Having a website alone won’t bring traffic. Sometimes, diagnosing why your site is not getting the traffic you want can be difficult.
For that reason, you might consider improving SEO. You could hire an in-house SEO specialist, a marketing agency, or a freelance SEO. You could also do the work yourself.
Understanding the types of SEO can help you choose the right services to boost your website’s visibility. This knowledge can also help you fix issues on your own before passing the rest to a specialist.
What Are the Types of SEO?
Three main types of SEO exist:
- On-page SEO: Actions you take with website content to improve rankings (for example, using relevant keywords).
- Off-page SEO: Actions that happen outside your website to improve rankings (for example, building backlinks).
- Technical SEO: Actions on the technical side of your site (for example, improving page speed).
Let’s look at each type more closely.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO focuses on the content of your website. Search engines favor content that is easy to find, easy to understand, and genuinely helpful.
Examples of on-page SEO services include:
- Assigning a target keyword to each important webpage
- Optimizing page titles for those specific keywords
- Updating item descriptions in an online store
- Adding fresh content to a blog
- Restructuring an old article or service page
- Adding structure to content with correct HTML tags
- Creating a content plan for each stage of a customer journey
If the content on your site doesn’t target keywords or is generally unhelpful, you may need better on-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO addresses factors that occur outside your website and can influence your site’s rankings. One major off-page factor is high-quality backlinks.
Here is an example of how to strengthen off-page SEO: First, you research and publish an informative article about cat allergies on your website. Then, another website cites your article in a study about common household-pet allergies and links to your site.
That link becomes your backlink, which may boost your SEO. Search engines, such as Google, often see backlinks from reputable sites as a positive signal.
Off-page SEO involves more than backlinks. It can include:
- Managing social media
- Conducting outreach and digital PR
- Creating content for other platforms (such as YouTube)
- Managing reviews
- Monitoring spammy backlinks that could hurt SEO
If nobody is visiting your website because nobody is talking about it, you may need stronger off-page SEO.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO addresses backend site factors that affect crawlability, user experience (UX), and site speed. Good technical SEO lets both search engines and people navigate your site easily.
Slow-loading pages, broken images, or poor navigation hurt user experience and reflect bad technical SEO.
Common technical SEO tasks include:
- Conducting a technical site audit
- Finding and fixing duplicate content
- Using a robots.txt file to guide Google on how to crawl your site
- Creating a clear sitemap
- Optimizing code and file sizes for faster page loading
- Managing a crawl budget
- Migrating a website
- Making the site mobile-friendly
A key part of technical SEO is ensuring that both humans and search engines can access your important pages. For instance, a clear and useful site architecture helps everyone find and understand your content.
Other Types of SEO
Beyond these three major SEO categories, other optimization strategies can boost your search engine visibility:
Image SEO
Image SEO ensures search engines can understand and rank your images, helping more users find your content.
Images need optimized HTML tags, much like other content on your site. Proper image SEO helps your images appear in features like Google’s image carousels.
Google’s John Mueller also recommends using descriptive filenames, filling out alt text, and keeping relevant surrounding text.
Video SEO
Video SEO ensures search engines can interpret and rank your videos, guiding more viewers to your content.
Video SEO requires optimization of a video’s title, URL, tags, and description. Adding structured data to your site’s code can also help search engines display your videos in rich results.
YouTube automatically adds structured data for key moments, but you can add or customize it on your own site.
The image above uses key moments to highlight an important clip. That clip quickly shows searchers how to groom a dog, and it shows Google the most important parts of the video.
Read our guide on structured data for videos to learn more.
Different video SEO techniques can also increase views on YouTube, which is another niche of SEO.
Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO is essential for online stores to rank higher in search results and attract more customers.
Stores that sell products or services online can use ecommerce SEO to increase traffic and boost sales.
Improving an ecommerce site in search engines goes beyond updating product titles and descriptions. It can also involve optimizing a brand on external platforms, such as etsy.com or amazon.com.
Most ecommerce markets are highly competitive, so strong SEO is critical to attract online shoppers.
Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO is important for reaching smartphone users and ensuring they can easily find and navigate your site.
A popular study by bankmycell.com found over 83% of the world owns a smartphone. Brands cannot succeed without making sure their sites work on all platforms.
A main part of mobile search optimization is making it easy for searchers to use your site on their phones. That goes back to technical SEO—optimizing your code so the mobile version of the site is fast and easy to use.
Another aspect of mobile SEO is finding keywords that people search for on their phones, which may differ from desktop searches. If you want to find those keywords, conduct mobile keyword research.
Local SEO
Local SEO is important for businesses with physical locations to attract nearby customers.
Businesses that have physical locations can use local SEO to get more foot traffic. Optimizing content on your site and on platforms like Google Business Profile (also known as Google My Business) can help put your brand in front of a local audience.
Imagine you need to find a dog groomer in the city of Orlando:
The options you see when you search on Google are the businesses with the best local SEO.
A dog grooming business in Orlando would need to improve its local SEO to appear in a Google search engine results page (SERP) feature like the one above.
- Local SEO typically includes:
- Managing online citations
- Setting up a Google Business Profile
- Targeting and tracking local keywords
- Creating site content to target local searches
- Leveraging local connections to build partnerships and backlinks
Local businesses should still focus on on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. The list above highlights specific actions that affect local rankings in addition to standard SEO best practices.
How to Decide Which SEO Services You Need
Effective SEO is subjective because it depends on your audience and your market’s competition. The best SEO plan for an online kid’s clothing store could differ from the best plan for a large hospital.
Because there are many ways to improve SEO, you must decide what works best for your site and your brand.
Here’s how to figure out what kind of SEO services you might need:
Do a Content Audit
Running a content audit will show how your site’s content performs—both good and bad.
You can use Google Search Console to see which content may need improvement. Open the full report on the main dashboard under Performance.
Add the URL of the page you want to improve.
Then, sort by impressions. Look for content that has many impressions for a keyword but few clicks.
This gap may be an opportunity to enhance your content for that keyword.
Run a Technical Audit
Use Google Search Console for a basic technical audit. Go to the dashboard and click on Core Web Vitals to see if technical issues exist.
Problems with site speed or layout can scare off visitors and lower SEO performance.
Run a Technical Audit with Semrush
Semrush’s Site Audit tool can provide deeper insights. You can sign up for a free account, add your domain, and crawl up to 100 pages.
View the Overview for a detailed site health report that pinpoints urgent SEO issues.
Audit Your Backlink Profile
Use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool(also available with a free account) to check for reputable backlinks or spammy ones. This tool offers recommendations to strengthen your backlink profile.
You can give these recommendations to an SEO specialist.
What Types of SEO Services Are Out There?
If you plan to hire an SEO provider but are unsure what to request, consider a 2021 Search Engine Journal survey. It revealed the most requested digital marketing services, many of which align with the SEO types discussed above.
Link Building
Backlinks can boost SEO. One popular SEO service is to create link-worthy content and find the right audience for it. A specialist might do this in several ways:
- Writing public relations releases
- Guest blogging
- Publishing new, interesting research
- Conducting an outreach campaign to build new online connections and backlinks
Part of link building is creating material that people want to link to. Another part is researching and contacting potential websites to pitch that content to.
If you’re considering hiring a link building service, ask how they find prospects, what tactics they will use to reach out, and how many links they plan to build for you.
Focusing on high-quality links, not just quantity, is also important.
Web Design, User Experience, and Web Development
Large-scale changes may be necessary to improve your site’s SEO and create a better experience for visitors. A web developer or designer might work on your site’s:
- Speed and load time
- Indexability and crawlability (the ease with which search engines can find and navigate your site)
- Mobile SEO
They will run a technical audit to identify problem areas and then fix them.
Other common services in this area include:
- Migrating a website to a new domain
- Migrating themes
- Finding patterns of when and where visitors exit a site
- Creating a sitemap and robots.txt file
- Creating clean site architecture
- Auditing and cleaning up heavy code
- Fixing duplicate content issues
Content Marketing (Keyword Strategy, Content Strategy, Content Production)
Content marketing is the process of producing and sharing online material that sparks interest in your products or services without directly promoting them. It helps you build brand awareness, gain trust, and increase conversions by offering valuable information to potential customers.
A strategy alone does not work without actual content production. A good content writer or developer uses the selected keywords to create a piece of content that is optimized for search.
Content specialists may also update old content on your site if it is underperforming. They could improve on-page SEO by suggesting the right words for meta tags.
You can learn more about content marketing and free tools to help you create optimized posts in this guide.
Online Reputation Management & Social Media Marketing
Online reputation can help or hurt your site’s visibility. If a Google search of your brand yields negative reviews on page one, it could turn away potential customers. A specialist in reputation management may respond to negative reviews, encourage positive feedback, and create social media posts to engage audiences. They also measure post performance to see which efforts drive valuable traffic.
Your online reputation can help or hurt your site’s success.
Why does that matter?
If a Google search of your brand name leads to negative reviews on the first search engine results page (SERP), it can damage your credibility.
A specialist in this field can respond to any reputation issues related to your industry or brand.
Managing a bad online reputation also involves building a good one. This can include:
- Responding to and managing negative reviews
- Encouraging honest positive reviews
- Setting up social media accounts and creating posts to boost engagement
- Getting mentions from other brands and influencers
These steps show people what to expect from your company and strengthen your off-page online presence. A specialist will also track post performance to see which content drives meaningful traffic to your website.
Determine Your SEO Needs
Identify which of the three core SEO types (on-page, off-page, or technical) your site lacks.
A free Semrush Site Audit is a good starting point. Then, explore services and tasks within those categories.
- An old site with technical issues may need technical SEO.
- A new site with little content could benefit from content marketing.
- A site with great content but no visibility may need better off-page SEO.
- A local business needs local SEO to appear in nearby searches.
The more you understand about SEO types and services, the easier it will be to improve your online visibility—either on your own or with the help of an expert.