Types of SEO: The 15 Kinds Explained, With a Priority Guide

Lists of types of SEO range from four to fifteen items, and most of them mix two different questions: which part of your visibility you are working on, and how clean your methods are. Google defines search engine optimisation in its SEO Starter Guide as helping search engines understand your content and helping users find your site and decide whether to visit it. Every type below serves that goal from a different angle. This guide sorts them into clear families, explains each one in a few lines, and ends with a method to decide where to start.

How many types of SEO are there?

There is no official count, because Google does not classify SEO into types. The useful way to read the field is with two separate axes:

• The area of work: the site itself (technical and on-page), its reputation on the web (off-page), and specialised contexts (local, e-commerce, international, AI assistants...).
• The method: white hat (within Google's guidelines), grey hat (in the margins) and black hat (against them).

On the first axis, three types are universal and the rest are optional layers. The table gives the overview.

What are the core types of SEO?

Technical SEO

Technical SEO makes sure search engines can access, render and index your pages: crawlability, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, redirects, HTTPS, page speed and structured data. If a page is not indexed, no other type of SEO can help it. Start every project with an index coverage check in Search Console.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO covers everything you control on a single page: the title tag, meta description, headings, URL, internal links, image attributes and the match between the page and the search intent. A well-optimised page answers one main query, uses its vocabulary naturally and links to related pages on the same site.

Content SEO

Content SEO decides which pages should exist. It starts from keyword research, groups queries by intent into topic clusters and produces the guides, comparisons and definitions that answer them. Many lists merge it with on-page SEO; keeping it separate helps, because the most common reason a site gets no traffic is missing content, not badly optimised content.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO works on signals from outside your site: backlinks from relevant sites, brand mentions, reviews and digital PR. Links remain one of the ways Google discovers pages and gauges their importance. Quality matters far more than volume: one link from a respected site in your field outweighs dozens of links from unrelated directories.

Which types of SEO depend on your business model?

Local SEO

Local SEO targets searches with a place in mind ("plumber near me", "dentist Lyon"). Its centre is the Google Business Profile. In its help page on local ranking, Google names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence, and states that more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking.

E-commerce SEO

E-commerce SEO deals with large catalogues: category pages that target generic queries, product pages that target precise ones, faceted navigation that can create thousands of duplicate URLs, and out-of-stock products. Unique descriptions and Product structured data (price, availability, reviews) make the difference in shopping results.

International SEO

International SEO serves the right version of a page to each language or country: URL structure (subfolders, subdomains or country domains), hreflang annotations, real translations rather than machine copies, and local keyword research, since people in each market search with their own words.

Enterprise SEO

Enterprise SEO applies the same principles to sites with tens of thousands of pages and several teams. The work shifts toward governance: templates, release checks so a deployment does not break indexing, crawl budget, and prioritising fixes by revenue at stake.

B2B SEO

B2B SEO targets small search volumes with high value per lead. Buyers research for weeks, compare vendors and involve several people, so content maps to each stage: problem guides, comparisons, pricing pages and use cases by role or industry.

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO builds many pages from a template and a dataset, such as one page per city, per integration or per product pair. It works when each page carries data the visitor needs. Google's spam policies name scaled content abuse: pages produced at scale mainly to manipulate rankings fall under it, whatever the production method.

Which types of SEO focus on a format or device?

Mobile SEO

Google's documentation on mobile-first indexing states that it uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. Mobile SEO therefore checks that the mobile version has the same content, structured data and links as the desktop one, and that it loads fast on a phone.

Image and video SEO

Image SEO uses descriptive file names, alt text, compressed formats and image sitemaps to rank in Google Images. Video SEO optimises titles, descriptions, chapters, transcripts and thumbnails for YouTube and the video results in Google. Both bring traffic that text pages rarely capture: tutorials, products to see, recipes.

Voice search SEO

Voice queries are longer and phrased as questions. The work overlaps with featured snippets and local SEO: question-based headings, a direct answer of one or two sentences right below, and accurate business information for "near me" requests.

What is SEO for AI assistants (GEO and AEO)?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO) aim to get a brand cited or recommended in the answers of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. It is the newest type, and it builds on the others. Google states in its documentation on AI features that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that SEO best practices remain relevant: a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet.

What GEO adds is a way of writing and measuring: answer-first paragraphs that make sense on their own, definitions, tables, named sources, consistent brand information across the web, and tracking of the prompts where a brand is cited or where a competitor is named instead. Our study of the platforms AI assistants cite most shows why third-party mentions matter as much as your own pages.

What are white hat, grey hat and black hat SEO?

These labels describe the method, whatever the area of work:

• White hat SEO follows Google's guidelines: useful content, a sound site, links earned on merit.
• Grey hat SEO uses tactics that are not explicitly banned but sit close to the line, such as heavily reworded copies of existing pages or exact-match anchors repeated across many links.
• Black hat SEO breaks the rules listed in Google's spam policies: cloaking, hidden text, link schemes, scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse. It can bring short gains and ends in ranking drops or manual actions.

Negative SEO is black hat aimed at someone else, typically a wave of spammy links pointed at a competitor. For most sites, monitoring the link profile is enough; Google's disavow tool is meant for rare, serious cases.

How do you choose which types of SEO to prioritise?

The order below fits most sites. Move to the next step only when the previous one is in place.

1. Technical base: pages indexed, no crawl errors on important URLs, fast mobile pages.
2. On-page and content: one page per important search intent, written better than the current results.
3. Your specialised type: local SEO for a business with a physical area, e-commerce SEO for a store, international SEO if you sell abroad, B2B SEO for long sales cycles.
4. Off-page: earn links and mentions once you have pages worth linking to.
5. GEO: structure your best pages for citation and measure your presence in AI answers.

A quick test helps: if your pages are not indexed, fix technical SEO; if they are indexed but rank beyond page two, work on content and on-page; if they reach page one without climbing further, off-page authority is usually what is missing.

How do the types of SEO work together?

The types overlap more than lists suggest. A product page needs technical SEO to be indexed, on-page SEO to match the query, Product data for e-commerce results, backlinks to compete, and a clear, factual description to be quoted by an AI assistant. Treat the types as layers of one strategy, with one owner who decides the order.

Sorank covers several of these layers on autopilot: it finds your keywords, writes and publishes optimised articles, obtains natural backlinks automatically from its network of 5,000+ users, and its GEO optimisation tracks whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude cite your brand. Start with the core three types, add your specialised one, and let the routine work run every week.