The 4 Types of SEO (And How to Execute Each One)

After running search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns for over 1,000 brands at Relevance, we’ve found that the companies getting the best results from their SEO strategies never rely on a single approach. They run multiple types of SEO tactics in tandem. These can be broken down into four categories:

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Local SEO

The most effective SEO marketing strategies use these to create synergy and dominate a market increasingly overshadowed by AI search tools. Let’s take a look at how each SEO technique helps you get more qualified traffic to your website and build your brand.

What is SEO, and how is it different from SEM?

SEO refers to the process of optimizing your content to rank higher. It’s an organic tactic – meaning the only investment is the time it takes and the resources invested during that time. 

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the opposite side of the same coin. It refers to paying for an ad placement at the top of the SERP.

Both SEO and SEM can help you achieve your content marketing goals by complementing each other. Here’s an example.

Let’s say you’re an online retailer specializing in running shoes. Your organic SEO goals will typically fall near the top of your marketing funnel. You might use SEO to gain organic traffic searching for informational keywords like “how to choose a running shoe.” This will help you establish your brand as an authority. If your audience finds your content helpful, they’ll think of you when they’re ready to buy.

To win traffic searching for transactional keywords like “buy XYZ brand running shoes,” you’d likely be more aggressive. Those users are more likely to bring immediate value to your company by making a purchase. In this case, SEM is your best bet.

It’s worth noting that the line between when to use SEO and when to use SEM blurs easily. Many brands use SEM to pay for top-funnel traffic if they know those users will be profitable down the line. For example, a user searching “best running shoes under $500” is still in the research phase. But they’ve indicated they’re willing to spend a lot on shoes. Even though they’re not ready to buy, it might be worth it to pay for their eyeballs on your content.

Here’s another example. Maybe your blog has a high-converting pop-up that invites readers to get email notifications when their favorite shoe brands go on sale. Since a user on any piece of content could convert, it might make sense to pay for search traffic, even on informational keywords.

Regardless, the best uses of SEM and SEO tend to be woven together. While we’ll focus on the variations of SEO you can use in this resource, remember that as you build an SEO strategy for your brand, you want to remember SEM as a way to amplify it even further once it goes live.

The 4 types of SEO

Let’s break down the four different kinds of SEO tactics in detail. Here they are again in the order they’re presented below:

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

Let’s dive in…

1. On-page SEO

On-page SEO is where the Relevance team starts with every new client engagement. It includes the tactic most people think of first when they hear “SEO”: high-quality content. This is the content that helps position your brand as an industry leader. 

Search engine algorithms are more sophisticated than ever, and Google gets better at recognizing truly valuable content with every update. The same qualities that help content rank in search also increase its chances of being surfaced in AI-generated answers.

As you invest in a strategy, it’s important to differentiate between black hat and white hat SEO. Black hat SEO techniques game the system, and search tools can see them from a mile away. If you want to show up in a search result, practicing white hat SEO techniques is key.

How do you know if you have high-quality content that uses white hat SEO techniques? You’re on the right track with your content if it:

• Centers on one keyword phrase or theme
• Educates or entertains your reader (or both)
• Has credibility indicators like original research and citations
• Includes new insights rather than regurgitated info

High-quality content is structured for both people and search engines. Scannable headings, concise writing, logical organization, and credible outbound citations make your content easier to understand, navigate, and trust.

Including keywords in your content

When you sit down to create SEO content, your focus keyword and closely-related keywords should appear in all the following areas:

• Title tag
• Slug (URL)
• Meta description
• Headers
• Body

Including your keyword shouldn’t be difficult or unnatural. If you’ve created a focused, high-quality piece, it should happen almost organically. 

How do you decide which keywords to focus your content around? Ask yourself: What would a user’s search intent be if they were looking for this content? What types of keywords would they use to inform their search: informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional?

Here are a few tips for researching keywords:

• Use keyword research tools – there are free and paid tools, including Google Trends (for inspiration) and Google Keyword Planner (for research and search volume).
• Check out the keywords your competitors are using, like Mangools’ tool.
• Consider using long-tail keywords (phrases that are longer and more specific) to catch niche searches with lower competition.

The 3 most important on-page ranking factors

Here are the three most important ranking factors for writing on-site content.

• Written to search intent: If your user is looking for information with their search, your content shouldn’t focus on a transaction.
• Helpful: Your content is easy to read, educational, and credible. It includes fresh insights and perspectives.
• Focused on a keyword: Here’s where your keyword research comes in. Crafting your content with a focus keyword in mind is much easier than retroactively optimizing it. Include your keyword in the title, URL, headers, meta description, and image tags.

2. Off-page SEO

This is where our digital PR team shines. Great content alone isn’t enough. Search engines and AI platforms look for third-party validation, and backlinks from reputable websites are one of the strongest signals of authority and credibility.

Search engines look for signs that other users have found your content helpful. These are called backlinks (links from external sites). That’s why creating linkable content is the foundation of off-page SEO.

So what’s the difference between high-quality content and linkable content? High-quality content answers a searcher’s question. Linkable content goes one step further by giving other websites a reason to reference it.

Linkable SEO content has been specifically crafted to attract attention and earn backlinks. It often includes:

• A focus on data
• Quotes from industry leaders
• Podcasts, videos, and other engaging media

Building your backlink strategy 

Creating high-quality, linkable content is the first step. We’ve secured hundreds of media placements for clients using this approach, but even the best content benefits from strategic promotion. While your content will likely earn some backlinks on its own, actively pursuing additional backlinks will help you get the most out of it.

Link building isn’t just about publishing great SEO content. To get more backlinks, identify trustworthy, popular sites within your space. 

Track down who’s responsible for their digital content, and craft an email. Ask them to consider linking to your content. Include a summary, how it benefits their readers, and where the link could go. Be specific, including the anchor text (the text that links to your content) you’d prefer them to use. That makes the ask as easy as possible for them.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the type most teams neglect — and it is often the reason great content underperforms. To make the most of your content, it’s important to make sure your website meets modern technical standards. We run technical audits for every new client, and the issues we uncover—including slow load times, broken crawl paths, and missing schema—almost always explain ranking underperformance.

I can’t count how many times we’ve run a technical audit and surfaced something major the client had no idea was there — a canonical tag quietly deindexing half their content, a load time killing their rankings. I had a client tell me just last week that our audit caught a handful of things their dev team had not noticed. They were too deep in their own work to see it. Sometimes that’s the whole value of an outside set of eyes: we’re looking at your site the way Google does, not the way you remember building it.

Technical SEO – Image Credit: RelevanceThese are quiet SEO killers, and they point to the need to optimize elements like:

• Site structure
• URL structure
• Loading speed
• Security
• Mobile performance

These components are important to search engine algorithms because they impact accessibility and user experience. Your content might be brimming with unique insights but if it takes 90 seconds to load, most users won’t stick around to find out.

You can run a simple SEO analysis aimed at making sure you’re following web design best practices. Your topics and audience should be clear. Simplify your site structure as much as possible to focus on the essentials. To get a sense of technical performance, run your site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, too.

4. Local SEO

Local SEO is the fourth type. It doesn’t apply to every business, but if you serve customers in a specific geographic area, it deserves as much attention as the first three types combined. 

Local SEO – Image Credit: Relevance

The most important factors Google weighs directly here are proximity, relevance, and prominence. 

• Proximity — how close the searcher is to your business location. You can’t manipulate this, but you can make sure Google knows exactly where you are through consistent, verified location data.
• Relevance — how well your business matches what the searcher is looking for. This is where local keywords in your content and your Google Business Profile categories do the work.
• Prominence — how well-known and well-reviewed your business is, both online and off. Review volume, review quality, and citations from other reputable sites all feed this.

In practice, that means:

• Creating high-quality content that includes local keywords — not just “plumber” but “emergency plumber in [city].”
• Fully building out your Google Business Profile: accurate categories, complete service lists, regular posts, and prompt responses to reviews. An incomplete profile is one of the most common local SEO gaps we find in audits.
• Keeping active, location-tagged social accounts, since engagement signals feed prominence.
• Optimizing your website for mobile, since most local searches (“near me,” “open now”) happen on a phone.
• Auditing every mention of your business — website, directories, social profiles — for NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency. Even small mismatches (a missing suite number, an old phone number on Yelp) can quietly undercut how much Google trusts your listing.

Optimizing for local SEO can also lower your content marketing expenses since it allows you to focus on a defined geographic audience instead of competing nationally.

How we build technical, content, and link authority

Here are three steps we use to bring all of these types together into an active, focused strategy.

1. Start with technical SEO: the foundation everything else sits on

We always start here. It doesn’t matter how good your content is if Google can’t properly crawl and index it. We’ve seen sites with genuinely excellent articles sitting in Google’s “crawled — currently not indexed” bucket simply because of technical debt nobody was monitoring.

Here’s what a technical SEO audit looks like in practice at our agency:

Crawlability and indexation

The first thing we check is whether Google can actually find and process your pages. That means reviewing your XML sitemap, robots.txt directives, canonical tags, and internal linking structure. 

On a recent engagement with a B2B SaaS client, we discovered that a misconfigured canonical tag was pointing over 40 blog posts to the homepage — effectively telling Google to ignore all of that content. Fixing the tag alone was enough to recover indexation for pages that had been invisible for months.

When I found that misconfigured canonical on the SaaS client’s site, over 40 of their best blog posts were pointing back to the homepage — Google had been told to ignore every one of them. The team had spent months wondering why great content wasn’t ranking, and it came down to a single tag. That’s why I never assume a content problem until I’ve ruled out a technical one. Too many times the pages aren’t underperforming. They’re invisible, and nobody’s been watching the backend.

Site speed and Core Web Vitals

Google’s Core Web Vitals Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift) are confirmed ranking factors. We use a combination of Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and Ahrefs site audit tools to benchmark performance.

These point to some of the most common speed killers we see across client sites: unoptimized images, render-blocking JavaScript, excessive third-party scripts (especially chat widgets and analytics tags stacked on top of each other), and bloated CSS. Fixing these typically requires collaboration with a dev team, which is why we build technical SEO into project timelines rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Mobile experience and accessibility

Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily evaluates the mobile version of your site for ranking decisions. We test every client site across device sizes and flag issues like tap targets that are too small, horizontal scrolling, and text that requires zooming. These aren’t just SEO issues. They directly impact conversion rates.

Structured data

Schema markup helps search engines understand what your content is about and can unlock rich results (FAQ dropdowns, review stars, how-to steps) that dramatically improve click-through rates. We implement structured data as a standard part of every technical audit. For one client in the healthcare space, adding FAQ schema to their top 20 pages increased organic CTR by 18% within six weeks.

2. Next up, focus on on-page SEO: where content quality meets search intent

On-page SEO is about creating content that earns its ranking. This is where most teams focus their energy, and for good reason. Content is what users actually interact with. But there’s a massive difference between “content that exists” and “content that ranks.” Here’s how to execute your strategy to achieve the latter.

Keyword research that goes beyond volume

We don’t chase high-volume keywords for the sake of it. Our keyword research process starts with understanding the client’s actual business goals and customer journey. From there, we work backward to identify the search queries that map to each stage.

For example, a marketing automation platform doesn’t just need to rank for “marketing automation” (impossibly competitive for most companies). They need content targeting queries like “how to set up lead scoring workflows” or “email drip campaign best practices.” These are terms with clear intent that attract people who are actually in-market.

We use tools like Ahrefs and Google Search Console to identify keyword opportunities, but the real skill is in understanding search intent. Is the searcher looking for a definition, a comparison, a tutorial, or a product? Matching your content format to intent is the single biggest lever in on-page SEO.

Content that demonstrates E-E-A-T

Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) isn’t just a set of guidelines — it’s the lens through which Google’s quality raters evaluate content. After working through multiple Google algorithm updates, including the Helpful Content updates that devastated sites relying on generic, AI-generated content, we’ve seen firsthand how critical genuine expertise is.

What does E-E-A-T look like in practice? At Relevance, it means:

• Experience: Writing from actual practitioner experience means we don’t publish theoretical SEO advice. We write about techniques we’ve tested across real client engagements. When we say a tactic works, it’s because we’ve measured the results.
• Expertise: That means having qualified authors with real credentials. Every article we publish has a named author with relevant professional experience, not a generic brand byline.
• Authoritativeness: Building topical depth requires comprehensive content hubs — like our content marketing strategy guide — that demonstrate deep knowledge across the subject.
• Trustworthiness: This focuses on citing sources, being transparent about limitations, and keeping content updated. Outdated statistics and broken links erode trust with both users and search engines. We’ve circled back around and updated this very resource more than once so you know you’re getting the best, up-to-date advice possible!

On-page optimization fundamentals

Beyond content quality, the mechanical aspects of on-page SEO still matter. For every piece of content we publish, we optimize:

• Title tags and meta descriptions that are written to include the target keyword naturally while compelling clicks from the SERPs. We A/B test title formats across client sites and consistently find that titles with specific numbers or clear value propositions outperform generic alternatives.
• Header structure strategy also uses H2s and H3s to create a logical hierarchy that both users and search engines can follow. This also improves your chances of appearing in featured snippets.
• Internal linking connects related content to distribute page authority and help users navigate deeper into your site. We typically aim for 10-15 contextual internal links per long-form article, pointing both to pillar pages and to related supporting content.
• Image optimization involves descriptive alt text, compressed file sizes, and modern formats like WebP. This is one of the most commonly overlooked on-page factors we encounter in audits.

3. Build authority through strategic link acquisition and digital PR

Even as search and AI evolve, backlinks remain one of Google’s strongest ranking signals for SEO. Every quality backlink from a relevant, authoritative site tells Google that your content is worth referencing. But the approach matters enormously — we’ve cleaned up more bad backlink profiles than we can count.

Our off-page strategy is built on digital PR and genuine value creation, not transactional link exchanges. Here’s what that looks like.

Our link building playbook

Create linkable assets first: Before any outreach, we make sure the client has content worth linking to. Original research, proprietary data, comprehensive guides, and interactive tools naturally attract links because they provide unique value. The best backlink strategy starts with the best content strategy.

Data-driven digital PR: We help clients extract newsworthy stories from their data and pitch them to journalists and industry publications. Done well, a single data story can generate dozens of high-authority backlinks from one campaign. We had one client in the growth marketing space publish an original research piece that earned dozens of referring domains within months. That was more than the previous year’s entire link-building effort combined.

Relationship-based outreach: Mass email outreach with generic templates doesn’t work anymore (and arguably never did). We build genuine relationships with editors and writers in our clients’ industries. When we pitch a link opportunity, it’s because we’ve identified a specific piece of their content where a link to our client adds real value for their readers.

Competitive backlink analysis: Using tools like Ahrefs, we analyze where competitors are earning their backlinks and identify gaps. If a competitor has links from 10 industry publications and our client has links from three, those other seven publications become priority outreach targets. This ensures the link-building effort is focused on the domains that matter most for competitive rankings.

Avoiding tactics that backfire: We won’t participate in link schemes, PBNs (private blog networks), or paid link placements that violate Google’s guidelines. We’ve inherited sites that were penalized by these tactics, and the recovery process is painful and slow. Building authority the right way takes longer but creates a durable competitive advantage.

The 5 SEO factors to prioritize

To review, here’s a checklist of the five factors to build your SEO strategy. Each one strengthens the four types of SEO covered above.

1. Strong technical foundation

The best integrated SEO plans are built on a solid technical foundation. Content-focused marketers might be tempted to skip technical SEO (or at least save it for last). But it’s the cornerstone of high-ranking content.

2. Keyword-optimized content matched to search intent

Keyword research is prospect research. Consistently including a keyword research step in your SEO strategy helps you validate your assumptions. It allows you to ask, “What topic is our audience actually searching for? What kind of language do they use when searching?” When you skip that step, you’re optimizing for guesses instead of data.

3. On-site interlinking

Building links between your own website content helps search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of your website. From Google’s perspective, on-site interlinking passes link equity back and forth between your pieces of content.

4. Backlinking

Building backlinks is one of the most important off-page SEO factors. Search engines view backlinks as a sign that others have found your content helpful. If your strategy is to publish excellent content and sit back as the backlinks flow in, you’re missing opportunities. There are sites out there with an audience that would love your new content. But that publisher likely won’t find your content without a friendly introduction.

5. Helpful content

Last but certainly not least, great content is a vital component of your strategy. If you don’t get content right, the other factors we’ve discussed won’t matter. Publishing helpful content should be the bread and butter of your on-page SEO. 

Organic SEO signals worth tracking

As you leverage the power of things like hyperlinks, keywords, and search intent, how can you use Google Analytics data to know if things are working?

Many people talk about organic SEO in terms of website traffic, and that’s important. But it also includes related items like CTR (click-through rate). That is, how often people who see your links click on them. Heat mapping, where a person navigates to on a web page, is also important. So is dwell time (how long a visitor spends on a site). 

Where SEO is heading

AI tools are taking over the search world quickly — and that is having a clear impact on SEO. But it’s changing search engine optimization, not eliminating it. 

Google itself made this clear in May of 2026 when it said that AI-driven search optimization, things like AEO and GEO, are still SEO. Foundational SEO best practices (like those laid out in this resource) remain critical to ranking in AI Overviews and generative search.

When Google confirmed in 2026 that AEO and GEO are still SEO, it validated what we’d already been telling clients for two years: the fundamentals don’t change, the emphasis does. We started restructuring client content for AI citation (direct answers up top, real FAQ sections, clean schema) well before it was the industry consensus. The teams panicking about AI ‘killing’ SEO are usually the ones who never nailed the fundamentals in the first place. If your content is genuinely helpful and technically sound, AI is just one more place it gets to show up.

AI Overview SEO may look slightly different in areas. For instance, including an FAQ and answering a search query in the first paragraph of a resource have become more important if you want to be cited in AI tools. But the foundational pieces of SEO that help content organically shine online remain firmly in place. 

What’s different is emphasis, not substance. To be cited in AI-generated answers, it helps to:

• Answer the core question directly in the first paragraph, before adding context.
• Include a clear FAQ section — AI tools frequently pull directly from these.
• Use structured data (schema) so search and AI systems can parse your content’s meaning, not just its words.

The key is finding a growth marketing partner that can grow with you as this AI-driven wave continues to evolve SEO and search moving forward.

Frequently asked questions

What are the 4 types of SEO? 

The four main types are on-page SEO (content and keywords), off-page SEO (backlinks and digital PR), technical SEO (crawlability, speed, and structure), and local SEO (proximity, relevance, and prominence for location-based searches). The strongest strategies run all four together rather than relying on just one.

What’s the difference between on-page and off-page SEO? 

On-page SEO covers everything you control directly on your site — content quality, keyword targeting, title tags, and internal linking. Off-page SEO builds authority beyond your site through backlinks, brand mentions, and digital PR. Both signal quality to search engines, but off-page relies on third-party validation, not your own claims.

What are the 5 SEO factors to prioritize? 

Prioritize a strong technical foundation, keyword-optimized content matched to search intent, on-site interlinking, backlinking, and generating helpful content. Those five elements give you some of the biggest impact across SEO campaigns. Technical SEO ensures Google can find and index your pages, so the rest can build on that foundation to earn rankings, traffic, and authority.

Is SEO different from SEM? 

Yes. SEO focuses on earning unpaid, organic visibility in search through content, technical optimization, and backlinks. SEM includes paid search ads that appear instantly at the top of search results. Most effective strategies use both together, pairing SEO’s long-term authority with SEM’s immediate visibility.

What is organic SEO? 

Organic SEO is the work you do to earn unpaid search traffic, rather than buying clicks through ads. It usually includes high-quality content, technical improvements like site speed and crawlability, and link building through digital PR. It takes longer to show results than paid search, but the traffic it earns tends to be more durable.

How is AI changing SEO in 2026?

AI is reshaping how content gets discovered — search engines and AI tools increasingly reward the same fundamentals: crawlable sites, high-quality content, and clear structure. Google has confirmed that optimizing for AI Overviews and generative search is still SEO, not something new. 

Talk to our SEO team

There’s a lot to learn when it comes to SEO in marketing, and there are specialists in each of these four categories. So what’s the most important lesson here?

SEO strategy is ultimately about the user experience. As search engines become more sophisticated, the gap closes between what’s prioritized by the algorithm and what’s helpful to the user.

When it comes to SEO best practices, the most important one is making sure your website is easy to use and meets your audience’s expectations. Keeping your customers top of mind is the North Star that won’t steer you wrong as you navigate SEO. If you want help building a strategy that ties all four types together, book a call with our team — we will audit your current setup and show you where the biggest opportunities are.