What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for goods, services or information on topics that your organization has expertise or authority. What you’ll learn in this guide:

• Why SEO is important
• How SEO works
• The SEO Process
• Organic SEO versus paid search
• SEO planning

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Why SEO is Important

Whenever people want to go, do, find, research or buy – their journey usually begins with search. In fact, 53% of all website traffic flows from organic search results. Want to know something, Google it.
Smart marketers build search relevancy so that they can engage users across a myriad of search, social and retail platforms as they begin their customer journey.

How SEO Works

How SEO Works
SEO works through a combination of people, processes, technology and activities working in unison to provide search engines with the information they need to view your site as expert, authoritative, and trustworthy.
Search engines perform four core functions to produce page results:

1. Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to discover pages on the web by following links and using sitemaps.
2. Rendering: Search engines generate how the page will look using HTML, JavaScript and CSS information.
3. Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages it has discovered and add them to a database (though there’s no guarantee every page on your website will be indexed).
4. Ranking: Complex algorithms look at a variety of signals to determine whether a page is relevant and of high-enough quality to show when searchers enter a query.

The SEO Process

SEO is a journey, not a destination. Your search results are dependent upon feeding major search engines relevant information fast from credible sources so that search engines view you (your site) as experienced, expert, authoritative and trustworthy. Effective SEO involves three disciplines:

• Technical SEO: Site performance – the structural elements you control on your website to help search engines index and crawl (read) your site such as load speed, responsiveness, structured data, site maps, image optimization, etc.
• On-Page SEO: Relevance – the content you control on your website to help search engines understand the relevance of your company to a search query, i.e., site content, title tags, meta data, keyword usage, links, etc. 
• Off-site SEO: Credibility – the content you influence that is published on other sites such as: NAP citations, backlinks, reviews, article mentions, etc.

 
Technical and on-page optimizations are directly controlled by you. Off-page SEO is a different animal because you can’t control the content that other sites publish.
 
Technical optimization
Job one for SEO is technical optimization. This begins with site architecture that makes it easy for search engines to discover and access all of the content on your pages (text, images & videos). Properly indexed sites allow search engines to crawl and capture and organize your site so that it returns relevant search engine page results.
User experience is also a critical element of technical optimization. Search engines stress the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials all matter in technical SEO. 
 
On-page optimization
People and search engines are your primary audience. Your site must be optimized for both. Effective SEO optimizes the content your audience sees (what’s actually on the page) as well as what search engines crawl (the code).
Publishing high-quality content congruent with your audience’s wants and needs, and that follows Google guidance, ensures that your content your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness as perceived by search engines.
For people, content must be:

• Relevant, covering topics with which you have experience or expertise.
• Inclusive of keywords people use to find the content.
• Unique and original.
• Well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors.
• Current and accurate.
• Well organized and readable.

For search engines, content must be organized and include:

• Title tags
• Meta description/data
• Header tags (H1-H6)
• Image alt text

 
Off-site optimization
Working to influence content that you do not control is a significant challenge for any organization. Managing your listings and reviews is the best place to start. Listings are free NAP citation (Name-about-place) such as Google Places, Yelp, Bing Places, etc. Reviews are another tactic that you can directly influence.
There are four core off-site tactics:

1. Listing management: Claiming, verifying and optimizing the information on any platforms where information about your company or website may be listed and found by searchers (e.g., directories, review sites, wikis).
2. Ratings/reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to them.
3. Link building:  referring backlinks from a third-party site to your website offers significant ranking and traffic benefits. The challenge is the effort required to establish and maintain these links. Chris Lowers president of Grey Partners advised, “Link quality wins. Successful marketers get results by establishing backlinks from relevant, authoritative and trusted websites.”
4. Content Marketing:  referring backlinks from this can refer to a host of tactics from podcasts to posts to native articles and more. Anywhere you can insert content on a reputable third-party site helps build your expertise and authority as perceived by search engines.

Organic SEO VS Paid Search

Organic SEO Versus Paid Search
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and its objective is to ensure that your site attracts visitors through relevant search results. SEO results occur organically because your site is optimized for search engines. SEO is vital and sustainable – traffic continues without additional spending.

• SEO = driving organic traffic from search engines. 
• PPC = driving organic and paid traffic from search engines. 

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It’s a type of paid search marketing where advertisers are charged whenever a person clicks on their ad. Ads are served as search results or display ads next to search results.
It’s important to think of SEO and PPC as complimentary marketing channels. SEO is foundational providing long-term traffic without exponential cost. PPC is an effective tool for as long as your budget allows. When your paid campaign ends, so does the traffic. And, the more aggressive your competition – the more expensive your cost to be competitive.

SEO Planning

SEO Planning
Effective SEO is based on clear objectives and adhering to a long-term action plan to reach them. Remember, SEO is a journey rather than a destination. It’s ideal to think of your strategy as an endless road trip. The path you take will evolve over time – but your goal should remain clear and unchanged.
Your SEO plan may include things such as:

• Setting goals (KPI’s, OKR’s) and expectations (timelines/milestones).
• Defining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics.
• Deciding how projects will be created and implemented (internal, external or a mix).
• Coordinating and communicating with internal and external stakeholders.
• Choosing and implementing tools/technology.
• Hiring, training and structuring a team.
• Setting a budget.
• Measuring and reporting on results.
• Documenting the strategy and process.

 
Turn ideas into effective SEO actions through research such as:

1. Audience research: It’s important to understand your target audience or market. Who are they (i.e., their demographics and psychographics)? What are their pain points? What questions do they have that you can answer? 
2. Keyword research: This process helps you identify and incorporate relevant and valuable search terms people use into your pages – and understand how much demand and competition there is to rank for these keywords.
3. Competitor research: What are your competitors doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What types of content are they publishing? 
4. Brand/business/client research: What are their goals – and how can SEO help them achieve those goals?
5. Website research: A variety of SEO audits can uncover opportunities and issues on a website that are preventing success in organic search. Some audits to consider: technical SEO, content, link profile and E-A-T. 
6. SERP analysis: This will help you understand the search intent for a given query (e.g., is it commercial, transactional, informational or navigational) and create content that is more likely to earn rankings or visibility.

 
Because code is intangible, many organizations wrongly think of websites as static objects and struggle to allocate the resources required to maintain an effective site. The same is true for your SEO.
 
Consistently improving your SEO is dependent upon analyzing, assessing, and reporting performance. You need to know if traffic drops to a critical page, pages become slow, unresponsive or fall out of the index, your entire website goes offline, links break, or any other number of potential catastrophic issues. There are a variety of resources to help you make data-driven decisions such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Performance reporting should be reviewed at meaningful time intervals, typically comparing to previous report periods and tell the story of your customer journey. Monthly reporting is ideal for information sites. E-commerce sites should consider weekly performance measures.

Conclusion

Our digital world is ever-evolving. Search engines, user behavior and your competitors are always changing. Websites change, become stale and break over time. There is always an action you can take to improve your results. Or, as Chris Lowers put it, ‘SEO will only end when our competition dies.’
If you found this page via a search engine, you likely searched for ‘what is SEO’ or ‘how does SEO work’. 
This article is published by Grey Partners, an authoritative digital marketing company with solid expertise on and experience in the topic of SEO since 2009.