Thus, even a small improvement in search engine rankings can result in a website receiving more traffic and potentially business. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which is just another way of saying search marketing. It’s a broad term that includes both SEO and PPC, all aiming to drive traffic to your site through organic (unpaid) and paid efforts.

Generative AI for content creation and optimization

Search engines take time to find your site, process and understand it, and rank it initially. But once they see you’re constantly improving your web presence, they’ll be back more often to look for more reasons to boost your standing in the search results. Avoid using overly long phrasing and special characters so that your URL looks neat and is easier to remember.

Era 2: Google Era 1 (late 1990s - late 2000s)

If you’re curious to learn more about Google and its impact on SEO, check out our timeline of Google algorithm updates. Besides learning the different concepts and theories, the only way to find out what works is to apply the various SEO techniques on a website and monitor your rankings. Besides the changes you can make to your website (on-site SEO) to rank higher in the SERPs, the other way to influence your website’s ranking position is by using off-site SEO factors.

When you type something into Google, Google has to make a decision on which websites to show you. If potential customers search for your products, solutions, or services, you need SEO to be found and convert browsers into customers. While SEO can take months to build up, PPC campaigns can SEO Anomaly start driving traffic within minutes of launching.

• If you have subject-matter expertise, consider pitching a guest blog post that points back to your website.
• On the other hand, once an organization achieves organic visibility, it can receive lots of traffic for no charge, which makes SEO highly profitable in the long run.
• SEO is one of the most important and effective marketing channels for various types of businesses.
• This has allowed G2 to create such a profitable media business through their own software product and ads/partnership network that they hit $100M+ in revenue back in 2024.

Don’t forget to include keywords in copy throughout your website, but don't go overboard either. Focus on writing useful, helpful content for your customers first. That will allow for keywords to appear naturally anyway while supporting your SEO efforts. Getting Google to send you traffic is an ongoing process, not a one-time thing. This doesn’t mean it can only rank for that, in fact, a page can rank for many terms.