Four types cover the field: technical, on-page, off-page, and local. Each is defined here by what it actually does, not by the tactics associated with it, because tactics change and function does not.
The four types
Technical SEO makes a site accessible to search engines — crawlable, indexable, fast, structured correctly. It is infrastructure, not messaging.
On-page SEO makes an individual page clear about what it is and what it answers — titles, headings, body content, internal links to related pages.
Off-page SEO builds trust and prominence from outside the site — links, mentions, citations, reviews.
Local SEO connects a business to a physical or service-area location in search — Google Business Profile, Maps, local citations.
Where to start: a decision table
| Situation | Start here |
|---|---|
| Pages seem to be missing from Google entirely | Technical |
| Site loads but ranks nowhere for relevant searches | On-page, after confirming technical is clean |
| Site ranks for the right terms but low, against established competitors | Off-page |
| Business depends on nearby or walk-in customers | Local |
| Brand-new site with no history at all | Technical first, local second if applicable, on-page throughout |
Most situations point to more than one row. Where they do, technical takes precedence, because it is the layer everything else depends on — see technical SEO for why.
Is this for a business my size?
A local service business and an ecommerce store need almost opposite starting points. The local business gains most from local SEO and enough on-page clarity to convert a visit; off-page work matters less because trust is often established in person or by proximity. The ecommerce store has no physical location to anchor local search and depends far more on technical SEO at scale — thousands of product pages, all needing to be crawlable and clearly structured — and on off-page signals to compete nationally or beyond.
There is no single type that suits every business; the decision table above is the more useful question than “which type is best.”
Can I just do this myself?
Relative difficulty, roughly ascending: local SEO is the most DIY-able — see Google Business Profile — followed by basic on-page work like titles and descriptions. Off-page work is harder to do well alone because it depends on relationships and outreach that take time to build. Technical SEO sits at both ends: some of it is simple and checkable directly, and some of it needs someone who can read a full site crawl, as covered in can you do SEO yourself?