What is SEO? How do you do it, what are the costs, on-page- and off-page SEO, and most importantly, why even bother? Today, we’ll answer all these questions—and more.
What Is the Difference Between SEM, SEA, and SEO?
What Is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is an essential online marketing strategy dedicated to driving prospective customers to your website.
Its goal is to optimize a website to gain top positions in search engines for selected keywords. This goal is achieved by strategically employing measures to improve the technical setup and contents and obtaining backlinks from other domains.
SEO is divided into three general categories:
- Keywords and rankings
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
SEO specialists apply measures to meet the search engine’s ranking factors for each category. Search engines use ranking factors to determine the position it lists a website in search results.
Why Do I Need SEO?
Every day, millions of people use search engines to find information or services from all aspects of life: Recipes, guides, products, flights, navigation, tickets, entertainment, and more. Most people navigate the web using search engines to find answers to their questions and solutions to their challenges.
A study shows that 68% of the web’s traffic comes from search engines. 53% of this traffic has its origins in organic search—search results that are not ads (paid search) and can be improved through SEO.
Source: brightedge.com
In other words: organic search (SEO) and paid search (SEA, Ads in search results) make up the lion’s share of traffic on the web.
Even where we go ‘offline’ is significantly influenced by search engines: We use Google- / Apple Maps and local search results to find places and services like hairdressers, supermarkets, restaurants, and doctors near us. We choose our destination based on online reviews. And we instruct search engine-based services to guide us there, be it by car, public transportation, or on foot.
Now imagine your business, products, and services are not listed in search results. Imagine people can’t find you online to buy your products or find their way to your brick-and-mortar business. Instead, they will most likely choose your competition.
What Can SEO Do For Me?
With the help of SEO, users can find your business, products, and services online—and buy them. That means that people can find you online and much easier offline, too.
SEO maximizes your chances to be listed in top positions for keywords crucial to your business. The better your position, the more people will find their way to your website—preferably on the first page (or top ten) of search results.
Why Page One?
Good question. Studies have shown that 31.7% of users click on the first organic search result (position one); a whopping 75.1% of all clicks go to the top three search results. After that, the number of clicks shrinks rapidly with every following position.
Source: backlinko.com
This behavior shows that users rarely look at page two or lower results, let alone click on any of them.
That’s why businesses need to be present on the first page of search results, at least for relevant keywords.
In short: It’s crucial for freelancers and business owners to
- Own a website or any online presence, even if they offer their products or services offline
- Perform SEO to make sure they rank on page one for relevant keywords
What Are the Costs of SEO?
Often, SEO is referred to as the ‘free’ counterpart of Search Engine Advertisement (SEA). That assumption is easy to make. While you have to pay for adverts, search engines like Google list organic search results for free.
However, SEO is not for free. While you won’t get an invoice from Google, you still need resources to get your website on page one. You need someone to take care of the search engine optimization of your website—and permanently so. SEO is not a one-time project but an ongoing process.
Your website must meet current SEO requirements, both in its setup and contents. For example, you’ll need
- A fast-loading website on all devices
- Good usability
- Convincing content users want to interact with
- SEO tools
- And more
You can either hire an SEO agency or a freelancer, hire an in-house SEO specialist, or do the work yourself.
The cost and scale of SEO depend on your
- Website’s present state
- Desired measures (technical setup only or keyword research and content writing, too?)
- Sphere of activity (are you a real estate agent with a brick-and-mortar business or an international online shop?)
- Industry (the higher the industry’s revenue, the higher the effort to gain top rankings)
- Your region
Agencies and Freelancers
An SEO agency or a freelancer costs between $100 and $200 per hour. Agency budgets often start at around $500 monthly for the most basic measures. For a more detailed overview, check out this report about the true price of SEO services in 2022.
Inhouse SEO Experts
A full-time in-house SEO Specialist earns a median of $49,000 a year. An SEO Manager’s salary is significantly higher, with a median income of $63,000.
DIY SEO
Of course, you can do SEO yourself, saving a lot of money in the process. But keep in mind that the time you spend optimizing your website is time you cannot spend doing your actual job. So DIY SEO is an excellent option if you’re just getting started with your business and need to be thrifty.
Can I Do SEO Myself?
Yes, you can. The prerequisite is to familiarize yourself with the subject matter and acquire the access, tools, and skills needed for SEO.
To do SEO yourself, you need
- Understanding of SEO, current measures, goals, and implementation
- Access to your website’s backend and its server
- SEO tools to analyze your website, discover important keywords and monitor your rankings
- Web Analysis tools (e.g., Google Analytics, Matomo) to understand visitor behavior, indexing of your website, and more
- Basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and PHP, if necessary
- Basic copywriting skills
What Do I Have To Do?
SEO is all about analyzing, optimizing, and monitoring your website and its performance in search engines. Your goal is to outrank your competitors and get as many (prospective) customers on your website as possible. Put simply:
- Figure out which keywords are essential to your business
- Optimize your website’s contents for those keywords
- Monitor your rankings for crucial keywords
- Get your website in the best general shape possible, especially
- Page speed
- Mobile version
- Try to obtain backlinks from relevant websites
What Tools Do I Need?
For SEO, you need data—and lots of it. To get it, you’ll need SEO and web analysis tools.
SEO tools like XOVI NOW help you analyze, optimize and monitor your website’s SEO performance. You’ll get information about your website’s technical condition, your rankings, crawling and indexing issues, and can conduct keyword research. Use this information to drive traffic to your website.
Then there are web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Matomo. With their help, you can measure your website’s performance based on user behavior. For example, they’ll tell you how much time users spent on a page, how they navigated it, and what actions they took. Use web analytics tools to keep users on your website, have them interact with it, and optimize your conversions.
What Are Ranking Factors?
As mentioned, a search engine’s algorithm applies more than 200 so-called ranking factors to evaluate a website’s relevance for a given keyword and list it in search results accordingly.
Search engines look at
- Your website’s technical setup
- Your website’s contents
- Your website’s “recommendations” by other websites (backlinks)
- User behavior on Search Results Pages
- User behavior on your website
Many of the 200+ ranking factors are a well-kept secret, while Google confirmed others over the years.
Google’s ranking factors include
- Quality and relevance of content
- Rendering on mobile devices (mobile-friendliness)
- Page speed
- Good use of keywords
- Quality and quantity of backlinks
Why Are Keywords Important?
Keyword is a technical term for search queries (words, phrases, sentences, and questions). With their help, users find content that answers their questions and provides solutions. Put simply, a keyword is the link between users and your website. Search engines compare keywords with websites, looking for the most relevant match.
A big part of SEO lies in identifying keywords that have the potential to drive relevant traffic to your website—in other words, bringing in prospective customers. To do that, you need to identify search terms (or keywords) people use when searching for offers like yours. This process is called keyword research. Ideally, keyword research provides you with a list of keywords covering search queries across the entire customer journey.
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Check out our Keyword Research Guide on how to discover promising keywords with XOVI NOW. |
What Is Keyword Optimization?
So we know that relevance is a crucial factor for a top position in search results. To create relevant content, you want to deal with the topics and questions around a keyword on an individual subpage/URL. Then, make sure your keyword appears in crucial spots on your page.
Let’s say you are in the ice cream business. One of your keywords is s’mores ice cream sandwich. Now you focus on everything that has to do with a s’mores ice cream sandwich.
What you want to do is create a recipe page for a s’mores ice cream sandwich where users find an easy-to-follow recipe, pictures or videos, and answers to questions they might have. S’mores ice cream sandwich is your focus keyword that should appear in your page’s URL, title, headlines, and more.
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Check out our Keyword Optimization Guide for a full list of where to fill in your keyword when optimizing a page. |
Providing a dedicated and keyword-optimized page makes it easy for search engines—and users, too— to determine what your page is all about. That way, they can list it in good positions in related search results.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO deals with everything on your website that affects its rankings in search results. For example:
- Technical condition
- User-friendliness
- Page speed
- Usability on mobile devices
- Website- & page architecture
- Accessibility-ease of important pages
- Internal linking
- Rules for crawling & indexing by search engines
- And more
What Is Off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO deals with everything on the web referring to your website that affects your website’s rankings. Mainly, that includes backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Besides backlinks, there are
- Business listings on other sites and directories (e.g., Google My Business, Yelp)
- Social media activities
- Mentions of your brand on the web
- Influencer marketing
- Guest blogging
- And more
Why Are Backlinks Important?
For search engines, backlinks are the web’s reviews. Whenever a website links to another, search engines consider this link a recommendation for the website’s users. Therefore, those backlinks often have a significant influence on your rankings.
Naturally, the more “recommendations” a website gets, the more trustworthy it is, right? Well, almost. Google also looks at who gave this “recommendation,” how well established that website is, and how relevant that website’s topics are to yours.
What Is An SEO Strategy?
In SEO, you need a set of goals you want to achieve. They provide a course of action and ideally make SEO measurable. An SEO strategy is a set of SEO measures to achieve a predefined goal. More often than not, SEO experts have one overarching and numerous incremental goals.
What Is the Difference Between SEM, SEA, and SEO?
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEM consists of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEA (Search Engine Advertising). SEO focuses on optimizing pages and content to improve their rankings in organic search. SEA is all about paid ads in search engines, like shopping and text ads.
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