Search engine optimization (SEO) is where the rubber meets the road with your business marketing efforts. Today, 93% of interactions on the web begin with search engines.
There are several benefits of SEO that you’ll appreciate no matter what sort of brand you’re trying to take to the next level.
So what kinds of SEO should you know about? How does SEO work?
Below we’ll dive into the different types of SEO and what you should know about each.
Local SEO
The importance of SEO really becomes apparent when you’re trying to drive local business.
Local SEO involves optimizing for your local and surrounding area. This is helpful since most people in any given area use Google to find businesses nearby.
With local SEO, you’re incorporating researched local keywords, belonging to local listing pages, online reviews, and other strategies.
Mobile SEO
A staggering 97% of people in the United States today own a cellphone. This is why it shouldn’t be surprising that mobile SEO is one of the most important types to focus on right now.
With mobile SEO, you optimize your site, keywords, links, and practices to cater to people browsing on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.
Some key ways to improve your mobile SEO include simplifying the site design, improving the site speed, enhancing the user experience (UX), and incorporating local SEO principles. The design should also be optimized for thumb swipes and other forms of mobile navigation.
“Hat” SEO Practices
If you do a bit of SEO research, you’ll quickly find that this form of marketing wears a lot of “hats”.
SEO types are often broken down into white hat, black hat, and gray hat SEO. White hat is the type of SEO that most people are encouraged to participate in. It involves creating useful content, judiciously using well-researched keywords, and using quality links from authoritative websites.
Black hat SEO can get results but might come back to bite you in the long run. With a black hat, you’re typically stuffing keywords, spamming links, and using keywords that are irrelevant to the content. Too much black hat SEO can get you dinged by search engines so that it reverses the results you got.
With gray hat SEO, people typically use a mixture of white hat and black hat. It involves things like clickbait, paid reviews, and link exchange agreements that aren’t entirely organic.
Understand the benefits or risks of each “hat” SEO so that you can apply them in a way that makes sense.
Content Creation SEO
Without question, content is one of the most critical aspects of SEO that you should pay attention to right now.
Greater than 50% of brands and companies today rely heavily on content marketing in order to inform and engage potential customers.
Content is king because it draws people in organically and supports all aspects of SEO. Take an amazing blog for instance. You don’t have to twist people’s arms to read it, and people come away from it feeling impacted.
When you incorporate keywords, quality links, and other aspects of SEO into the blog, it grows its traffic so that you get more readers.
In addition to blogs, things like video content, social media, podcasts, and e-books can all work well for you from an SEO standpoint. Make content a foundational piece of your SEO puzzle and you won’t go wrong.
Technical SEO
This form of SEO is more behind the scenes than others. It involves tweaking the infrastructure of the website so that it’s easier for Google to index it and crawl it.
Technical SEO is important because it satisfies the nuts and bolts aspects of Google’s algorithms. Examples of technical SEO include focusing on mobile-friendly practices, utilizing SSL, removing dead links, and creating an XML sitemap.
Once you hit the right notes with your technical SEO practices, you will get a website that loads quickly, makes your site safer and more secure, and teaches Google to pay attention to your website.
Voice SEO
Close to 6 million people in the United States use voice search to make purchases every month. This is a sign that voice search is only becoming increasingly important each day and year.
By optimizing for voice search, you’ll be more likely to get people that use Siri, Google, or Alexa, which is a growing segment of the population. Some of the benefits of voice SEO include improvements in user engagement, a step toward cutting-edge technology, and an influx of fresh traffic.
Some steps that you should take toward optimizing for voice include creating persona-based content, studying your customers, using keywords that are conversational, and generating content that provides direct answers.
Regardless of what sort of SEO you’re interested in, it’s important that you recognize its importance and take the correct steps. Hiring the help of a qualified SEO expert will help you achieve your goals regardless of which types you’d like to explore.
No matter where you live, there are SEO experts here that will be happy to assist you.
Learn All About the Different Types of SEO
Understanding these types of SEO will help you get the marketing results that you need for your business. Start with these rules of thumb and begin churning out some SEO campaigns that will get you results.
Scope out some of our other articles when you’re ready to learn as much as possible about business practices, SEO, and other aspects of marketing and advertising.
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