Four Types of SEO Every Business Should Know

Key Takeaways

• What is SEO?
• What are the four main types of SEO?
• Detailed Explanation of each type of SEO

There are four categories of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and each one is important to your SEO marketing plan. Learn about the four categories of SEO and how to optimize your website.

What is SEO?

As has been mentioned in our article: How to Optimize your Website for Search Engines, a complete guide:

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a practice of optimizing content so that it shows up better on search engines. The goal of search engine optimization is to align your site with ranking algorithms used by search engine's so that it can be quickly found, crawled, indexed, and discovered. (link)

While there are certainly some useful elements to that guide, and you should certainly look into that article if you would like to know more, this article aims to talk specifically on the four main types and their importance to SEO.

What are the Four main types of SEO?

Now that we understand some history, it's time to look at the four types of SEO. The four main types of SEO, which we will explain in more detail below, are as follows:

1. On-Page SEO
2. Off-Page SEO
3. Local SEO
4. Technical SEO

We will address each one of these in greater detail below, but you might also be best served understanding why Search Engines work the way they do, which will give context to them and help understand why they exist in the first place. Each one of these types of SEO impacts how you show up in search engines in different ways. We have numerous guides to help you improve your ranking in each one, or utilize our SEO Services to receive help for your business!

First Type: On-Page SEO

Our Search Engine Optimization and Core Web Vitals article contains an excellent guide on how to improve this type of SEO, but does not explain what it is or why it is important. Simply put, On-Page SEO is based on your website and how it is interpreted by a search engine (see: Why do Search Engines work the way they do?). 

In order to make it easier for crawlers to read through your website content, you need to follow a set of best practices such as maintaining heading structure so that topics can be understood in context of headings and so forth. Doing this makes your website easier to 'crawl' for bots and therefore allows it to rank higher in search engines as the content is easier to understand. In a sense, you are rewarded for your discipline.

Another important part of On-Page SEO has to do with the way you word your content. Using your keywords in your main body content allows for better content matching. This is a major reason why our coding practices at Wallaby Designs lay a heavy emphasis on SEO Optimized Code, because we understand the importance of maintaining good content structure. 

As was mentioned earlier, if you want to examine your On-Page SEO and see how it measures up, there is an excellent guide to On-Page SEO in our article: Search Optimization and Core Web Vitals.

Second Type: Off-Page SEO

You might read the name of this kind of SEO and think 'duh'! Logically, it makes sense that external factors have an impact on your Search Engine listing, but how? For this, it's best to understand how exactly Search Engines work, and for that you need only to read above if you haven't already.

Off-page SEO refers to the activities you carry out on other pages of your website, other websites, and even other platforms to support the ranking of your page (link)

We spoke at length about backlinks above, so you should understand the importance of backlinks for your website ranking. There are a number of ways to improve this ranking, which we have outlined in our Search Optimization and Core Web Vitals article.

Beyond that, the best way to help your off-page SEO is by producing good quality content. We have a few suggestions here, but blogging is the easiest way to help this ranking. Our article: 8 Benefits of Blogging for Your Small Business has some excellent advice on this. We also have another article: Ten Search Engine Optimization Tips for Beginners that also gives great ideas on content creation and how it can benefit your SEO ranking.

Third Type: Local SEO

It may shock you to learn that approximately 46% of all searches have to do with location (source). Since Google handles over 3.5 billion searches every day, that's over 1.6 billion searches which are intended for local content. Locally based SEO results, therefore, should be important to you and your business and there are a number of ways to do this, but some simple methods are:

1. Creating and updating your Search Engine profiles - Having a Google Business Profile that you post updates to is a good way to stay current with Google and raise your local rank. Reviews on this profile, as well as images and map content, are tremendously important for success.
2. Ensuring your business is listed in local and online directories with correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data. This ensures that people not only can find you, but they can contact you. It is one of the most important factors of SEO since it determines how customers are able to interact with you.
3. Putting your company NAP data on your website for your customers to find. The best and easiest way to do this is by having your company contact information in the footer.

Fourth Type: Technical SEO

Technical SEO relates not only to how search engines are able to read your website (see: Why do Search Engines work the way they do?), but also the site architecture, security, speed, and mobile optimization, among other factors. Also, if your pages are not able to be easily crawled, they won't be ranked well.

Mobile friendly websites are especially important to google as they are one of the driving forces for internet access. In fact, in 2015 it was observed that more than half of all web searches were performed on mobile (source).

With mobile devices coming to the forefront of access, your website needs to be able to handle lower-bandwidth access and so needs to be optimized for mobile as well as desktop. Having poor mobile accessibility can severely impact your site. 

Our article: How to Optimize your website for Search Engines has a list of search factors that can negatively impact your ranking.