Types of SEO and Why You Need an Agency to Do It?

SEO is a digital marketing practice, and its goal is to improve your website’s ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs) and enhance your brand’s online visibility.
SEO makes it possible for search engines to understand more about what’s on your website, and guide the right people to go check out your content by displaying high-quality, relevant results for their search questions. It simply accomplishes this by targeting keywords relevant and desirable to your demographic, and in doing so, sending qualified traffic to your site. Whether your website sells products and services or shares insights on a specific niche, the best SEO efforts will help your audience grow and attract more organic traffic. More visibility in search engine results increases your chances of being found and visited.

SEO is a three-tier operation: technical SEO provides the foundation, on-page SEO shapes the content visitors see, and off-page SEO builds connections and buzz around the web.

Technical SEO: The Framework of a Website

SEO is incomplete without optimizing the technical aspects of a website. It starts with great site architecture that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. Your page content needs to be accessible for search engines to understand and index its content, including text, images, videos, etc. Other technical things to consider include URL structure, navigation, and internal linking.

Another thing to consider in technical optimization is user experience. Search engines favor pages that load quickly and offer clear user value. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS,  and removing annoying pop-ups all matter in technical SEO. CMS (Content Management Systems) and security play a crucial role in technical SEO.

On-Page SEO: Optimizing Every Element

On-page SEO involves optimizing website elements to improve search engine rankings and get organic traffic. This includes both the content and HTML source code of a page. At its core, on-page SEO refers to what a human would see and what value they would derive from your content.  Well-executed on-page SEO doesn’t just boost your site’s visibility; it improves user experience, meaning the reader seamlessly gets the information they were looking for. 

Previously, the position of a page was determined by correctly positioning the right keywords in specific areas of a website, allowing search engines to read the webpage. User experience was often an afterthought, and what mattered was whether  search engines deemed those keywords relevant, thereby influencing your content’s ranking. These days, however, search engines are infinitely more advanced. They can understand the meaning of a page within the context of the content that surrounds it. While the use of keywords remains important, it is no longer a core component of on-page SEO philosophy. What is important is its relevance to the user intent behind search queries.

Strong on-page SEO helps the content rank on top of competitors on the search engine results page (SERP) by providing users with a stronger value or a better user experience. Firstly, the best on-page SEO content is well-organized and has a great structure. The content should align with keywords that are widely used by the target audience, ensuring it is original and conveys accurate and relevant information related to the central theme.

It frequently involves the use of multimedia, such as images or videos, to enrich the user experience. The use of elements such as subheadings, short paragraphs, and layout enhances the readability. Additionally, some key content elements to optimize are meta descriptions, title tags, header tags, and image alt text. Strong on-page SEO also helps a site not only compete with other web pages on search engines but also stand out from them.

Off-Page SEO: Creating Brand Awareness

Off-page SEO (search engine optimization) involves improving a website’s ranking on unpaid search engines without modifying the site’s content or structure. Among the most common practices are link building, guest posting, and social media marketing.

The goal of off-page SEO is to increase the trustworthiness and authority of your site in the eyes of search engines and users. The success of a SEO strategy relies on it.

At face value, SEO might appear to be something you can do on your own — throw in a few keywords, write a couple of blogs, and simply wait for the traffic to start rolling in. However, in practice, SEO is far more complex and unforgiving. It’s a mix of technical accuracy, changing algorithms, content strategy, competitor analysis, backlink stacks, site performance, and UX metrics — and it’s all in flux. One false move can jeopardize your visibility or result in penalties. This is why, when you try to do it yourself, there’s a ton of wasted time and missed opportunities.

For this reason, any good, sustainable plan for SEO is going to require a higher level of depth than that. An SEO agency or consultancy provides the depth necessary to navigate the waters. It’s not just doing SEO — it’s doing it right, over and over again.