What is local SEO? A complete local SEO guide for businesses

Use the Semrush Local toolkit to streamline and improve your local SEO strategy. One of the most important factors in local SEO is optimizing your Google Business Profile because Google evaluates and ranks profiles (rather than webpages) in map-based results. According to Semrush Sensor data from September 2024, Google displays images in the top 20 results for over half of U.S. Technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of your website to enhance its search visibility. Avoiding keyword stuffing—forcing in keywords where they do not belong—is also important because Google considers this a spammy practice. Violating Google’s spam policies can lead to a penalty that harms your search visibility.

Applying the principles of SEO to your website will make it easier to use and enhance the user experience. Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines emphasize that content should be written for users, not for search engines. Structured data are special tags you can add to your HTML code to give search engines more information about certain page elements. Because that link comes from an authority site, Google puts lots of weight on it.

Search engines like Google and Bing use a number of ranking factors to determine and provide the most relevant content for a particular search term. To many people, the term “search engine” is synonymous with Google, which has about 83% of the global search engine market share. Because Google is the dominant search engine, SEO typically revolves around what works best for Google.

Understanding the Types of SEO

Platforms (websites and apps) where users can interact with each other, as well as create, share, and consume content. The practice of crafting a positive online perception of a brand or person – including in search results and on social media – by minimizing the visibility of negative mentions. Pay-per-click advertisements that appear above (and SEO Anomaly often below) the organic results on search engines. Large Language Models, also known as LLMs, are AI algorithms that are capable of understanding, processing, and generating human language.

Google also displays SERP features (non-standard results) to enhance the search experience. Search engines are somewhat secretive about the systems they use and constantly change them to improve search results. A higher ranking typically translates into more impressions and a better click-through rate.

Understanding SEO’s definition is only the beginning of understanding how it works. First, you need to learn how search engines work, as their advanced algorithms power the search results and determine where websites appear in the search results. After indexing, search engines rank pages based on relevance, quality, and user experience.

A sitemap is a structured list of all pages on a website available to be crawled by search engines. Having one is yet another way to let crawlers find all your pages. Besides the structural internal links, it is a good practice to also link to other relevant pages from within the page body. Yes, external backlinks are essential in SEO (more on that in the next chapter.), but having a proper structure of internal links is equally important.

• This text is intended to provide contextual information to people and search engines about what the webpage or website being linked to is about.
• Becoming an expert, however, takes time, patience, and a willingness to experiment.
• There are a number of ways to get one, such as through HubSpot’s SSL certificate.

Help improve MDN

Too little (or thin) content can be a signal of low-quality to search engines. Up to six algorithmically-chosen links that appear below the listing for the same website of a top-ranked organic search result. Pages can be blocked from appearing as sitelinks within the Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Structured data can be added to the HTML of a website to provide contextual information to the search engines during crawling. This information can then be displayed in the SERPs, resulting in an enhanced listing, known as a rich snippet. A meta tag that tells search engines not to store a cached copy of your page.

Search engines would wither away, with people turning to AI answer engines like Perplexity and Gemini to answer all their queries. Lucky for all the SEO pros out there, that prediction has not yet proved correct. Instead, nimble marketers have discovered how to employ AI to improve their SEO tactics.

Title tags appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) and should accurately describe the content of the page. Meta descriptions, on the other hand, provide a brief summary of the page’s content and should entice users to click through. When optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, it’s essential to include your target keyword and make sure they are descriptive, concise, and compelling. Beyond helping search engines interpret page content, proper on-page SEO also helps users quickly and clearly understand what a page is about and whether it addresses their search query. Effective on-page SEO not only improves visibility in search results but also enhances user experience by ensuring that visitors can easily find the information they need.