Got an amazing website but not getting traffic? It is because you need to do SEO aka Search Engine Optimization for your website. Now the catch here is that there are multiple types of SEO, and you need to know the right one for your business.
So to give you clarity on what would be best for you to get started with, we are going to discuss SEO types in detail, and that way, you will be able to figure out which one you need.
Let’s get into it!
Types of SEO that can boost your business revenue
There are multiple types of SEO in digital marketing, and we are going to discuss each one in detail, with the industry examples. So are you ready to find out which type of SEOs your business needs?
On-page SEO
Anything that is done on your website for your website is called on-page SEO. In this type of SEO, you optimize the elements of your website, like content, images, and HTML code, to increase the chances of ranking your website.
On-page SEO involves the optimization of the following elements.
- Sorting out your keywords, to include them in your content, URLs, and other crucial elements like title and meta description.
- URLs designing and structure – what your URL should look like. What should the slug of the URL be to make it relevant to the SERPs (search engine page result).
- Optimizing the metadata like meta title, meta description, to make it rank in the search results.
- Optimizing the image data like title, file name, alt text, and caption, to ensure the image is optimized enough to show up in search results.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is the exact opposite of on-page types of SEO techniques. It is anything that you do beyond your own website to help your website perform better overall.
For instance, getting backlinks for your website. Which means, some third party site is giving a link to your website. Even though you did not make any direct change to your website, yet it helps your website in gaining authority.
Other than backlink building, it also involves practices like guest blogging, sharing press releases, and actively listing your business on various review sites like G2 and Capterra to get brand signals.
All these efforts collectively make your brand credible and also improve your authority in the search engine’s eyes.
Technical SEO
You want your customers to have the best experience on your website but along with that you also want to ensure that your website is crawlable by search engines like Google.
For that, along with other types of SEO you also do technical SEO. Where you give instructions to the search engine about which pages they can or cannot crawl, optimize the loading speed of your website, and also check the mobile friendliness.
In technical SEO, you also do an SEO audit of your website to find out aspects like duplicate content, analyze the site structure, and fix errors that Google Search Console is giving you regarding your pages.
Make a mental note that technical SEO is the backbone of SEO. Even if you are putting your best efforts, it still won’t give you quality results, because search engines are unable to read or crawl your pages in the first place.
Fix that!
| File name (all lowercase, evergreen name) | technical type of seo can give errors as well |
| Alt text (in sentence case, with period) | If not done right, then technical categories of SEO can give errors. |
| Title (in sentence case, with period) | If not done right, then technical categories of SEO can give errors. |
| Caption / Description (in sentence case, with period) | If not done right, then technical categories of SEO can give errors as shared from Google Search Console directly. |
Local SEO
If you own a local bakery shop, or are a local florist, have a local gym, then this is the type of SEO you need for your business.
Local SEO is done to increase the footfall at your local business by reaching your local audience and showing up in local search results on Google.
Once you do local SEO, you increase your chances of getting ranked higher in the search and also being shown in the local map.
For instance, ZeroAdo has optimized its blog SEO companies in Mumbai for local SEO.
The local SEO type not only helps you in getting more customers, but also increases traffic on your website, which in return improves your rankings, which means more customers. It is a loop that keeps on going.
International SEO
International SEO, often interchangeably called as global SEO is the type of SEO that gets you business and traffic from across the globe.
If you are planning to make your local business global, then this is the SEO for you. If you have a business spread across the nations but you want to scale it further then this is the SEO for you. If your services/products are deliverable to anywhere in the world, then this is the SEO you should be opting for.
International SEO can be done from anywhere. You could be sitting in Abu Dhabi, and your content and business will still be able to reach the audience in the USA.
International SEO is not location based and monday.com is the biggest example of that. They are based in Tel Aviv, Israel but their platform is reaching places which they probably might not have even heard of.
That’s what international SEO can do for you. So, that little online baking book that you are trying to sell locally, can actually be sold internationally.
Or that software of yours that has the potential to add value to the users can actually be sold worldwide instead of just one vendor – who by the way will eventually sell it globally with international SEO.
Video SEO
This is one of the most underrated types of SEO in the market and is often overlooked. The competition in ranking for a video versus a content piece is uncanny.
According to a report by Forrester, I quote – “On the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.”
The statistics are truly baffling, because it feels like a gem has been under our nose all this while and yet we couldn’t bank on it.
For video SEO, you optimize your videos to rank and show up in Google searches, and this can be from various hosting platforms like Youtube and even TikTok.
Only the form of content changes, but the practices and the goal remains the same. So go get started, and leverage on what videos.
Image SEO
Just like videos, images have ranking potential as well on Google.
Image SEO is the type of SEO that not only increases the traffic of your website, but also adds an assisting hand to other SEOs like content SEO.
If your images within the content are optimized for search results, then people can reach your blog, article, or a landing page as well.
For instance, because of Image SEO, you can see two of ZeroAdo’s images ranking from the blog SEO copywriting tools.
We are ranking in the search results for images, because we ensure that the backend of the image is always SEO optimized, from our filename to title and alternate text, everything is SEO optimized with appropriate keywords 👇.
Content SEO
SEO, when done for text based content is known as content SEO. Blogs, landing pages, articles, and white pages, all come under the SEO content category.
Content SEO overall is very vast, and it has a lot of other segments within it as well. You start with doing keyword research for your content piece and then move onto optimizing the content and following aspects within it based on that and SERPs.
- Optimize your title and meta description to include keywords.
- Check your content for keyword frequency, and also make sure that keyword addition is organic and contextual and not forced.
- Check if internal links are added within the content with appropriate anchor text and context.
- Ensure image SEO has been done for all the images and infographics within the content.
- Most importantly, check if the content is plagiarism free, and has rank worthy quality.
- Ensure consistency while publishing content.
White Hat & Black hat SEO
White hat and black hat SEO are the contrasting types of SEOs as you can already make that out from their names.
White hat SEO includes following ethical SEO practices and following guidelines as curated by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
These practices include adding keywords contextually to your content, making original content, and doing barter link collaborations.
Black hat SEO is completely opposite of this and includes unethical SEO practices like keyword stuffing and purchasing links.
Now, black hat SEO is not against the law, but it is against the guidelines of the search engines and it can result in negative repercussions for your website.
Brand SEO
How do you think brands like Apple, and Monday.com show up in search results while their names are dictionary words with meanings?
Through one of the SEO types called brand SEO. Brand SEO simply refers to optimizing your website, and content to rank for queries related specifically to your brand.
For instance, if you look up for ZeroAdo, then you will find our website on top along with our social media channels in the search results. That is because we have done brand SEO for our own brand as well.
Multilingual SEO
SEO is a customer centric marketing channel with high ROI which is loved by businesses and customers alike. You might ask why?
Because it is not constantly nudging your customers to buy your products and services. But instead, it is there, when your customer genuinely needs a solution to their problem.
It is further loved because of one of the SEO categories called multilingual SEO through which you can reach your customers in their preferred language. So SEO is not bound by linguistic barriers.
With multilingual SEO, a similar version of your site exists in a different language as well. For instance, checkout the example below.
When I set my location to Abu Dhabi on my VPN, the language was different, but the moment I set it to India, the language was English again.
[Source – Aldar]
[Source – Aldar]
Ecommerce SEO
Among all the categories of SEO, e-commerce SEO is the one which is often more difficult than the others. Why? Because no matter what e-commerce business you are in, there are always going to be ads ranking on top of the search.
The E-commerce audience is also the one that is looking to buy a product instantly, and often goes with the one that shows up in the top 3.
However, if you rank e-commerce SEO and rank in top for organic traffic, then it is also highly rewarding, and that is what makes it a high risk and high reward stream. Tentree, a sustainable clothing brand, took notes of it, and invested in SEO, and today they are ranking for high volume queries like “joggers” and “hemp clothing” which are staple piece of their brand.
Because SEO might take some time to show results, but the benefits of SEO come back compounded!
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is the type of SEO that showcases that greed has no end! Even if some businesses are doing good, they try to harm their competitors with malpractices so that their competitors cannot do better than them.
When someone tries to build spammy links, low quality links, content scraping, and even hack a site they are trying to harm the rankings of is called Negative SEO.
To stay away from such practices, always make sure that your site is secure, keep a check on all the backlinks that you are getting, and of course make sure your ranking content pages have the canonical tag.
Mobile SEO
Mobile now accounts for 58.22% of all searches globally.
As per a report from Highervisibility
Mobile is one of the most important devices currently when it comes to organic search as the statistic is clearly stating. And why not? It is so handy and available all the time.
Keeping that in mind, mobile SEO becomes crucial as well. Mobile SEO refers to optimizing your website for mobile aka your website should be easy to use, and must give a good experience to the user on mobile.
Practices like responsive design and dynamic serving (the outlook of the page is different on mobile and desktop based on the size of the screen) are currently the ones that stand out in this type of SEO. Other than this, most of the SEO practices are similar to that of desktop SEO.
Voice SEO
Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa – we talk to them as if they are humans. We engage with them and find us search results. The type of SEO that helps your brand show up in search results for a voice search query is known as voice SEO.
You optimize your website for voice SEO by targeting appropriate keywords which are often long tail, analyzing the intent of those keywords, and making sure the content on your website sounds human.
Social SEO
Social SEO refers to optimizing your brand social media profiles to be able to be found in search results easily for queries.
You want to be found not just on Google but also on social media for your product and services. In Google as well several social media pages of brands rank since they are optimized for the queries.
For instance, check out how a social media e-commerce store on Instagram is ranking in search results.
Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO refers to optimizing huge websites of big organizations to improve their visibility. Often, with big websites, the data is so huge, that the SEO ends up getting messy. There is duplicate content, indexing issues, and sometimes even the site structure is not right.
In such cases, the work that needs to be done to fix it all is huge, and that is where enterprise SEO comes into play.
Accenture, is a good SEO example of enterprise SEO. They provide multiple services ranging from consulting to digital marketing, and they focus heavily on SEO for the growth. From their site structure, to content, to even job postings, everything is SEO optimized!
Your business need SEO experts along with SEO types
There are several SEO types and most of them work best if they are implemented together. For instance, content SEO combined with image SEO, and off-page SEO, and technical SEO, will give better results than it would give alone.
But that just isn’t it, to implement these SEO types, you also need expert SEO services. SEO is a hard earned skill that gets better only after years of practice and for best results you should opt for experts that have an SEO-Led Growth® approach and can take into account different types of SEOs.
