Search Engine Positioning. Is the Same as SEO?

Whether you’re a small e-commerce business or an emerging tech startup, you’re likely looking to drive organic search traffic from Google and other search engines.

But what if your pages can’t even reach the top 10 in the search results?

In that case, you might be overlooking search engine positioning or doing it wrong.

What Is Search Engine Positioning?

Search engine positioning means optimizing specific pages on your website to increase their search rankings. You can use this technique to optimize everything from product pages to blog posts.

Performing search engine positioning is important because you want your website to land at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). The first organic result on Google has a click-through rate (CTR) of 39.8%, which drops to just 1.6% for the tenth result, according to a recent study by the First Page Sage agency. Moving up just a couple of positions can significantly impact your website traffic and conversions.

You can also apply search engine positioning to rank for different SERP features, such as “People Also Ask” boxes, featured snippets, and image results.

Search Engine Positioning Vs. SEO

Although the terms “search engine positioning” (SEP) and “search engine optimization” (SEO) are often used interchangeably, they are not exactly the same.

Search engine positioning (SEP) is one of the SEO techniques that focuses on improving the rankings of specific webpages. SEO, on the other hand, is a much broader concept involving many other techniques that impact the entire website, including:

• Technical SEO (such as page speed, crawlability, etc.)
• Link building
• Keyword research
• Local SEO (for business owners)

Like SEO, search engine positioning is an ongoing process because search results on Google are not static. Algorithm updates can affect your rankings anytime, and your competitors are constantly working to improve their search rankings. So, you need to monitor your keywords and search traffic regularly to spot changes that could reduce your search visibility.

Why is search engine positioning important?

When you apply search engine positioning to grow your rankings, you can expect the following benefits:

1. Maximize organic search traffic

One of the main benefits of search engine positioning is an uptick in organic search traffic. If your pages convent well, this should also lead to more sales.

If you’re part of the marketing team, growing organic traffic and conversions will also help you show the impact of your work and increase the ROI on the content you publish on your website.

2. Increase brand awareness

Let’s say you’ve developed new photo editing software. You need to spread the word about your brand to attract users, and ranking at the top of the SERP will help you achieve just that.

For example, the keyword “best free photo editing app” gets 7.2K monthly searches in the US alone (based on Ahrefs data), so ranking for it would increase brand awareness significantly.

3. Get ahead of your competitors

You and your industry rivals compete over many similar keywords.

Considering the difference in CTR between different search positions on the first page of search results, increasing your rankings by just one or two positions can help you outperform your competitors.

Take a look at the average monthly traffic for the top search results generated by the keyword “photo editor.” The lower you rank, the less traffic you receive.

How To Do a Search Engine Position Analysis

We can do a search engine position analysis using a tool like Ahrefs.

The main questions we want to answer are:

• What are the search rankings of individual webpages?
• Have the rankings decreased significantly over the past few months?

Answering these questions lets you decide which webpages to prioritize for your search engine positioning strategy.

To start, enter your domain into Site Explorer, then go to the “Organic keywords” report. It shows all the keywords your domain ranks for.

By default, it compares current search rankings to the month prior. But you can also adjust this filter to a period of your choice or turn it off.

The “Position” column contains the rankings data.

Any page that doesn’t appear in the top 10 is an excellent re-optimization candidate, especially if it appears on the second or third page of search results. You can use the ranking position filter to narrow down the results.

In this case, it might take to slightly modify the webpage content to reach the top 10.

How To Improve Search Engine Positioning

It’s frustrating to pour time and resources into creating high-quality content only for it to have little impact.

With search engine positioning, your content will be able to reach the top of the SERP and its target audience.

Get started with our five tips below.

1. Meet Search Intent

Search intent is the reason a user enters a specific query into Google or another search engine. There are four types of search intent:

• Informational: The user wants to learn more about a specific topic, e.g., “how to ride a bike”
• Navigational: The user wants to find a specific page, e.g., “instagram help center”
• Commercial: The user wants to do research before buying a product, e.g., “best commuter bikes”
• Transactional: The user wants to make a purchase, e.g., “buy commuter bike”

If your webpage doesn’t meet the search intent, its chances of ranking at the top of the SERP are low. Search engines want to provide users with relevant content. So if your content is commercial but targets an informational keyword, it’s not helpful to users.

Note that search intent can change. For example, a commercial keyword can become informational and vice versa. Some keywords can display a mix of intents. That’s why it’s important to double-check search intent whenever you’re reoptimizing a webpage.

You can check the search intent simply by analyzing the top-ranking content. You can also use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Just click “Identify intents” in the SERP Overview section.

Then, you’ll see a breakdown of the search intent. These insights will help you position your content in a way that results in higher rankings and traffic because it will be more relevant to users.

2. Optimize for SERP features

Search engine positioning doesn’t only apply to traditional search results—a.k.a. blue links. Optimizing your webpage for different SERP features can also help boost your reach and traffic.

There is a huge variety of SERP features today, but you can optimize for:

• Featured snippets
• Knowledge panels
• Image packs
• Videos
• “People Also Ask” boxes

For example, if you were to optimize a webpage for a featured snippet, you would first have to check what kind of snippet appears for your target keyword. It could be a paragraph, list, table, or video. Then, you would use the same format. Simple explanations and brief sentences work best for paragraphs or lists.

For step-by-step instructions, check out our guide to optimizing for featured snippets.

3. Add secondary keywords

Secondary keywords are long-tail variations or synonyms related to your target keyword. By including as many relevant secondary keywords as possible (as long as the text sounds natural), you’ll rank for more search queries and signal to search engines and users that you covered the topic in detail.

You can find secondary keywords using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. After running a search, scroll down to the “Keyword ideas” section and check the “Also rank for” and “Questions” suggestions. These will provide plenty of ideas for secondary keywords.

You can use the Keyword Difficulty or Lowest DR filters to narrow the list to the keywords where your site has a higher chance of ranking. Then, find a way to incorporate the most suitable secondary keywords into your content. However, be careful not to overuse them—ensure they fit naturally within the text.

4. Use internal links to boost your pages

Strategically placing internal links helps boost organic search traffic by passing “link equity,” which refers to the amount of authority one page passes to the page it links to.

This strategy involves linking to webpages you’re optimizing from webpages on your domain with high authority.

Link equity is determined by:

• The PageRank* of the referring URL
• How relevant the content on the referring page is to the page it links to
• The number of other pages the referring URL links to
• Anchor text relevance

PageRank is a Google algorithm that measures the importance of a webpage based on its link profile. Since we don’t have access to Google PageRank data, we can use Ahrefs’ URL rating (UR) as a replacement metric.

To start, identify which pages on your website have the highest UR by pasting your domain into Site Explorer. Then, go to the “Best by links” report.

Here, you can see which pages on your website have the most backlinks (internal and external). The UR column tells you the strength of the URL’s link profile on a scale from zero to 100.

Then, add links to pages with a high UR score pointing to pages with rankings you want to increase. Ensure the links are helpful and relevant to the referring URL otherwise they will pass little equity.

If you’re using Ahrefs or their free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, check the automatic Link Opportunities report, too.

5. Refresh your content

A webpage might see a rankings drop due to content decay. This is caused by numerous factors, including:

• Competitors publishing better content
• Content becoming outdated
• The search intent of the target keyword changes

Besides, for some keywords, Google uses the so-called “Query deserves freshness” approach.

The amount of work it takes to refresh a piece of content depends on how outdated it has become. It’s best to analyze the SERP for the target keyword and compare your content to the top-ranking pages. This will help you identify any sections to add or remove.

Next Step: Learn More About SEO

Search engine positioning is just one of many SEO techniques that can help your website traffic grow.

So, to boost your growth, make sure to use various techniques, such as link building, technical SEO, and keyword research.

If you’re relatively new to SEO, I strongly recommend the free Ahrefs SEO Academy videos.