Search engine optimization helps search engines understand and rank your website content. The techniques can be broken down to three types of SEO: on-page, off-page and technical.

Let’s take a look at each to see why they are critical part of your business marketing.

On-page SEO

When you hear the phrase SEO, you’re mostly likely thinking of on-page SEO techniques—those applied directly to a website to make it rank higher.

On-page SEO is a set of technical and content principles that highlight the relevance of your website to search engines, making it easier for web users to find the content they’re seeking. Search engines want happy users, and that means quality, original content that is related to the keywords input by a user. It all starts with quality content that people find useful and relevant.

It also includes strategic use of keywords; optimization of title, meta and heading tags; internal linking; image optimization; and many others.

Let’s dig a little deeper regarding strategic use of keywords. Keywords are the phrases and words that tell a search engine what your website is about. They are also the key terms users search to find your content. How you use them has an enormous impact on how you rank. Strategic use of keywords involves ensuring that keywords and synonyms are placed naturally throughout the text and also 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. 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 besides your own. These are external activities that boost the ranking of your site in the search engine results (SERPs). To most people, off-page is simply building links to your site on other websites. In reality, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Off-page SEO is a group of actions that are taken off your website to improve its ranking, authority and trustworthiness. It includes actions such as link building and content marketing. Additional avenues for off-page SEO are social media, forums, reviews and podcasts. When thoughtfully planned and executed, these can be great sources of indirect and direct traffic flow to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO has a direct affect on how search engines crawl and index your content and has a huge impact on how you rank. If your website is not technically optimized, regardless of how optimized your content is, is won’t rank. A slow-loading site that’s not following current website encryption standards and structural optimization is not going to appeal to people nor search engines. The same goes for websites that waste crawls and bandwidth, and confuse people or bots with duplicate content. 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 business’s online presence

Together, on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO manage numerous factors that are analyzed by ranking algorithms. Note however, that algorithms are constantly updated and a change can have a significant impact on how you rank. Resultantly, successfully implementing all three types of SEO requires an ongoing effort and a wide range of skills and experience.

Consider that 75% of user never scroll past the first page of search results, so it’s important to be found there for at least a few keywords. Also consider that when your brand engages on social media, forums, reviews and podcasts, you’re establishing 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.

Clearly, monitoring and maintaining good ranking in search engine results pages and visibility is other media channels is essential for in business marketing. A good SEO program can drive organic traffic, increase brand awareness and boost revenue. With such a huge potential for return, startups and scale-ups simply can’t afford to overlook the importance of SEO.