SEO

SEO is “the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a webpage in a web search engine’s unpaid results” (Wikipedia). This differentiates SEO from the use of paid ads in order to appear at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Take the following two screenshots, for example (Figure 3.1). On the left-hand side, we have results that appear at the top of the SERP because the company has bid on certain keywords used in a search query (in this instance, “car rental montreal”). On the right-hand side, we have organic search results that appear because the company has practiced SEO on similar keywords. In other words, they have optimized certain pages of their websites to maximize the chances that these pages would rank high when people search for specific keywords (e.g., “car rental montreal”).

Figure 3.1 SEO vs. Organic Search