If you are familiar with Google or other search engines and its impact on marketing, it is likely you have heard of SEO and understand its importance for a company’s visibility. In case you aren’t hip like us agrimarketing nerds or need a reminder, SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of implementing several tactics to improve your rank on a search engine results pages (SERP). 

The common mistake many new businesses make is thinking including a couple of keywords on a page and maybe an intriguing title for a little razzle dazzle is enough to feed the algorithm to get on the first page. However, that’s only a fraction of what it takes to get a good rank on Google’s Search and drive traffic to your website. To get the results you want in your SEO marketing strategy you must be familiar with the 4 different types of SEO and implement them into your strategy to really take advantage of the algorithms.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is probably the most commonly known type of SEO. This is where your content and keywords come into play. A successful on-page SEO strategy requires you to first do thorough keyword research around your audience. When you determine your keyword strategy, another key factor in boosting your SEO score is having interesting, well-written content. This includes everything from website copy and blogs to landing pages. Stay away from bad practices like keyword stuffing and creating duplicate content, because Google will penalize you for it. Before you upload, you’ll want to also optimize your page title, meta description, headers, and photos. If you want a more in depth look at on-page SEO, you can check out our handy guide here written by our resident farmer and agricultural marketing professional on our team. 

Off-Page SEO

Another piece of the pie is off-page SEO. Off-page SEO consists of tactics you use to promote your website from other sources. The most common tactic of off-page SEO is backlinks. Backlinks are when websites or brands that may be in a similar industry link back to your website. This can be extremely helpful for your SEO strategy because if that website has a good ranking it can help boost yours as well. You can also improve your off-page SEO with good social media marketing, investing in influencer marketing, hosting guest bloggers, or simply building up your brand. The key to efficient off-page SEO is ultimately building relationships with other brands and also building trust with your audience. This will get more eyes on your brand and let search engines like Google know you have an authoritative source, thus helping you rank higher in search.

Technical SEO

So aside from good content and efficient website promotion, what else is there to help boost that Google SERP? That is another necessary step deemed technical SEO. Technical SEO is everything done on the back end to make your site secure and create a nice user experience for your audience. There are many things that can help improve your technical SEO including indexing, crawling, schemas, your page speed, a sitemap, and making your website mobile friendly. All of these practices will allow Google to actually find and identify your page and what is on it, while also correcting any technical errors. This can be a more complicated and intricate process so it is suggested that you get an SEO professional and even website developers to complete all the steps properly.

Local SEO

If you are a local business trying to gain real foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar from people in your area, you should also optimize your local SEO. Local SEO can be more tangible than general SEO because it focuses on a more niche location than competing with websites from all over the world. This is what will help a coffee shop in Nashville get discovered whenever a person searches for “coffee in Nashville.” A big part of this entails creating and optimizing your Google Business Profile. Here you can update all the new happenings about your location as well as verify information such as your address, phone number, and what you offer. To learn more ways you can spruce up your Google Business Profile check out our guide here.

All in all, while content might be the thing most people are paying attention to, all of these types of SEO play a vital part in your website being discovered. Each category listed requires much work for the strategy to succeed. It can also require different levels of knowledge or expertise.

If you are ready to put your SEO strategy in action and improve your keyword rankings by 12% and overall organic traffic by 25%, contact us and we can assist you with our team of professionals for each form of SEO.