start with a brief explanation of what SEO is.
SEO is a technique to optimize your website so that it is easy to understand for both search engines and your end-users. SEO’s ultimate aim is to maximize organic search engine traffic by improving the website ranking for different keyword phrases on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
SEO was quite simple and straightforward in the beginning. Since then, the global market has expanded multifold, which led to the intricacies that we see in SEO processes today.
No more can you simply plug in a few keywords to rank #1, today you must evaluate countless SEO guidelines when optimizing a website for search engines to meet the numerous search engine ranking factors while ensuring the users are satisfied.
Different Types of SEO
There are majorly three types of SEO that helps you increase organic search traffic: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. You can organize the execute your SEO strategy by breaking down your strategy into these three categories.
The SEO industry has segmented SEO into different types to make it easier to navigate. A variety of SEO rules apply to each category.
What is crucial to know is that these SEO subsets are not separate processes but rather a way to simplify a complex process that is simpler to handle in several smaller components.
Different Types of SEO Services include:
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Content SEO
- Local SEO
- Mobile SEO
- Ecommerce SEO
Of all the types of SEO in digital marketing, Technical, On-Page and Off-Page SEO, they are considered the most relevant. Please take out your shovels because we are digging deep on each SEO Services.
Before that, check out my Ultimate SEO Checklist covering all types of SEO and all the must-have factors for each type. Let us get started.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO, as the name suggests, includes the technical elements on the backend of the website that influences its ranking on search engines.
SEO’s primary purpose is to guarantee that search engine crawlers can easily access and index a website.
The key technical SEO recommendations are as follows:
- To ensure that search engines are able to access your site properly by reviewing and optimizing your website’s robots.txt file.
- Establish your preferred domain and connect your website with Google Search Console.
- Locate and repair crawl errors using the COVERAGE report.
- Set an XML Sitemap and submit it to all big search engines.
- Keep the site structure simple and optimize the structure of your URLs.
- Ensure that you follow the SEO best practices for your website’s design.
- Develop websites that easily load on both mobile and desktop.
Check out this article to learn everything you should know about Technical SEO
On-Page SEO
The concept of On-Page SEO is more about the page itself and how to make it easier for search engines to crawl the site and ensure a high-end user experience for your target audience.
One thing to note- A website is ranked on a single page basis by search engines and not just the website as a whole. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that each page of your website is optimized.
Some of the most important On-page SEO elements include:
Optimizing page titles: One of the most critical aspects of SEO is optimizing Page Titles because search engines display the page titles on the SERP. So, they must be exciting and worth clicking on for the user. Additionally, make sure that the title also includes enough explanation for the content of the page.
Optimizing Meta Description: The meta description of a webpage offers a concise overview of the content of the page. Search engines mostly show the meta-description in search results, which can impact your site’s click-through rate. Optimizing the meta description means ensuring that the description copy is not only explaining your service but is persuasive and integrated with relevant keywords.
Optimizing H1 Tags: While page titles are displayed on the SERP, the H1 tag in all its glory is shown on a website’s header. Bear in mind that the H1 tag shares a similar value as the page title, so adding one H1 tag is considered to be one of the best practices for SEO.
Optimizing other headers: Along with the H1 tag, a web page requires to include subheaders (H2, H3) for the various sections. Subheadings make the page easier to read by users and search by crawlers in the case of long-form content.
Optimizing Images: It is important to properly optimize all images used on a website because search engines do not really comprehend their significance without it. Elements of Image SEO include optimizing the filename, the size of the image, ALT text and more.
Optimizing the page format: It is not good SEO custom to publish a website with just text and photos without investing time in embellishing the User Interface and content of the website. Although Google cannot see the page like a human would, they understand how a page looks, including factors such as if it is loaded with ads and popups, which heavily impacts its ranking.
Further read: On-page SEO: A Complete Guide for SEO Beginners
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is about publicity altogether. Whereas other SEO types mainly focused on the website’s infrastructure and content, off-page SEO works around the tactics that you can use to market your website on the Internet.
In general, the more popular you are on the Internet, the higher the chances of you ranking on the #Top10 of Google SERP, as compared to less popular websites.
The most vital off-page SEO strategies are:
Link Building: The method of getting SEO backlinks from other websites is known as link building. These backlinks function as ‘trust votes’ and raise the website’s credibility (this only works if the link attached has a do-follow attribute).
Marketing your Brand Name: Since customers trust and respect them, Google tends to rate established brands higher in the rankings.
In addition to promoting your website to get backlinks, you can also promote your brand by encouraging engagement and conversations on different social media networks, blogs, forums etc.
Google can accumulate these signals and award websites that people talk about the most.
Content SEO
In all actuality, content SEO is a part of on-page SEO and makes the content better and more efficient.
Since it is a very significant factor in ensuring that your SEO performs well, many consider it to be a type of SEO on its own.
You will often find many content SEO guidelines overlapping with On-Page SEO guidelines, which is also a good approach for optimizing your content.
However, the best thing to do is to publish quality content that search engines can understand, and users can enjoy Aka win-win for both.
You should follow these instructions to do this:
- Commence your content creation process with in-depth keyword research. After that, please select the most useful SEO keywords for the website and integrate them into your website’s content.
- Furthermore, add long-tail keywords and semantically related keywords (or LSI) to your page title, header tags and in your content as well.
- Publish detailed and lengthy enough content that users can grasp the meaning of your content and provide sufficient information to the search engines too.
- To help people know a little more about the topic, link your content to other high-quality and relevant websites and other pages on your site.
- Use schemas and structured data to identify essential elements of the content for search engines.
Further Read: Content marketing strategy
Local SEO
One of the most important and impactful SEO types, Local SEO is most beneficial for local businesses. That is, you should optimize your website for local SEO if your goal is to get more clients to visit your local store.
All of the above guidelines about on-page SEO, Off-page SEO and Technical SEO are also valid for Local SEO. In addition, you need to follow the below guidelines:
- Ensure that all pages on your website include your business name, your address and contact information(NAP information).
- Link your homepage with the Local Business Schema.
- Generate a Google My Business Account and connect it with your site.
- Connect your company on verified directories such as Yelp, Yahoo, Foursquare and more.
- Market your website on local guides such as local newspapers and cross-promote with other local businesses.
Further Read: Local SEO Guide
Mobile SEO
Yet another not a real SEO type, Mobile SEO is a subset of SEOs for certain mobile devices.
However, with the rise in usage of mobile devices, Mobile SEO has made quite an impact. As a matter of fact, more than 60% of Google searches are now conducted via mobile devices. That’s a lot!
This is an incredible number and a positive indicator of the Internet moving away from conventional laptops and desktops and is moving towards mobile devices.
No wonder Google introduced its iconic Mobile-first Index algorithm, which gave the website’s mobile version a higher preference as a ranking factor than the desktop one.
While optimizing your site for mobile SEO, you need to take care of the following things:
- Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. You can do that by running a mobile-friendliness test using a free tool by Google.
- Make sure that the site efficiently loads on mobile devices.
- The website is mobile-friendly and is easy to use on mobile devices.
- Ensure that interactive banners, pop ups, and ads are not hampering the user-experience on mobile devices.
Further Read: Mobile-first indexing best practices
Ecommerce SEO
From Amazon to Alibaba, the industry for eCommerce is enormous. So, optimizing eCommerce for search engines is more troublesome than optimizing a standard blog or a product site.
There are way too many pages on an eCommerce site, and it is quite frustrating and taxing to optimize them all for promoting an eCommerce site with SEO.
The online shop optimization process begins with the homepage and category pages. Before you start to work on other product pages, ensure that the home page and category pages are properly optimized.
The key SEO variables for e-commerce are:
- Conduct your keyword research and optimize your product pages based on the results.
- eCommerce is also a visual platform, where your target audience will see the product before buying. So, it is important that you optimize all the visual elements on your website, including images and videos.
- Attach relevant and required schemas for products, reviews, marketing offers, etc.
- Additionally, it is important to have a good interlinking structure to connect various relevant pages on your website. This will boost your search ranking.
- Just like any other website, even your eCommerce SEO requires you to build a well-organized site structure that is easy to navigate and improves user-experience.
- Make sure that you are marketing your eCommerce store on social media as well.
- Think out of the box and find new ways to get people to link to your website
- Develop a blog and post content about the products and how it can help solve your target audience’s problems.
White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO
Some people see ‘black hat SEO’ as another type of SEO, which is so not true. Out of the two types of SEO (Black Hat and White Hat), Black hat SEO is simply a concept used to represent all measures taken in hopes to fool the search engine algorithms.
Occasionally, many people come up with theories about creating artificial links that increase their website’s SERP ranking.
These tactics or shortcuts are against everything that Google stands for, and no ethical business should resort to BlackHat SEO.
The repercussion of pursuing strategies associated with black hat is losing your Google ranking. Additionally, you might also be penalized by Google and lowering your probability of ever gaining traffic from Google again.
All the strategies that I have mentioned in this article are strictly white hat. Abide by the rules, follow the guidelines, and your website’s rankings will surely go up.
Conclusion
For all websites, SEO is one of the most powerful digital marketing methods. An SEO optimized website enhances the user experience and is pretty visible on search engines.
In order to simplify the process, SEO is divided into subsections or different types of SEO. As I said earlier, out of all the other types, Technical SEO, on-Page SEO and off-Page SEO are the most important types of SEO.
What did you think about this guide about different types of SEO?
Let me know in the comments how helpful you find this article.
See you next time.