SEO Marketing: What It Is and How to Get Started

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it's a digital marketing process that entails optimizing your website and its content for greater visibility on search engines like Google.

When someone conducts a search query, such as "data analyst salary" or "what is content marketing," an SEO-friendly site that contains relevant content will rank high on a search engine results page (SERP). In short, optimizing your site for SEO makes it easier for your target audience to find your content, products, and services organically—without using paid ads.

Dive deeper into SEO marketing, its importance, and how to begin implementing it.

What is SEO marketing?

SEO refers to a range of processes you can use to increase a website's search engine rankings, drive more traffic to the site, and improve its visibility. It accomplishes this with a combination of high-quality content that's relevant to internet users' needs and an outstanding user experience. 

It’s imperative in today’s digital age, which demands a robust online presence. An SEO marketing strategy makes it easier for search engines like Google and Bing to "crawl" your content and determine how it should rank on SERPs.

Types of SEO marketing

Types of SEO marketing typically fall into three categories: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. SEO aims to optimize elements in all three categories, ensuring they operate harmoniously so that your website and its content gain greater organic visibility.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to a webpage’s content and how it’s crafted. Search engines look for content relevant to the keyword that satisfies searcher intent, is well-structured and easy to navigate, and offers authoritative information within an industry. 

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the backlinks a site acquires. Backlinks occur when other sites link to pages on your site. The more authoritative and relevant, the better for SEO. Over time, backlinks can contribute to your site’s authority and exposure.  

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the backend aspects of your site, including title tags and meta descriptions that appear in a webpage's source code, the site’s structure and navigation, how pages within a site link to one another, and the site’s loading time. 

Learn more: What Is an SEO Consultant and Do You Need One?

What is an example of SEO marketing?

Real-world examples can help bring concepts to life. SEO examples can include incorporating relevant keywords into blog posts and website content, adding a sitemap to help Google identify the location of relevant content, and completing a Google Business Profile to boost local SEO results.

Why is SEO marketing important? 

An SEO-friendly site has many benefits, including attracting more consumers in your target market without relying so heavily on paid ads. These four reasons make SERO marketing important for your business:

1. User experience

2. Visibility

3. Organic traffic

4. Customer insights

Explore each reason in more detail to understand the importance of well-crafted SEO marketing.

1. User experience 

When you’ve optimized your website or e-commerce store, visitors are more likely to enjoy their experience. The table below shows the SEO strategy and its effect on user experience. 

2. Visibility

Where you rank on SERP matters; the first organic (unpaid) search result on Google receives 27.6 percent of clicks, according to Backlinko [1]. A significant decline in clicks occurs for results on the second page, meaning that appearing on the first page garners more visibility. 

3. Organic traffic

Paid ads are one way to drive traffic to your site but are expensive. Statista, a market, and consumer data provider, projects that worldwide search advertising spending will reach $306.7 billion in 2024 and grow by a compound annual growth rate of 8.01 percent through 2028 to reach a total of more than $417 billion by 2028 [2].

Using an SEO digital marketing strategy, you can rank well in search results and attract more organic (free) traffic to your site, meaning people find and click on your content without paid ads. Moreover, 95 percent of clicks on Google go to organic search results, according to Semrush [3]. In addition, you can become a trusted source of information in the marketplace, increasing the effectiveness of your paid ads.  

Did you know? Improving your site’s organic search traffic can reduce the costs of acquiring customers by 87 percent, according to a report by Terakeet, a marketing technology platform [4].

4. Customer insights 

Much of running a successful business is knowing what customers want. You can gain customer insights throughout the SEO marketing process, including: 

• Keyword research: Learning about the terms customers are searching, from questions asking how and why to the names of products and brands

• Searcher intent: Understanding why customers search for particular keywords 

• Content strategy: Learning what content drives actions such as subscribing or purchasing products 

How to build an SEO marketing strategy

In this section, you’ll improve your website’s content, domain authority, and technical elements to make your site more discoverable and beneficial for your target audience. The steps below give an example of some strategies you can take:

1. Analyze your competitors. 

2. Understand your target audience from an SEO perspective.

3. Create SEO-friendly content. 

4. Improve your technical SEO.

5. Acquire relevant, authoritative backlinks.

Use each step below to learn about strategies to improve your SEO.

1. Analyze your competitors.

Just as you perform a competitive analysis to identify market gaps and differentiate your products and marketing efforts, you’ll need to investigate and analyze competitors’ SEO. That way, you can give yourself a competitive edge regarding your site and its content.  

• Make a list of your competitors, including ones you’re already familiar with and ones that rank at the top of SERPs for keywords related to your products and services.   

• Audit competitors’ web content, site structure, navigation, and user-experience features like call-to-action buttons and page design. How authoritative is the content? How easy is it to click around, find information, and take action?    

• Use an SEO marketing tool like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz to determine which keywords these competitors are ranking for on each webpage, including secondary or related keywords and their search volumes.

• You can find out what meta tags your competitors are using by right-clicking anywhere on their sites and selecting “view page source” from the menu that pops up. 

Read more: What Is Competitor Analysis? Definition + Step-by-Step Guide

2. Understand your target audience from an SEO perspective.

Once you understand your competitors, it's essential to consider your audience, including what they search for online and the intent behind it, so that you can generate content your audience finds relevant.

• Install a Google Chrome extension, such as MozBar or Keyword Surfer, to explore relevant keywords. These SEO marketing tools allow you to conduct keyword research right from your browser while viewing SERPs.  

• Use SEMRush to determine searcher intent for each keyword, including navigational (looking for a specific site), informational (looking for information or answers to a question), transactional (intending to complete an action or make a purchase), and commercial (intending to investigate products).  

• Analyze SERPs to discover what questions searchers ask, related searches and questions, featured snippets that Google predicts searchers will click on, and more.

3. Create SEO-friendly content. 

Consistent effort is required to create SEO-friendly content that your target audience finds valuable. You’ll want to optimize every page of your website, including the home page, about page, and other static pages, as well as blogs, articles, sales pages, and lead capture landing pages. 

• Written content should include unique, authoritative information that satisfies searcher intent for a particular keyword. 

• Integrate the keyword and related keywords into your subheadings and text seamlessly and grammatically without overusing them. 

• Structure the content on each page to provide a logical and easy-to-navigate reading experience. This means using subheadings, bullet points, and numbered lists to organize information into smaller sections that are easy to find and skim.  

• Embed relevant images, graphics, and videos to enhance the reading experience. 

• Include links to other relevant pages of your site in the anchor text.

• Include helpful calls to action to make it easy for site visitors to subscribe, fill out forms, and purchase.  

4. Improve your technical SEO.

Businesses often work with web developers or IT professionals to improve their sites’ technical SEO. If you have access to your site’s admin panel, you may be able to make these improvements or fix issues yourself. Start by logging into your website’s admin panel, where you’ll find different options for updating your site’s settings, including metadata and navigation menus. 

For each webpage, follow these steps: 

• Craft a title tag that includes the keyword you want the page to rank for and clearly describes each page's content in 50 to 60 characters.

• Craft a page description that contains the keyword, summarizes the page, and conveys the page’s unique value in up to 160 characters.

• Reduce the size of images so that they load quickly. For example, if your image is 5,000 pixels wide, you might reduce it to 2,000 or 1,200 pixels. 

• Name image files with keywords and descriptions and separate each word with a hyphen. For example, if the image is automatically saved to your device as “image1.jpg,” rename it to “dark-roast-coffee.jpg.” 

For the site as a whole, follow these steps: 

• Set up a clear navigation menu to help site visitors find pages.

• Create a site map with information about your site’s pages, videos, and files and the relationship between them. 

• Create a Google Search Console account and submit your site map so that Google can crawl your site more effectively.  

5. Acquire relevant, authoritative backlinks. 

To improve your off-page SEO, create a plan for getting other sites to link to your content:

• Make a list of sites relevant to your website, not competitors, with high domain authority.

• Reach out to these site creators or content managers to request backlinks. Be sure to offer an incentive, such as high-quality content to improve upon what they’re currently linking to or proposing a topic for a guest blog post you want to write for them. 

• Post pages from your site to social media and include links in your email marketing to get more clicks and increase the chances that other sites will choose to link to your content. 

Improve your SEO marketing skills with Coursera. 

SEO marketing is a vital aspect of digital marketing that creates organic traffic to your website by optimizing its SERP, helping your site rank higher than competitors. If you’re ready to master SEO practices for the long term, consider taking online courses. These flexible learning opportunities can help you build SEO skills, produce authoritative content in your niche, rank higher in search results, and attract more potential customers to your site. 

Courses to consider include The Strategy of Content Marketing from the University of California Davis and Content Strategy for Professionals Specialization from Northwestern University, both on Coursera.