Table of Contents

A Comprehensive Guide to Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Before this article dives deep into SEO marketing, let’s first talk about why every business should do it. It's 2025, and people’s buying practices have changed dramatically. People use the Internet to find what they need.
Notably, there is cut-through competition in the market and most of the competitors are on the Internet today. So, how can businesses stand out and get customers? That’s where SEO comes in.
This article will discuss everything about SEO marketing. 

Who is this article for?

  • Digital marketing students.
  • Early SEO professionals including freelancers.
  • Students who want to learn new skills.
  • Small businesses and individuals want to rank their websites.

What is SEO?

SEO is the combined activities that help grow a website's organic traffic. It involves all the activities that businesses do to rank higher on search engine organic results. But why is this important?
People use the internet to buy what they need. Users are likely to first search online for what businesses offer to them. If a website ranks higher on search results, more people will visit and purchase from them only.
But without any effort, businesses can’t rank their website on SERP as others may be doing the same. That’s where SEO helps organizations to lead the SERP rankings and get more organic traffic.

  • 93% of people start their online experience with a search engine.
  • Google processes 8.5 billion searches every day.
  • SEO provides an average 748% returns on investment whereas pay-per-click ads provide only 38% in the long run.  

How Does SEO Work?

SEO uses a ton of factors to rank websites. Search engines update their algorithm and ranking factors to remove errors, non-helpful websites, or content. Therefore, in simple terms, SEO is a flexible set of practices that changes according to the search engine demands.
However, there are some evergreen ranking factors that all websites must keep a track record of.

Best Ranking Factors for Search Engines

  • Keywords optimization.
  • Content quality
  • Content frequency.
  • Website speed.
  • Website responsiveness. 
  • Backlinks.
  • User experience.
  • Schema markup.
  • Search relevancy. 
  • Entities.

Note- There is a lump sum of 200 ranking factors that we will discuss in upcoming articles or blogs.

How is Entity SEO Changing the SEO ranking formula?

A search engine recognised entity can be anything such as an organization, thing, concept, person, or place with individual definitions. For context, the entity is not a new term for search engines. However, with the increasing demands of LLM, the search algorithms have started focusing on entity-based SEO. It makes the search results more relevant to the user intent. But how do they do it?

Pro Tip- Understand entities as semantic keywords.

Semantic keywords are phrases related to primary keywords and help the search engine understand the context.

For example- If a user searches for the ‘Jaguar’, there are two possibilities for results. The first is the animal and the other is the luxury car brand.

Now, if a publisher has published content about Jaguar the animal, it should have semantic keywords such as wild, forest, animal, teeth, meat, hunt, etc. Search engines don’t read the whole content instead they focus on these related terms that define the page context.
Check the entity intent on Google's ‘Natural Language Programming’ API.

For example

A screenshot with Google recognizing an article as a guide for SEO with 0.99 confidence.
This screenshot shows that Google recognizes this article as a guide for SEO with 0.99 confidence.

Types of Search Engine Optimization

SEO comprises three major types.

On-page SEO

Building quality website pages for users.

Off-page SEO

Building quality links from other authoritative websites.

Technical SEO

Optimization related to technical aspects of the website.

How to Create a Successful SEO Strategy?

An SEO strategy is a detailed plan of SEO activities and their frequencies to increase organic traffic. This involves a roadmap and calendar for an SEO marketer or brand that can help a website rank higher on SERP.
The three pillars of any SEO strategy:

Technical Setup:

  • Website sitemap and links.
  • URL structure.
  • Website speed.
  • Broken links.
  • Robots.txt
  • Canonical Tags

Links

  • Every time a website mentions a brand with a link, the referred brand website gets a backlink. There are several activities needed for gaining backlinks from other high authority websites. 
  • The activities include Guest Blogging, profile creation, social media mentions, etc.
  • Check the website quality before creating a backlink. How to do that? Focus on the following factors:
    - The popularity of the linking site.
    - Relevance of the subject.
    - Domain authority (DA & PA)
    - Spam Score
    - Website Traffic
    - Website Age

Step-by-Step SEO Process

SEO involves setting up a website on Google and making it more user-friendly. Let’s see how you can do that.

  • Get a good domain.
  • Use a website builder platform for creating a website.
  • Get a good hosting.
  • Secure website with SSL certification.
  • Create a mobile-friendly appealing website design.
  • Design a website URL structure.
  • Create a URL formula for website service pages and blogs.
  • Install an SEO plugin.
  • Connect the website to Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
  • Create a sitemap of the website and submit it to Google Search Console.
  • Write gold-value user-friendly content on service webpages.
  • Optimize the service page content with keywords and entities.
  • Start creating content for readers by finding the topics, and related keywords, and setting the on-page optimization.
  • Start creating backlinks. 
  • Track the SEO growth report.

Understand the Local SEO

  • 46% of the total web searches are for finding vendors and businesses nearby.
  • 81% of consumers use Google to find local businesses.

As the demand for local businesses is increasing, MSME brands and businesses have a chance to focus on the local market and rank in local search queries such as ‘Book Store near Me’. But how is this different from traditional SEO?
Google features a dedicated section for local businesses. Though search engines have similar principles for local and global ranking, they use location-based ranking factors to provide the best results.
Moreover, the local search algorithm works only for local search intent queries. These results provide specific information to users such as name, description, image, working hours, reviews, address, contact number, and website address (if any).

Local Search Ranking Factors

  • On-page optimization of Name, Address, and Phone Number (called ‘NAP’).
  • Optimization of ‘Google My Business’ profile.
  • Local Content.
  • Online reviews.
  • Local landing pages.

Best SEO Practices Everyone Should Follow.

  • Focus on technical SEO for faster loading and no errors.
  • Create helpful and quality content for readers at a pre-decided frequency.
  • Find the right intent-serving keywords and use them in content. 
  • Use internal linking.
  • Optimize the title, descriptions, and content with entities and keywords.
  • Start building backlinks with white-hat practices.
  • Focus on local SEO.
  • Track SEO growth reports.
  • Improve the user experience of the website.

Tools for SEO

  • Google Analytics: to understand consumer behavior, traffic sources, and improve marketing ROI. 
  • Google Search Console: to monitor and improve a website's performance in Google search. 
  • Semrush: to help websites with SEO, content marketing, social media, and PPC campaigns. 
  • Ahrefs: to improve the website’s overall SEO health. 
  • Moz: to do SEO audit, keyword research, improve website’s overall SEO performance.  
  • Page Speed Insights: to analyse a website’s performance and recommend improvements. 
  • Google Trends: for finding the current trends and content ideas. 
  • Similarly Web: for competitor analysis.
  • Answer The Public: for finding content ideas.

Conclusion

This article has discussed a basic overview of SEO. The step-by-step guide is direct instructions for taking immediate action. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
This article has shared a brief idea about tools, concepts, and steps to start an SEO journey immediately. Follow them and take the first step for digital success. 
Want your business to enjoy SEO marketing for the long-term gains? Contact Vigyapan Mart today.