What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, the process of improving a website – including technical elements like its coding, setup and user experience, plus its content and connectedness – so that it can be better discovered, indexed and made more visible on the results pages of search engines like Google.

What is the Goal of SEO?

The goal of SEO is to raise the visibility and ranking (or location) of a company’s assets, such as web pages, images, videos, downloadable documents, local business listings, etc., within the results returned by various search engines, when a company’s target audience types in a query such as: “best-running shoes for rainy days” or “stores near me that sell waterproof running shoes.”

But more than that, the goal of SEO is to drive more leads, conversions, sales, donations, downloads – or more of whatever makes your business succeed – by increasing the amount of qualified traffic to your website.

Why is SEO Important?

There are lots of reasons why SEO is important. Here are our top four:

1. Search engines are key traffic drivers for websites. 
   This is especially important for consumers ready to take actions such as buying, donating, downloading, etc. Optimizing your website so it can easily be found by your target market is imperative for your company’s success.
2. As with any business, location is vital.
   Because the top three organic listings on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) account for the majority of ALL the clicks there – and because fewer than 1% of searchers will ever proceed to the second page of Google’s search engine results – it’s crucial that your company’s assets show up on the first page, and as close as possible to the top of the organic (i.e. non-sponsored) results.
3. Ongoing cash outlay needed to maintain organic rankings is manageable. 
   Even though SEO requires an upfront investment and is not a set-it-and-forget-it sort of thing, the ongoing cash outlay needed to maintain organic rankings is much less than what’s necessary to run PPC ads 24/7.
4. SEO creates long-lasting success. 
   Once your website attains a top 10 organic ranking for a given keyword, it’s likely to rank in the top 10 search results for dozens or even hundreds of other relevant keywords, magnifying your efforts.

SEO vs. PPC: And the Winner Is?

But wait. What about Paid Ads on search engines?

Since sponsored or pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google typically appear ABOVE the organic results, isn’t that a better option?

Yes and No.

Even though paid or sponsored ads can push organic listings lower on the page; the top organic search result typically receives 19 times more clicks than the top paid search result.

What? Yes, you read that right. Consumers trust what they perceive as the organic, arm’s-length information returned by Google 19 times more than they do advertiser-sponsored listings.

And even though PPC ads can achieve tremendous results by combining proper keyword choices with campaign optimization, the minute your wallet is empty, your PPC ad will no longer appear, and your competitor’s might.

Learn more about strategizing SEO vs. PPC

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Why SEO Strategy Focuses on Google First

Google. Google. Google. What’s with all the focus on Google?

It’s simple. As of the beginning of 2024, 93% of all searches took place on Google’s search engine. You’ve heard the saying, “Fish where the fish are,” right? Well, Google is the pond where you’ll find the most fish. Creating an SEO strategy to help your company rank higher on Google’s SERPs first makes sense.

How Search Engines Work

Google is an expert at the long game. It knows the only way to get consumers to stay loyal to its search services is to return organic results that make people pump their fists and say: “Yes!” day in and day out.

Google wasn’t the first search engine. That was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

In fact, Google didn’t even launch until 1998, and by that time, there were 11 other fairly well-established search engines, including:

• Aliweb
• AltaVista
• Ask Jeeves
• Dogpile
• Excite
• HotBot
• Infoseek
• Lycos
• MSN
• Yahoo!
• WebCrawler

How Google became the predominant player in the search engine space is a tale for another time, but its work on deciphering the intent of every search, finding and indexing web assets correctly, and using its years of learning to construct an algorithm that returns results that consistently make consumers very happy has certainly paid off.

How Search Engines Deliver the Best Results

To deliver results that best satisfy its users’ queries, search engines like Google use three primary methodologies:

Crawling:

Search “spiders” or “bots” are computer programs that periodically scan the Web, land on different web pages and “read” the content contained within. But they don’t just read the content that users see. They also read HTML code, including title tags, meta description tags, image tags and all the technical or markup language used to serve each page. We’ve got a whole article about meta title tags and meta descriptions can help drive search success.

Spiders begin from a known web page and jump from link to link between and within pages to get to other pages (HINT: That’s one of the reasons backlinks that point to your site are an essential part of any SEO strategy. Backlinks can increase Google’s ranking of your authority on a subject, but they also help crawler programs find you.) To enable your home page to appear at the top of Google’s SERPs for an important keyword, you could need dozens or even hundreds of high-quality backlinks – and those may also take weeks to be found by spiders – but we’ll talk more about backlinks below.

Crawl rates and index times vary based on a myriad of factors, including:

• The popularity of the site being crawled - Entertainment sites might make up a substantial amount of these.
• How often the site and its assets are updated - National news sites with a history of updating content daily, hourly or even by the minute during a crisis, political event or sporting contest might be good candidates here.
• Whether or not other bots are already crawling the site—In fact, if you want Google’s bot to crawl your site more frequently, your webmaster will need to use a “robots.txt” file to limit the pages that non-essential bots can crawl so your site isn’t inadvertently slowed down by the addition of Google’s spiders.

Indexing:

Once your website (or a page within it) is discovered, other technologies attempt to index or categorize it. This isn’t always an easy process.

Think of the words: carrot, caret and carat. The first word refers to an orange root vegetable, the second is a copy-editing symbol that means “insert text here,” and the third indicates the weight of a diamond or other precious stones.

Before crawlers were used, websites were categorized by humans – go figure! – and this indexing info resided in a multilingual, open-content database that was updated and maintained by a community called the Open Directory Project (ODP). Google and other search engines initially used this database to help sort sites.

It might be surprising to note that despite all of Google’s technical acumen, SEO professionals in the know estimate that Google indexes less than 5% of the total Internet.

Ranking and Serving Up Search Engine Results in Eye-Catching Ways

It’s thought that Google uses over 200 distinct factors to rank websites and their assets in order to determine if and where to place them in Google’s ever-changing “result packs.”

If you’re a Gen-X’er or Boomer, you first experienced the internet with just ten plain text results delivered to your clunky desktop computer on your Netscape browser. You weren’t afraid to scroll right down to the bottom of the page, and you’d hit the “next” button a bunch of more times, just for fun. That made sense because the Web was in its infancy then, and relevant first-page results weren’t exactly plentiful. And because the world was your oyster, you had plenty of time to dally the morning away before heading out to a big, boozy client lunch at noon. Plus, FOMO on what might be on page five was SERIOUS!

Today, like many, you’re likely using a desktop or laptop device with a nice, wide, high-res screen and seeing an array of Google result packs that change based on how and what you searched for.

These organic SERP results packs include:

• Blended Results, such as:
  • Featured Snippets
  • Sitelinks
  • Top Stories
  • Image packs and carousels
  • Knowledge panels
  • Video packs
  • Tweet carousels
  • People Also Ask features
  • Related Searches
• Local SERPs Results pack
• Regular Organic Results
• Vertical Search Results
• Plus, any combo of shopping, hotel, travel, job listings, news and FAQs, depending on your query

And if the search query indicated buying signals,

• Sponsored (or Pay-per-click/PPC) ads

If you’re a Gen Alpha kid, you – like 63% of the world – do most of your searching on a smartphone and often use your voice or your phone’s voice assistant to create your query.

In these cases, the number and kind of results delivered to your device will depend on a variety of factors, including:

• Device type
• Screen size
• Operating system
• Software version
• Location

NOTE: It’s imperative that companies bring the mobile versions of their websites up to snuff, as Google now defaults to crawling a company’s mobile site for indexing and ranking and utilizes its “smartphone agent” to do so.

How Does SEO Work?

As we said earlier, SEO researchers – aka nerds like us – who’ve attempted to reverse-engineer Google’s ranking algorithm have found over 200 factors that are likely to influence a site’s organic ranking (or position) on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

While each business will have unique challenges to overcome, most search engine optimization strategies and tactics aim to:

• Increase the visibility of your company’s web assets in relevant search engine result packs Because there are a lot of moving parts to SEO, it is, by its nature, a process that needs time to build momentum and get results.Forget about attaining the #1 position right off the bat.

Remember, Google changes the results packs it shows to users depending on their perceived intent. Where they might reside within the purchase funnel is also a factor – i.e. at the top, looking for general information about a topic or at the bottom, where they’re ready to buy. And finally, results packs will also be tailored for a user’s location. Learn more about sales funnels in digital marketing here.

You’re better off homing in on being more visible to your target market for your most important keywords across as many Google results packs as are relevant rather than hoping for a #1 position straight out of the starting blocks.

• Increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website
  Another important goal of SEO is to drive more qualified traffic from your target market to your website. You want qualified traffic, as they’ll be more likely to perform actions – or conversion events – like donating, downloading a document or buying your product online or at your brick-and-mortar location than plain web-surfing old looky-loos.
• Ensure the content on your website adds value for your target market first, and scores highly for Google’s algorithm second.
  There’s no “Which comes first – the chicken or the egg?” regarding one of the top-ranking factors for Google’s search algorithm.Content that Google perceives serves your target market best will be rewarded with more prominent and frequent placements in relevant Google SERPs. Google’s Helpful Content Update has made good content creation more important than ever- we’ve put together a

Content Creation Playbook to help. Relevance is vital here, so, for example, if you’re a New York City restaurant that’s been voted the #1 pizza parlour for ten years running, there’s almost zero chance your brand will surface in the organic search results delivered to pizza lovers currently located in Mexico searching for “the best pizza restaurants close to me.”

NOTE: SEO will NOT influence whether your company’s assets appear in the “sponsored” or paid results of Google’s SERPs.

To appear there, you’ll need to choose the keyword or keyword string you want to associate with your ad, offer to pay Google a certain cost-per-click for that association, and then see if your price surpasses that of other businesses who want their ad to show up for the same keyword(s).

If your bid wins out, your ad will appear. If you stop bidding high enough to win – or stop bidding altogether – your sponsored ad won’t be shown.

Technical SEO, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO Tactics

Optimizing your site involves three key focus areas:

• Technical SEO
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO

Technical SEO

Technical SEO ensures your website loads fast, is easy to crawl and index, and creates a great user experience.

It includes tasks like:

• Speed optimization (CWV audit)
• Crawlability optimization
• Indexability optimization
• Mobile/device optimization
• Cross-browser rendering optimization
• Structured data (schema fitting audit)
• Image and video optimization
• txt status
• Canonicalization
• Feed optimization for followers and Google News
• Sitemap customization and optimization
• Analytics optimization

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO starts with keyword research to help you understand where your company ranks for the keywords or keyword strings your target market typically types into search engines as they meander on their customer journey.

You’ll also want to check out how your competition ranks for the same keywords and what else they might be doing that you’re not.

You can use the findings of your keyword research to optimize your website content, including:

• Page URLs
• Page titles
• Meta description tags
• Headers
• Alt text tags
• Navigational Content
• Faceted search optimization
• Dynamic on-page optimization
• Internal linking optimization
• SERP optimization (via Rich Snippets)
• Page content

We’ve got a great article about SEO Keyword Research right here.

Off-Page SEO

The goal of off-page SEO is to get users and search engines to see your site as more trustworthy and authoritative, by having other trustworthy, popular and authoritative online sources link to it.

Off-page SEO includes tasks such as:

• Creation of linkable assets
• Link building
• Citation building
• Content marketing
• Google Business profile optimization

Technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO all work synergistically to increase the visibility and rank of your company’s web assets on the results pages of search engines like Google, so you can boost the amount of qualified traffic to your website and, ultimately, create more conversions or sales for your business.

Want to learn more about effective link building tactics?

Tracking and Optimizing SEO

You know what they say. “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

While setting key performance indicators (KPIs) may seem complex and even scary at first – what if your SEO strategy and tactics fail – embarking on SEO without a plan practically assures that it will.

The most important SEO KPI will always be conversions, i.e. actions that result in success for your business.

You’ll need to figure out the current average number of monthly conversions or the average conversion rate for your website and make that your baseline. All new SEO efforts will be measured against that baseline. From there, Conversion Rate Optimization can help improve those numbers.

Other tracking and optimization tasks will include:

• Conversion/Goal/Event creation
• Sitemap and URL segmentation
• Proactive campaign monitoring
• A/B Testing of Navigation/Landing Pages/Assets/ Calls-To-Action Messaging/Graphics
• Monthly competition analysis
• Reporting

How Long Does It Take to Get SEO Results?

Depending on what your KPIs are, and because there are so many moving parts to be manipulated and tested, SEO is, by its nature, a slow process.

You should start to see improvements in KPIs in three to nine months.

Remember, the goal is to take steps now that build momentum and lasting results.

Do I Need an SEO Agency?

You likely typed “What is SEO?” in Google’s search engine a while ago and read your way through this page, and yet we’ve barely skimmed the surface of all that’s involved in SEO or search engine optimization.

And while you might have learned a lot – and we hope you did – most business owners realize, sooner or later, that their time is probably better spent coming up with new products or services, delivering excellent customer care, streamlining processes for greater efficiency or tackling other tasks essential for growing their businesses.

Leave SEO to the experts whose job is to stay up to speed with the changes in search engine algorithms, explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to speed up SEO results, combat keyword cannibalization in SEO, do away with content decay, etc., etc.

Learn more about how to choose a digital marketing agency here.

Recap and SEO FAQs

You had questions. We delivered answers. Understanding what is SEO can truly transform your online presence, ensuring that when potential customers search for products or services related to your business, your website stands out in search engine results.

But before you go, let’s quickly recap what you learned and send you on your way with some snappy one-sentence answers for frequently asked questions (FAQs) about SEO.

What is SEO and Other Frequently Asked Questions

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving a website – including technical elements like its coding, setup and user experience, plus its content and connectedness – so that it can be better discovered, indexed and made more visible on the results pages of search engines like Google. Learn more about SEO services.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

What is the goal of SEO?

The goal of SEO is to improve the visibility and ranking of web pages in the organic search results delivered by search engines like Google to help increase both the quantity and quality of traffic to a website.

Why is SEO important?

SEO is important because organic search engine results are more trusted, preferred and clicked on by consumers and customers.

How do search engines work?

Search engines like Google and Bing crawl the web using spiders or bots to find, examine, index, interpret and rank web pages to return the best results in response to their users’ search queries.

How does SEO work?

SEO uses technical, on-page and off-page strategies and tactics to optimize website performance, content offerings and usefulness for users first, then search engines next, to achieve SEO marketing goals.

What is the role of SEO in digital marketing?

SEO works alongside strategies and tactics used in other marketing channels, including social and traditional media – and in concert with paid (CPC) search advertising – to realize KPIs that lead to business success. We’ve got a whole article called What is the role of SEO in digital marketing with more information here.

How Can I Learn More About SEO Best Practices?

Why not go straight to the source? Head over to Google Search Central now.

Prefer to snack content from Toronto’s Top SEO agency? Check out our blog and other resources at Search Engine People.

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