Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of targeting your website to rank better on a search engine results page (SERP) so that you receive more traffic. The goal is usually to place on the first page of Google results the search terms that most mean to your target audience. SEO is as much about understanding the wants and needs of your audience as it is about the technical nature of how to set up your website. On-page SEO involves creating the type of content search engines are looking for and “optimizing” it to help search engines better understand what it's all about.
SEO marketing and social media marketing go hand in hand because the goal is to tell Google how great you are. By adjusting your website and content for greater visibility and readability, you help make sense of your SEO. Designing your site based on the needs of your visitors and making sure that search engines can easily access your site, generally yields positive results. If your site supports SEO, then you can position hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of different keywords.
Search engines are placing increasing emphasis on having fast-loading sites; the good news is that this is not only beneficial to search engines, but also to your users and your site's conversion rates. For a detailed summary of the need to hire an SEO and what things to look for, you can read Do You Need an SEO? If you want to take a more organized approach to learning SEO or empowering your entire team, check out the Moz Academy SEO Essentials Certification. That way, you can see if the traffic that comes from SEO is actually turning into leads and sales. In the end, this approach to SEO produces pages that are often difficult for people to read and look a lot like spam.
So we could easily do a search in Content Explorer to find more blogging guides, and then contact their authors and suggest this post to them as a complement to their guide. If you're a small business that would benefit from ranking for very specific terms focused on geographic location, but not much else, shore up your local SEO efforts (and then perhaps focus on other marketing efforts once you start to see a decline in the benefits of your efforts there). If you're new to SEO and content marketing, I recommend The Skyscraper Technique because it takes a lot of guesswork out of creating content that bloggers and journalists are likely to link to. Since this is a guide to the basics of SEO, you may not be ready to invest that amount of money in powerful SEO tools like Ahrefs just yet.
