SEO breaks down into three core types that work together. On-page SEO covers everything you control on your actual pages: title tags, meta descriptions, header structure, content quality, internal linking, image optimization, and keyword targeting. This is where you prove relevance to search engines and users. Off-page SEO is primarily about backlinks and external signals that establish your site's authority. Getting links from reputable domains, building brand mentions, and earning editorial citations all fall here. You don't control these directly, but you can influence them through outreach, content marketing, and PR. Technical SEO handles the infrastructure: site speed, mobile responsiveness, XML sitemaps, structured data markup, robots.txt configuration, canonical tags, HTTPS implementation, and crawl budget optimization. Search engines need to access, crawl, and index your content efficiently before rankings even become possible. Some agencies split out local SEO as a fourth type when you're targeting geographic queries. This includes Google Business Profile optimization, local citations (NAP consistency across directories), location-specific landing pages, and review management. In Ottawa, Toronto, or any Canadian market, local SEO matters significantly for businesses with physical locations or service areas. At Ottawa SEO Inc., we run technical audits first because you can't rank sustainably if Google can't crawl your site properly. Then we layer on-page optimization for relevance and off-page link building for authority. For e-commerce specifically, technical SEO becomes critical: faceted navigation can create duplicate content nightmares, product pages need schema markup, and page speed directly impacts conversion rates. The types aren't silos. A single change often touches multiple areas. Adding structured data to product pages is technical SEO that improves how your on-page content appears in search results. The real skill is knowing which type to prioritize based on your current bottleneck, whether that's a crawling issue, thin content, or lack of authoritative backlinks.