Understanding 3 Types of SEO That Increase Website Traffic
Search engine optimization helps search engines understand and rank your website content. But not all SEO is created the same. So, how do businesses maximize their SEO?
Three fundamental types of SEO are the cornerstones of ranking well: on-page, off-page and technical. Let’s look at each to see why they’re a critical part of your business marketing.
On-page SEO
When you see SEO, you’re most likely thinking of on-page SEO techniques—and for good reason. These techniques are applied directly to a website to make it rank higher.
On-page SEO is a set of technical and content principles that highlight your website’s relevance to search engines, making it easier for web users to find the content they want. Google wants happy users, which means starting with quality, original content related to keywords input by visitors.
What’s a keyword?
Keywords are the phrases and words that tell a search engine what your website content is about. They’re also often part of the key phrases users enter to find your content. Therefore, research is crucial in determining the best keywords to use on your website and within your content. Poorly chosen terms will have users bouncing from your site. Therefore, how your content incorporates keywords has an enormous impact on your rank.
Use keywords strategically
It’s important to note that strategic use of keywords is critical. Optimizing your title, meta description, heading tags and images in conjunction with keyword use in internal links makes all the difference.
Strategic use ensures that keywords and synonyms are placed naturally throughout the text and used in other critical positions, such as image labels, video tags, URLs and meta descriptions. These are all places search engines look to discover what your content is about. Because this requires concise and precise writing, it makes your content clearer to readers too. However, it’s important to note that keywords are not the only aspect of on-page SEO that matters, and they can even be done wrong, resulting in Google penalties.
Off-page SEO
Off-page practices happen on sites other than yours. These external activities boost your site’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). To most people, off-page SEO is simply building links to your site on other websites. But, in reality, there’s a lot more to it than that.
Off-page SEO is a group of actions that happen somewhere other than your website to improve its ranking, authority and trustworthiness. Some of the most valuable actions and channels include:
- Link building
- Content marketing
- Social media
- Forums
- Reviews
- Podcasts
When thoughtfully planned and executed, these can be excellent sources of indirect and direct traffic flow to your website.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO directly affects how search engines crawl your site and index your content and significantly impacts your rank. If your website is not technically optimized, regardless of how relevant your content is, it won’t rank. For example, a slow-loading site that’s not following current website encryption standards and structural optimization will not appeal to people or SERPs. The same goes for websites that waste crawls and bandwidth and confuse people or bots with duplicate content. On the other hand, a technically optimized website is fast loading, well-indexed and makes good use of structured data and sitemaps.
All 3 types of SEO boost your brand’s online presence
Together, on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO manage numerous factors analyzed by ranking algorithms. It’s important to note that algorithms are constantly updated, and a change can significantly impact how you rank. Therefore, successfully implementing all three types of SEO requires an ongoing effort and a wide range of skills and experience.
Considering that the first organic result is 10 times more likely to be clicked than the tenth link—meaning most users never scroll past the first search engine results page—your website must be ranked higher for at least a few keywords. Also, when your brand engages on social media, forums, reviews and podcasts, you establish it as an industry thought leader in front of new audiences. So you benefit not just from links and traffic but also from increased brand awareness and trust.
Are you maximizing the 3 types of SEO?
Monitoring and maintaining good ranking in search engine results pages, visibility in other media channels and technically improving your website are essential for business marketing. But there’s more to increasing your ROI. A marketing agency will use analytics to tell you exactly where your SEO needs improvement and advise which changes to implement.
Why not book a consultation with a Minspin expert today?
We’ll look at your website and review all 3 types of SEO and how your business is currently leveraging them. Then, after learning more about your business and goals, we’ll provide recommendations for an individualized SEO program with marketing analytic reports to drive organic traffic, increase brand awareness and boost revenue. With such a huge potential ROI—whether your business is a funded startup or a scale-up—you can’t afford to overlook the importance of SEO.
