The practice of improving a website's visibility in unpaid ("organic") search engine results, through a combination of technical site health, content quality, and external authority signals like backlinks.
Why it matters
Organic search remains one of the highest-intent traffic sources available — people actively searching for a solution are further along than someone passively scrolling social media — and SEO is how a business earns visibility for that traffic without paying for every click.
In a sentence
"Our SEO strategy focuses on the specific questions our ICP searches when they first realize they have this problem."
Related terms
- Antonyms: Paid search (SEO is unpaid, organic visibility; paid search involves paying directly for ad placement in search results).
- Often confused with: SEM (SEO specifically refers to organic optimization; SEM, or search engine marketing, is a broader term that can include both organic SEO and paid search advertising).
- Synonyms: Organic search optimization.