SEO includes a set of complex practices and techniques to improve a website’s online visibility and search engine rankings. Marketers rely on different SEO strategies to drive organic traffic to the website. These tactics include keyword research, content optimization, off-page SEO, social media marketing, etc.
There are various kinds of SEO methods used to optimize multiple factors to align their marketing strategies with search engine algorithms and user intent. More than distinct processes, these SEO subsets are a way to break down the complex process of SEO and make it easier to manage.
Although on-page and off-page are the two most popular types of SEO, there are other SEO methods as well that professionals use to drive better results.
This blog will help you explore different SEO types that marketers rely on to build effective campaigns.
What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a continuous process to boost a website’s online visibility and drive organic traffic. For this, it aims at improving a website’s search engine rankings for relevant keywords. SEO includes various strategies and techniques that work together to enhance user experience, optimize a website’s content and structure, and make it more discoverable.
There are different types of SEO, each comprising distinct elements. Gaining a clear understanding of these SEO types can help you tailor these strategies for better and more effective results.
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Types of Search Engine Optimization (List)
SEO includes multiple approaches and strategies, and each of them intends to optimize the website for higher search engine result rankings. Below, we have listed 14 types of SEO in digital marketing:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Local SEO
- E-commerce SEO
- Mobile SEO
- International SEO
- Image SEO
- Voice SEO
- Video SEO
- Negative SEO
- White-hat SEO
- Black-hat SEO
- Gray-hat SEO
Also Read: What Are Keywords in SEO? Benefits, Use, Types 2024
Types of SEO
Let’s understand the different types of SEO in digital marketing, in detail:
1. On-page SEO
On-page SEO means optimizing each web page and element on a website, such as content, images, HTML code, etc., to boost its search engine rankings on SERPs and drive quality traffic. It involves making every element more relevant and appealing to users and search engines.
Elements of On-page SEO
Some common on-page SEO elements are as follows:
Keyword Research: Keyword research is the process of finding and researching relevant search phrases used by people to search for a query or product online. Marketers strategically use these keywords in content to improve the rankings of web pages and increase brand awareness.
Title Tag: It refers to the clickable headline that we see in search results. An optimized title tag must include relevant keywords and should be concise yet descriptive.
Meta Description: Meta description is the brief summary of a web page that we see below the title tag in search results. It should be compelling and informative to make users click on the link.
Header Tags: They provide a property structure to the content on a website or blog and showcase the importance of each section. Used as H1, H2, H3, and so on, they highlight important keywords and phrases.
URL Structure: Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a web address, allowing users to access each page. It includes relevant keywords and follows a logical structure so that search engines can determine the content of the web page and crawl it for the ranking.
Content: Content creation is a key component of different types of SEO, including off-page, on-page, voice search, image SEO, social media SEO, etc. Marketers should optimize website or blog content to boost its ranking. Content optimization includes adding relevant keywords, writing quality and engaging content, and making it readable for the target audience.
Images: Websites use images to improve user experience and make web pages visually appealing. However, images should be compressed and have descriptive alt tags to be SEO-friendly.
Internal Links: These links connect different web pages of the same website, enabling search engines to understand the correct structure of the website and distribute link equity.
External Links: They connect a web page of your website to other websites. External links are used to publish guest blogs, provide additional information, add cite sources, or build relationships with other brands and websites.
Page Formatting: Writing quality content and creating attractive images are crucial to optimize a website. However, it is also crucial to spruce up the content. Google assesses web pages on its appearance and look, checking it’s full of ads and popups to rank them on its SERPs.
2. Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO focuses on promoting a website on other platforms and sites. It includes social media marketing, link building, email marketing, etc. unlike on-page SEO that is more about a website’s structure and content, off-page SEO involves techniques to boost website’s ranking on search engines by optimizing factors outside the website itself. The aim of this type of SEO is to increase a website’s reputation, authority, and relevance, which is important to drive organic traffic.
Elements of Off-page SEO
Here are a few vital off-page SEO elements marketers focus on:
Backlinks: These are links you get from other websites to your specific web page. Backlinks allow search engines to assess the authority and popularity of a website.
H.A.R.O: Help a Reporter Out (H.A.R.O.) is an online service that connects reporters and media professionals so they can collect quotes to curate blogs, articles, press releases, and other types of content. In simple terms, it refers to addressing reporters’ queries to gain backlinks and media attention.
Social Media: Increased social media engagement, such as comments, likes, shares, and feedback, can boost the visibility and popularity of a website. It is also an effective way to build stronger and long-term relationships with potential customers while driving quality traffic to the website.
Brand Mentions: When the name of the brand or product is mentioned on other websites, forums, social media,and other channels, it adds to brand awareness and enances the reputation of the website.
Competitor Analysis: Marketers constantly keep a close watch on activities of their competitors, analyzing their digital marketing and SEO techniques to optimize their own. This helps them understand keywords competitors are using, content they are publishing, and campaigns they are building.
Guest Blogs: Marketers often write and publish articles on other websites that link back to their own websites; these are known as guest postings. They build links, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic.
Also Read: Top 8 Benefits of SEO Marketing in 2024 (Importance)
3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO includes different types of SEO techniques to improve the technical aspects of a website so that search engines can easily crawl and index it for improved search engine rankings. It includes improving page loading speed, setting up redirects, configuring robot.txt file, making the website mobile-friendly, and so on. Technical SEO makes a site more accessible to search engines and users.
Elements of Technical SEO
The following are the key elements of technical SEO:
Website Structure: The website should follow a proper and clear structure so people can easily navigate it. There must be a logical hierarchy of different web pages and categories, allowing search engines to crawl and index it without much hassle.
Website Speed: The website’s loading speed, including its text, images, and videos, determines its ranking in SERPs. If a website takes too long to load, it can lead to a higher bounce rate and lower search engine rankings.
Identification of Crawl Errors: To improve your site’s rankings and overall visibility, you need to identify crawl errors that hamper performance. This is a great way to find and resolve errors, such as broken links, missing pages, etc., making the website and its content easily accessible to search engines.
Mobile-friendliness: People now rely on their smartphones to access apps or websites. Therefore, your website should be mobile-friendly so that more users can access it on their mobile devices.
Security: Your website should be secure to keep user data safe and prevent hacking. You can protect your website from cyber-attacks by using a secure hosting provider, updating software, and implementing SSL encryption.
Audit of Duplicate Content: Two write-ups that are exactly the same or identical can also affect your search engine ranking and credibility. So, audit your content regularly to find the same content on the internet and optimize it for improved search engine rankings.
XML Sitemap: It is a file that lists important web pages, so that search engines can discover and index them easily.
Keyword Cannibalization Audit: It refers to identifying multiple pages on the website competing for the same keyword and fixing this issue. Such instances can dilute the online visibility of the website and affect its organic performance.
4. Local SEO
Local SEO comprises strategies to optimize a website for local search results. If you have a brick-and-mortar store and want to attract clients to visit it, you need to work on local SEO to improve its visibility and popularity. It targets audiences based on location by promoting a business across directories, local search engines, and maps.
It helps you get more clients and traffic to yoru store or office. Local SEO techniques include building citation and backlinks from local sources, optimzing Google My Business profile, adding local keywords, managing online reviews, and ensuring local business listings. Basically, these types of SEO optimization techniques aim to attract the local customers to your nearby store.
Elements of Local SEO
Here are a few local SEO elements you need to pay attention to:
Google My Business (GMB) Account: You need to create and enhance your Google My Business listing to improve the online visibility of your business in local search results and on
Google Maps. Add all the necessary details, such as the name and address of the business, contact details, operating hours, and pictures.
Local Citations: Register your business with trusted directories and platforms, such as Yelp, Foursquare, etc. Your listings should be accurate and consistent across all platforms and channels so that search engines can confirm your address and credibility.
On-page SEO: Develop and publish content for local search results and make it relevant to your business location. The name, address, and phone number of your business must be consistent and displayed correctly.
Online Reviews: Encourage your existing clients to share their feedback on different sites, such as Google, Yelp, and more, to enhance your marketing efforts.
Backlinks: Get quality links to your website from high-authority and reputable regional websites and trade publications.
Content Marketing: Curate informative, optimized, and top-notch content that targets the local audience and showcases your subject-matter competence.
Mobile Optimization: Optimize your website for all operating systems and mobile devices as users now prefer their phones to look for queries, products, or services.
Social Media: Create social media profiles to connect with native users and promote your products and services.
5. E-commerce SEO
E-commerce stores also need to achieve top ranks on SERPs to attract more potential and quality customers. Whenever a user searches for a product, the search engine shows the most relevant online stores offering the same product. Hence comes c-commerce SEO, which is among the top 4 types of SEO and is used to optimize online stores. It enhances the visibility and search engine rankings of e-commerce websites by focusing on different elements, such as category pages, blogs, product pages, etc. Similar to any other SEO tactic, it also intends to drive more organic traffic to the website and boost sales. It also includes improving website architecture, competitors’ research and analysis, and homepage SEO.
Elements of E-commerce SEO
To optimize online stores and improve their visibility across search engines, e-commerce SEO focuses on the following elements:
Keyword Research: Marketers identify and target relevant keywords related to different products offered by their e-commerce store.
On-page SEO: It includes optimizing the website for search engines, including its product and category pages, meta tags, image alt text, and headers.
User-friendly URLs: The URL of each web page should be user-friendly and clear, including relevant keywords and describing the content accurately.
Site Structure: The site structure must be intuitive and logical so users can navigate it easily.
Product Descriptions: Each product should have a compelling and informative description that also includes relevant keywords.
Mobile Optimization: The e-commerce website must be optimized for mobile devices to reach more users.
Also Read: Top 7 Free Backlink Checker Tools in 2024 (Check Backlinks)
6. Mobile SEO
As the name suggests, mobile SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website for mobile devices and tablets. It is not exactly a different type of SEO strategy but a subset of SEO that is specific to mobile phones.
More than 60% of searches happen on smartphones. Hence, Google has created a mobile-first index to assess how mobile-friendly a website is. A bad user experience on mobile devices means users will never return to that page. Therefore, it’s necessary that you offer the best and seamless experience to users, which is possible through mobile SEO. It aims to improve the structure, style, and loading speed of web pages when people use smartphones to access a site.
A few essential elements to consider for mobile SEO are:
- Web page loading speed.
- Format of the content for viewing on smartphones.
- Mobile compatibility
- Ease of use
- User experience
- No aggressive advertising or popups that can hamper the overall experience.
7. International SEO
International SEO is used to optimize multilingual websites or content to enhance their online visibility and ranking in global search results for users in different countries. Websites offering content in different languages use specific SEO techniques to enable search engines to index their content better. These are known as international SEO techniques. Their goal is to make such websites more accessible to the global audience and increase engagement, conversions, and traffic.
This is one of the main types of SEO used by big companies and global brands to drive more organic traffic from different regions and countries. To launch successful international SEO campaigns, you need to meet the requirements of the target audience and cater to the global market’s cultural context so they can make transactions in their currency and interact with your brand in their language.
Moreover, make sure to use the right format for the date and time according to the region. You also need to communicate in the native language of the users while addressing their queries to offer the best experience.
Elements of International SEO
As mentioned, international SEO is a technique for optimizing a website for better performance in search engines across multiple languages and countries. It includes various tactics and methods that make a website relevant, appealing, and accessible in different locations.
International SEO is the process of optimizing a website to ensure that it performs well in search engine results across multiple countries and languages. It involves strategies and techniques to make a website accessible, relevant, and appealing to users in different geographic locations. The key elements of international SEO are:
Localized Content: It involves creating linguistically and culturally appropriate content for prospects, including adapting images, focusing on local customs, and translating content.
Hreflang Tags: It includes implementing the hreflang tag to tell search engines which region and language you are targeting with each page. These tags are used to avoid duplicate content on the website.
Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs): You need to use country-specific domain extensions, such as .de and .uk, to optimize different website variations and showcase their relevance to a specific geographical location.
Currency and Pricing: Marketers ensure that product prices are displayed in the local currency. They also adapt to different pricing strategies to show price variations based on regions and market conditions.
Geotargeting: This element focuses on using geotargeting settings like Google Search Console to change the country you are targeting for a specific version of your website.
Subdirectories and Subdomains: You need to organize your international content through subdirectories and subdomains that separate each content by their area or language.
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8. Image SEO
Image SEO deals with optimizing images and image hosting platforms to enhance their search engine rankings and drive organic traffic. Although alt text is the most popular image SEO factor, there are more techniques that marketers use to make images SEO-friendly.
Elements of Image SEO
Image SEO focuses on optimizing images on a website to make them more responsive and increase their online visibility. This is one of the top SEO types used to attract and engage more users, leading to more traffic to the website and its enhanced performance. The key elements of image SEO are:
Image Sitemap: Marketers add images to he XML sitemap of the website to enable search engines to index images and associate them with the content.
Compress and Resize Images: Large image files can hamper the performance of a website, making it slow and affecting user experience. Therefore, you need to optimize the size of images while maintaining their quality. For this, you can use compression techniques that reduce the size of image files without compromising on the quality.
File Names: Add relevant and descriptive file name for each umage. Make sure that names are not generic. Go for specific and descriptive names that include keywords relevant to the content.
Image Format: Your content should have appropriate images in suitable formats. For example, JPEG is used for photographs, PNG is best for images with transparency, and WebP, a modern format, compresses images and maintains top-notch quality.
Responsive Images: Responsiveness is a major factor considered by search engines while determining the mobile-friendliness of a website and evaluating it for rankings. Hence, images must be responsive to different screen sizes and devices.
Image Alt Text: Alt text is a brief description added to each image so search engines can crawl it and assess its relationship with the content. Also, it affects accessibiity of the website. So, add concise and clear alt text to all images.
Also Read: 20+ Key SEO Skills You Need to Succeed in 2024
9. Voice SEO
As virtual assistants and voice-activated devices, such as Alexa, Siri, etc., are gaining popularity, voice search is becoming more common. Hence, it is crucial for businesses and brands to make their websites compatible for voice search. Voice SEO optimizes websites and content for voice search. It improves a site’s online visibility and accessibility by making it accessible to voice-activated devices. Voice search optimization is used for digital content to boost its search engine ranking.
Elements of Voice SEO
The key elements of voice SEO are as follows:
Conversational Content: Content must be written in the tone that people use in day-to-day conversations. It should provide direct answers to frequently asked queries.
Natural Language Keywords: Add natural language keywords to the content that people use while speaking, as search engines prefer sites that have more conversational content.
Local Optimization: Content should be optimized for local searches because most voice searches are location-specific. Add the name and address of your business and contact details on the website and update the details regularly.
User Intent: Try to understand the user intent behind voice searches to optimize the website and content for navigational, informational, and transactional queries.
Featured Snippets: Optimize the website for featured snippets because many voice search responses are gathered from such information-rich snippets.
10. Video SEO
As we answer how many types of SEO are there, we can’t ignore video SEO. It is used to optimize video content so it appears on the top of video streaming or video hosting platforms, such as YouTube and Instagram, in search results. Similar to any other SEO strategy, it also aims at boosting videos’ rankings, drive traffic, and increase views.
Elements of Video SEO
Vide SEO improves the visibility and rankings of video content. To achieve this, marketers have to focus on a few crucial elements, which are as follows:
Transcriptions and Closed Captions: Videos must have accurate captions and transcriptions to be accessible by more people and enable search engines to understand the content and purpose of videos.
Keyword Research: You use different tools to identify and choose the most relevant keywords for your videos. The selected keywords must suit your topic and have good search volumes.
Video Description: Videos must have detailed descriptions, providing context about the content of the video. Your description should have relevant keywords and links of reliable resources if needed.
Tags: There must be relevant and descriptive tags for videos to enable search engines to understand their context and discover them easily.
Video Title: Create interesting and keyword-rich titles for videos that represent their content and attract viewers.
Thumbnail Optimization: An eye-catching thumbnail is important for the video to entice users to click on it.
11. Negative SEO
Negative SEO may not be the most ethical SEO practice, but brands and marketers use it in certain situations to achieve top rankings. The goal of negative SEO is to hamper competitors’ search engine rankings to replace that position or gain benefits from their loss.
There are several negative SEO techniques used by businesses, such as posting negative reviews and feedback on different platforms, hacking others’ websites and building multiple low-quality links, etc. If a person involved in such malicious activities is identified, it can lead to legal ordeals. So, it’s always recommended to stay away from negative SEO.
Also Read: How to Do Keyword Research for SEO? 2024 Strategy
12. White-hat SEO
White-hat SEO includes all major types of SEO in digital marketing that abide by the guidelines and regulations of all major search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These methods take time to yield results, so you need to be patient. However, once white-hat SEO starts working, you get sustainable and long-term results that build credibility and goodwill around your brand.
White-hat SEO techniques comprise ethical practices to improve search engine rankings while regulating the integrity of the brand and website. The best part of this SEO type is there is no risk of getting the website banned by search engines if there are algorithm updates. So, we can say that white-hat SEO is low-risk and highly rewarding if done right.
A few common examples of white-hat SEO are developing relevant and quality content, using keyword-rich meta tags, doing extensive keyword research, building links from high-authority links, offering top-notch content and services, developing an easy-to-navigate website, etc.
13. Black-hat SEO
Black-hat SEO is the opposite of white-hat SEO, comprising techniques that exploit weaknesses in Google’s search algorithm to get a higher rank on SERPs. These methods don’t follow the regulations of search engines and resort to bad practices to get the website ahead, such as keyword stuffing, spammy or paid link building, cloaking to misguide crawlers, etc.
Such black-hat SEO methods may give instant results but can get your website blacklisted or affect its search engine ranking if detected by Google. Also, you achieve short-lived results even after taking such high risks. Therefore, it’s best to avoid back-hat SEO.
14. Gray-hat SEO
Gray-hat SEO includes tactics that are neither black-hat nor white-hat, so the terms and conditions regarding these practices are unclear. Marketers use gray-hat SEO to get quick results.
Google and other search engines don’t prohibit these strategies or mention anything explicitly regarding them, but they are frowned upon and can lead to unwanted results. However, they won’t get your website banned from search engines. So, we can say that the content you create and publish according to gray-hat SEO is ill-defined. Common examples of gray-hat SEO are excessive or suspicious links, clickbait content to sensationalize it, paid reviews, etc. Although these practices are not forbidden, avoiding such underhanded techniques is better.
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Conclusion
It’s crucial to understand the main types of SEO in digital marketing to improve your website’s online visibility and search engine rankings. From on-page and off-page SEO to voice SEO to international SEO to technical SEO, each plays a vital role in SEO marketing campaigns. On-page SEO optimizes the website, while technical SEO ensures the smooth functionality of the site. Similarly, off-page SEO builds page authority, and international SEO takes your business to the global level. Make sure you navigate each of these SEO methods effectively and use the right technique to attract more traffic and foster sustainable business growth.
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