What Are the Different Types of SEO?

There are over 200 ranking factors that affect how Google decides which pages to display as the top results. To start understanding how to make these work for your own business’ website, these factors are grouped into different areas of SEO which all play a different role in getting more traction for your website.

We’ll start off with a look at the three main areas of SEO that you might hear mentioned quite a lot – On-Page, Technical and Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO involves everything you can do on a particular page of your site in order to get that page ranking higher. It can cover ranking factors like how you use images, your page title, the length and quality of your content, links to related pages, using subtitles and having the correct tags – which are little bits of code which function almost like labels – in the right places on your page.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the other main area which covers changes you make on your site. Technical SEO is all about how well your site works and having a few things in place to make sure search engines can find or index your website properly. This can include things like making sure your site loads quickly, having a security certificate, using a responsive or mobile friendly theme and having a sitemap in place to make it easier for a search engine to find all the pages you want it to.

Off-page SEO

You could think of this area – Off-Page SEO – a bit like ‘off-website SEO’, because these are ranking factors based outside the immediate world of your website. One of the biggest focuses of Off-Page SEO is backlinks, which is where other websites link to yours. There are different ways to build these links such as guest blogging, Digital PR work to build links with relevant media and other organisations and creating interesting and unique content that will get shared and mentioned on other websites. Google sees these backlinks essentially as recommendations that your site is worth visiting, which helps you to build more trust and authority over time.

Beyond these main three areas, there are other types of SEO which are more specialised, depending on your business.

Mobile SEO

For sites that rely heavily on mobile users – which is a growing number of websites – there’s a category referred to as mobile SEO which focuses particularly on how your site looks and functions on a mobile phone. This can include things like optimising the layout for a mobile screen and making sure all the buttons are big enough to click with a finger, as well as taking into account the page speed and mobile friendly themes mentioned earlier.

Video SEO

If you’re using video heavily in your marketing, there are ways to optimise video both on your website and on other search engines such as Youtube in order to reach a wider audience. Youtube videos can also appear in Google search results directly, giving you two opportunities to attract more viewers.

And there are even more specialised areas of SEO…

You might even hear of more niche results than this – you’ll find search results for Amazon SEO and Pinterest SEO as well as that for Ebay, Facebook and Twitter. These aren’t all aiming to get your website to appear as a result – obviously some of the pages you want to rank will be a product page or a social media profile. If you think about it a lot of the websites and social channels we use today have their own internal search engine, which you can often optimise for if it’s appropriate for your business.

And that’s the beauty of SEO – it can be so tailored towards what’s most important for your business and how your audience are looking to find you.