What is SEO Marketing? Definition, Importance, and Types (2025)

Search engine optimization (SEO) has come a long way since the days of keyword stuffing and clickbait copy.

To rank highly in search results on Google and other major search engines, your website’s content needs to match a potential visitor’s intent and appear as an authoritative source on the topic.

Here, learn about the different types of SEO marketing and how to improve organic search results for your online store or website.

What is SEO marketing?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), ultimately driving more traffic to your site. The goal is to appear on the first page of Google results for keywords that are most relevant to your target audience, using organic techniques such as keyword optimization, quality content creation, link building, and enhancing site performance.

How SEO differs from SEM

SEO focuses on organic strategies, such as writing a blog post to answer a query, to improve a website’s presence in search results. Meanwhile, search engine marketing (SEM) involves paid marketing tactics like pay-per-click ads. SEO and SEM differ in a few ways, such as:

• Allocation of money. SEM requires a budget to purchase ads on search engines, social media, and other channels. While you don’t pay to rank on search engines with SEO, you do need to invest in hiring a writer to create content and potentially keyword research tools. 
• Speed. SEO takes longer than SEM to show results. When you run an ad, you can see the results immediately. SEO, on the other hand, can take months or years to establish domain authority, start ranking high on SERPs, and drive traffic. 
• Keyword use. An SEO expert can find relevant keywords and create well-written, informative content that can rank on a search engine. An SEM professional uses keyword research, but they must know how to target the phrases for cost-effective ad spending.

Why is SEO marketing important?

Google drives 63.41% of all US internet traffic, and 42% of online shoppers turn to search engines to research products. With search engines helping users discover brands, search is an important part of running a successful website. 

It’s also a more cost-efficient way to increase your visibility. While you might hire writers to create and optimize content, you don’t have to pay for a better spot on a SERP. Additionally, you can measure your SEO marketing efforts through organic traffic, conversion, and rankings, which can help you gauge the effectiveness of your strategies and give you more insight into your visitors. 

Types of SEO marketing

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO
3. Technical SEO

SEO activities fall into three general categories:

1. On-page SEO

The largest bucket of SEO marketing activities, on-page SEO involves optimizing your website’s content (including text, images, and videos) to ensure visitors and search engines can understand and navigate the information you publish.

Creating intentional content can help you make a connection with your audience. “I would much rather have 200 people on my website that are reading content that they do appreciate and potentially subscribe to my newsletter because they see value in this content than to have 2,000 of them that just bounce after an article and will never come back to my website,” says Jeremiah Curvers, CEO of mattress band Polysleep, in an episode of Shopify Masters.

Search engines look for on-page factors like topic relevance and metadata to determine the quality of your content and, in turn, where to rank your site in results pages. 

Topic relevance

Web pages that rank highly in search engines contain content that closely matches users’ search intent. That means considering what searchers are looking for when they enter queries and then providing the information or services they’re seeking. For example, if the term “masks” brings up results about beauty sheet masks, it wouldn’t be the right keyword for you if you sell Halloween masks. 

Best practices for producing relevant SEO content include offering original information, updating facts regularly, and sticking to topics within your website’s area of expertise.

Metadata

Metadata doesn’t appear on your web pages, so it’s not visible to website visitors. Instead, meta information is within your pages’ HTML code, tagging and labeling content in a way that’s easily digestible for the search engine bots that crawl your site.

Keeping meta information comprehensive and updated can increase your chances of ranking. Metadata includes:

• Title tag. This is the SEO title of a webpage and sometimes the same as the headline. It should include your target keywords.
• Meta descriptions. Meta descriptions summarize the contents of a web page and show up on the SERP.
• Robot tags. These tags tell search engines whether to index pages and follow links.

For example, Polysleep uses the keyword “baby mattress” throughout the product page copy.

2. Off-page SEO

Your website isn’t the only place for SEO marketing; you can create high-quality, unique content, like an interview with an expert in your field, to encourage other sites to link to yours. When a website links to you (a backlink), it is essentially vouching for you. These backlinks can increase your domain authority, which can boost your rankings on search engines.

Backlinks

PageRank is part of Google’s algorithm. It surveys the relationships between websites and the content they link to. This ranking system was one of the original ways Google determined its search engine results and remains an important part of SEO marketing strategy.

By earning links from respected websites, you’ll increase your topic authority and ranking ability. Essentially, the more quality backlinks you have, the more reputable search engines will consider your site.

Domain authority

As you create content, build links, and grow your organic search traffic, your website’s domain authority will increase.

Domain authority is a measure of a site’s trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines. Websites with high domain authority are more likely to rank in search engine results pages for keywords related to their area of expertise.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves making changes under the hood of your website to improve search performance. Technical SEO ensures your site is fast, optimized for search engine crawlers, and mobile-device friendly. 

Mobile-friendliness

More than 60% of website traffic now comes from mobile devices. Search engines cater to these users by directing them to sites that offer an enjoyable mobile browsing experience. This includes responsive design, which is when content automatically resizes based on users’ screen size, touch-friendly design, and simplified navigation.

Nearly all modern website themes are responsive, but you should always test your website by actually using it on a mobile device. This helps identify potential issues with text, buttons, and speed.

Site speed

Search engines want to point their users toward sites with an enjoyable user experience. A website that forces them to wait—even just a few extra seconds—can dampen their experience.

Shopify stores have an advantage over sites on alternative website builders because Shopify is built for speed. Some 93% of businesses using Shopify to run their online store have a fast website—that’s more than any other major commerce platform. 

4 SEO marketing tactics

1. Keyword research
2. Competitive analysis
3. Link building
4. Image optimization

Whether you’re planning SEO for a Shopify store or another website, here’s an SEO checklist to help you climb those search results.

1. Keyword research

Every page of your website that appears in search engine rankings is associated with one or more keywords (also known as search queries). The first step in any SEO project is to find which keywords your visitors are using to discover your site.

To conduct keyword research, use a free SEO tool like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest. These platforms reveal a keyword’s popularity and how easy it is to rank for that term. Tools can also suggest keywords relevant to your niche and analyze your website to determine which keywords you already rank for. Leverage this data to decide which existing keywords are most important to your website and which new keywords you should pursue.

Ideally, keywords should be popular enough to generate significant traffic but not so popular that you’re competing with websites and companies with marketing budgets beyond your scope. For example, say you’re creating an SEO marketing strategy for a candle business, and the brand groups its collections by: 

• Scent (e.g., fruit-scented candles)
• Color (e.g., red candles)
• Occasion (e.g., Christmas candles)
• Material (e.g., beeswax candles)

If “scented candles” has a monthly search volume of 1,000 and a difficulty of hard, but “fruit scented candles” has a volume of 350 and a difficulty of easy, you might choose the latter phrase because there’s less competition, it’s relevant to your brand, and it can potentially generate a few thousand views over a year. You can then use the term for a product page in an H1 tag. 

You may also identify keywords that don’t relate to one of your products, such as “how to make candles last longer” or “how to cut candlesticks.” You can use these keywords for standalone blog posts and include them in your title, body copy, and image alt text to help increase your authority in your industry. For example, Original Duckhead publishes blog content about sustainability that extends beyond its product offerings to position itself as a leader in the space. 

💡 Read more: Keyword Research for Ecommerce: A Beginner’s Guide

2. Competitive analysis

Once you know which keywords to target, your next step is checking out SEO competitors already ranking highly for those terms.

By getting to know your competitors’ SEO strategies, you can formulate tactics that will help you climb the search rankings and overtake them. With high-quality, relevant, and comprehensive content, even small businesses can leverage SEO to outrank larger competitors and reach customers first.

A good starting point for competitive analysis is to uncover which keywords your competitors are targeting and where they rank. You can use keyword tools and either study individual competitor pages or their entire websites to learn what terms they’re targeting. You might find, for example, that a competitor is using the phrase “women’s leopard print jeans” on a collection page. If you have a similar product, you can aim to use the same term. 

But before pushing forward with this strategy, ask yourself: Can I reasonably make a better page that makes sense to my business? If the answer is no, move on to the next opportunity. The key is to find strategies you can succeed at that also make business sense. Attempting to rank for queries related to products you don’t sell or topics unrelated to your core business is a waste of time.

3. Link building

Though it can be time-consuming, link building is a well-acknowledged way to enhance your search engine rankings. Attracting links to your website from more authoritative sites signals to search engines that your content is worth visitors’ time.

To begin executing a linking strategy, establish a presence on social media platforms and local business directories. The links you generate from social media sites may not give you a boost in search engines, but they can help with making your website more visible.

You can pitch your business or products to relevant websites or news outlets with the same target audience. If you have subject-matter expertise, consider pitching a guest blog post that points back to your website. You can also focus on your blog and create useful content—such as infographics, case studies, white papers, surveys, or statistics—that others will want to reference. 

💡 Read More: How To Get Backlinks: 15 Proven Strategies

4. Image optimization

While Google and other search engines focus on your website’s written content, they also crawl your images and media. As a matter of fact, 34.7% of Google searches return images. By optimizing the images on your website, you can enhance your on-page SEO while adding accessibility benefits for visitors.

Start by incorporating descriptive keywords into image file names and writing helpful alt text under 125 characters for all the images on your site. For example, effective alt-text for an image of Cherry Blossom, a pink candle, would be this: “A pink candle named Cherry Blossom in a glass jar on a white backdrop.” This will give search engines another tool for determining whether your content is relevant and valuable.

Next, make sure your images are the optimum size and file format. Google likes large, high-quality images—it just doesn’t love huge file sizes that lead to longer load times. Compress images and use efficient file formats, such as .png or .webp, to improve the user experience and speed up load times.

Measuring SEO success: key metrics to monitor

As with any digital marketing strategy, the only way to know whether you’re making headway on your goals is to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). Those most relevant metrics to SEO marketing include:

• Organic traffic. This tracks how much traffic came to your website through non-paid sources. You can use a tool like Google Analytics for this metric.
• Backlinks. These are the number of websites linking to your site from theirs. Use a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to analyze your existing backlinks, and use guest blogging and content marketing to build new backlinks.
• Keyword rankings. Learn which keywords you’re ranking for and which ones are worth creating content around with a tool like Moz.
• Organic conversions. Determine how many people converted after coming through a non-paid source. A conversion can mean a purchase, signup, account creation, or another desirable action. You can use Google Analytics to track conversions.
• Organic click-through rate. This is the percentage of people who saw and clicked your listing in the SERP. You can use Google Search Console to determine organic CTR. 
• Core Web Vitals. Google determines a site’s health through its Core Web Vitals, a combination of three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (how long the largest image takes to load), First Input Delay (how long it takes for a page to process a user interaction), and Cumulative Layout Shift (a page’s visual stability). You can use Google Search Console for Core Web Vitals. 

The future of SEO: Trends to watch in 2025

• Generative AI for content creation and optimization
• Increased topical authority
• Rise of zero-click searches

It takes time for SEO to make an impact, but the industry can move at a quick pace. Here are three major trends to keep on your radar in 2025: 

Generative AI for content creation and optimization

Artificial intelligence has infiltrated most aspects of modern marketing. SEO is no different. 

AI content creation tools (like Shopify Magic and Jasper) can produce marketing copy from a simple prompt. Improve this copy with keyword optimization tools like Surfer—and just like that, you have a ton of engaging, optimized content ready to add to your website. 

Increased topical authority

Generative AI has proven so popular that Google did a complete 360 on its original stance to deprioritize AI-generated content in search results. But there’s a caveat: In January 2025, Google advised its quality raters to assign pages where the main content is clearly AI-generated as “Lowest quality”. Entrepreneurs who use AI to generate content should follow Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. This states content should be written with:

• Expertise
• Experience
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness 

There are multiple ways to meet this criteria with AI-generated content. Perhaps you use AI to create an outline, then write the draft yourself, weaving in your (or another expert’s) experience to show credibility. Reference recent studies and fact-check the AI suggestions to ensure accuracy. 

You could also contribute articles to leading publications in your industry. Ask for an author profile in exchange for the content and boast about your credentials—whether that’s a professional certification, extensive industry experience, or examples of where you’ve been featured in the press. This helps cater to one checkbox on Google’s checklist: “Is this content written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?” 

Rise of zero-click searches

Not everyone uses search engines to navigate to a website. Sometimes, the user wants a quick answer—like the hours of operation of a business or the price of an item. Zero-click searches cater to these habits by giving searchers an immediate answer without them needing to click through to a website. 

While this might sound like a disadvantage for ecommerce brands, Google does offer publishers the opportunity to offer immediate answers (and, thus, build brand authority) through search features like:

• Featured snippets
• AI Overviews
• Knowledge panels
• People Also Ask boxes 

Increase the odds of appearing in these zero-click snippets by creating high-quality content that answers the search query. Format your content to make it easy for search engine crawlers to find this answer. One way to target the People Also Ask section, for instance, is by creating an FAQ section with short, succinct answers that are easy for Google to excerpt.