Local SEO is a strategy to make your business more visible in local search results on search engines like Google. When people search for services or products near them, local SEO helps your business appear at the top of the results. Arguably the most impactful way of improving E-E-A-T on your pages is getting more quality links from other websites – backlinks. With new websites popping up left and right, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get noticed and maintain customer loyalty. Unpaid search engine traffic may originate from a variety of kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search,3 news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Local content strategy

  • Engage with your user base through local listings and relevant online forums, like Reddit or Quora, to build your reputation as a trustworthy information source.
  • Practice outreach to connect with publishers in your industry, from news sites to bloggers to industry influencers.
  • Since most people use Google to find local businesses, local SEO mainly focuses on optimizing for Google users.
  • They are the words or Phrases that a person enters into the search engine to find the content.

It helps small websites compete with larger ones, drives organic traffic without relying solely on ads, and builds credibility by appearing at the top of search results. 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.

You can start with our guide on SEO for beginners or take free courses in Ahrefs’ Academy. Link building is something is something that preoccupies the SEO industry. To give you an idea of how this works, here’s a quick overview of a few popular backlink building techniques. E-E-A-T (aka Double-E-A-T) is a set of guidelines that Google’s quality raters use to assess the quality of search results. That’s why they operate like BHS Links librarians by reading content across the web and adding it to their library.

seo meaning

Why Should You Care About SEO (Hint: Free Traffic to Your Site)

seo meaning

Without SEO, we’d have to spend over $0.5M on ads to get that traffic. Overall, SEO benefits include free, sustainable, and passive traffic to your website month after month. Google’s first major update, the “Florida” update, is a prime example of the giant’s importance. By changing the rules for how SERPs were ranked on November 16, 2003—just before the holiday shopping season—Google accidentally hurt many small retailers.

Our Brands

seo meaning

So, SEO is as much about understanding the wants and needs of your audience as it is about the technical nature of how to configure your website. By researching each target keyword, you can produce SEO content that matches user intent, increasing search engine traffic. Local SEO is the process of improving your website’s organic rankings to get business from local search queries. Since most people use Google to find local businesses, local SEO mainly focuses on optimizing for Google users. As mentioned, search engines continue working on their algorithms to improve their users’ experience. The focus points of SEO in 2025 are still high-quality content and technical factors like site speed, security and mobile parity.

seo meaning

They can either compete on cost, and that’s being the cheapest in the market. That’s often massive organizations who are trying to dominate the market. Now walking this back to SEO, what we’re here to talk about today, that can often mean that your focus is on volume and reducing cost. So Michael Porter, who is the grandfather of modern marketing theory, talks about the fact that there are kind of three strategic levers, if you boil it down, that businesses can pull. More importantly, a secure site protects user data and builds trust with your audience.