All About SEO Marketing in 2025

What is SEO marketing?

SEO marketing is the process of updating specific aspects of your website, such as keywords, metadata, and backlinks, to rank highly on search engines to bring more traffic to your website. The goal is to appear within the first results for relevant keywords to your audience, using unpaid tools such as carefully selected keywords, blogging, social media, backlinks, etc.

Here is a SEO marketing report showing clicks, impressions, and ranking.

Why is SEO marketing important?

You can assess your SEO through organic traffic, sales, and ranking, which can indicate the effectiveness of your efforts and offer insights about your visitors. 

What is the Difference Between SEO & SEM?

While SEO is made up of an unpaid approach, like blogging, to enhance a website’s ranking in specific keyword search results. Search engine marketing (SEM) is paid advertisements such as Google Ads or paid social campaigns. Other differences include:

• Strategic Keywords - SEO professionals can help you find the right keywords for your business based on popularity and competitiveness. SEM folks use carefully selected keywords but know how to use them for the right audience for cost savings.

• Quicker Results - SEO requires more time to populate results than paid ads. Sometimes it takes months or even years to see results from content creation, while ads get almost instant results.

• Ad Budget - SEM is sponsored ads with a marketing budget for pay-per-clicks.

All the Kinds of SEO marketing

1. On-page SEO

Think quality over quantity for this category. It's better to have a dozen people subscribe to your newsletter because they appreciate your content then a 1,000 people visit your site for a few seconds only to hop off and never return again.

Relevance

It's crucial to create your content based on what people are searching for if you want to rank highly. For instance, if you're selling vitamins and people are searching for longevity 10,000 per week, it would behoove you to write a blog post about longevity and include information about how the vitamins you sell help with longevity, along with some links to your products.

Metadata

This information is included on the backend of your website for search engine crawlers to scan you site for relevant information relating to search keywords. If you have a Wix website, you're fortunate because Wix prompts you for this metadata when you're creating a website or blog post.

• Title tag - Also known as the SEO title of your page, and should include your strategically researched keyword.

• Meta descriptions - This is a short summary of the information included on your page for search results and should also include your researched keyword.

• Robot tags - Robot tags let search engines know to index pages and follow links. Wix automatically includes these tags.

2. Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO can be viewed as a "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" to get and give backlinks and share content on other people's platforms. For instance, if you give an interview you can share that link on your site promoting the interviewer's website and in turn they'll link to your site.

• Backlinks - Hyperlinks from other websites will increase your website's authority and rank.

• Domain authority - This is a 1 to 100 metric created by Moz that measures how well a domain may rank on search engines. The higher the number the higher the rank.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO includes modifying aspects of your site on the backend to enhance performance, such as downsizing imagery to load faster, making sure the site is mobile responsive on all devices. You can test your site's responsiveness by right-clicking and selecting the 'Inspect' option to see how it displays on a wide variety of mobile devices.

Top Five Free SEO Marketing Tools

1. Strategic Keywords

The initial step in every SEO endeavor is to determine which keywords your target audience uses to potentially find your site.

Creative Compass recommends Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator or the SEM Rush to choose which keywords are right for you. The two metrics used to select your keywords are popularity and competition. The image below shows results for the term 'event designer' the KD stands for 'keyword difficulty', and the volume is how many people search the term in a month.

Use Ahrefs Free Keyword generator tool to strategically select keywords for your SEO marketing plan.

2. Competitor Assessment

Once you've selected your top keywords, then you'll want to see what you're competitors are doing to rank highly for those same keywords.

3. Backlinks

To start building up your backlinks, create social media accounts, sign up on every business directory you can, and offer your network a backlink of their site on yours in exchange for a backlink on their site. You could also offer to blog on a prominent site relevant to your ideal clients for free as well.

4. Image optimization

Search engines also factor in visual media, so be sure to add your keywords to these media assets captions in the alt text. You also want to ensure that the images are not too large of a file size that will take several seconds to load. Reduce files sizes in Photoshop or with a free online tool.

5. Blogging

Start blogging on a regular basis and include your keywords, metadata, and alt text in the settings and throughout the content. If you're using Wix you'll be able to do this easily by following their instructions here. Once you publish your blog post, be sure to share it on all your social media channels and in an eblast to your subscribers.

Citations

Rogers, Adam. “What is SEO Marketing? Definition, Importance, and Types (2025) .” shopify.com. Shopify, 15 Apr. 2025. Web. 15 May. 2025.