Are you putting in extra effort this year to improve your SEO rankings? No matter how user-friendly or fast your website may be, that’s only half of the battle. You must engage in Off-Page SEO to be at the top of the search engines and overcome competition.
Off-page SEO is an effective SEO strategy that contributes significantly to a site’s ability to rank better on Google. While your website is vital to your SEO strategy, there are additional actions to take outside of your website that will help you rank.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be scary, especially when you don’t know what steps to take to rank your fresh content pages in Google’s top 10. But, if you can develop a basic understanding of on-page and off-page optimization, you’ll be way ahead of your competition.
If you’re ready, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about off-page search optimization.
Table of Contents
What is Off-Page SEO?
“Off-Page SEO” refers to all of the actions you and others undertake away from your website in order to improve a page’s search engine rating.
Many people equate off-page SEO with link building, but it encompasses much more. Off-page SEO includes a variety of operations that do not result in a standard link on other websites.
On-page SEO takes place within the site, and off-page SEO takes place outside the site. You’re performing off-page site promotion if you make a guest post for another blog or leave a comment.
Why Off-Page SEO Matter?
Google uses over two hundred factors for ranking sites. It’s difficult to rank based on content alone; this is where off-page SEO comes in. By telling Google what others think about you and your site, you are helping it determine how much your content is relevant for users. This is why getting links from quality websites is key.
On-Page SEO vs Off-Page SEO
In the simplest terms, on-page SEO encompasses every action you take on your website to affect your ranking on search engines. Off-page, on the other hand, happens outside of your website.
What actions specifically? Here’s a quick visual guide:
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it should provide some clarity on the difference between these two SEO strategies. The key takeaway is that both are equally important to gain and maintain a high search ranking.
What is best for Off-Page SEO
A common misconception among SEO newbies is that link-related activities are the only ones that matter. In reality, Google’s algorithm pays close attention to a number of factors for ranking content. Link building can only get you so far. Why not take advantage of a great variety of other SEO tools and strategies that can boost both your website and your brand?
While working on your off-page SEO, you should carefully consider the following:
- Domain Authority – This is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz to give an overview of a website’s performance. When doing off-page activities, you must always bear in mind the importance of this metric. Domain authority, or simply DA, assess website performance and quality.
- Relevance – Getting links from high-DA sites is the way to go; however, it is even more crucial that these sites are relevant to the one you’re linking to.
- Site traffic – When doing off-page activities like forum posting, bloggers outreach, etc. you need to figure out how much traffic these sites/people can drive towards you.
- Link Type – Here are the two main types of links involved in link building or promotion activities.
- Do-Follow Links. A do-follow link is the default link type that allows Google bots or spiders to pass value to the link or webpage that is linked to. Google observes the number of do-follow links and the amount of separate domains you get then from. The more the number of do-follow links from multiple and relevant sources, the more the value that is being passed.
- No-Follow Links. A no-follow link type means Google bots or spiders will not follow such links. They won’t pass any value to the page where it is linked to. No-follow links won’t make any difference for your rankings. No-follow links were introduced in an attempt to stop web spam.
Off-Page SEO Techniques
1. Link Building
We realize it’s easier said than done! Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your own pages and articles, for those unfamiliar with SEO. They are one of the most essential ranking factors since they act as personal recommendations from greater websites, and the more high-quality links you have, the better. Consider them a digital road sign directing visitors to your website.
Backlinks can indicate to search engines that your website has useful content. Why else would a fantastic website point you in that direction? When search engines see that high-quality websites are leading viewers to your website, they deduce that yours must be very good as well and award you a higher ranking.
Building backlinks takes time. If you are buying them, make sure to go with reputable companies that provide genuine outreach services to acquire valuable links to websites with high domain authority. If you’re performing outreach yourself, understand that getting responses and eventually a link takes time, patience, and persistence.
It’s important to use white hat strategies to gain backlinks, as methods like flooding forums and comment sections with links to your webpage can get you penalized by Google.
2. Social Media
You’ve probably thought of social media as a brand awareness tool, more than an SEO play.
However, using social media to build domain authority and improve your search engine position is an excellent approach to do so.
When you publish information on social media and drive traffic to your website, Google sees that you’re getting visitors from a variety of places and that you must have fascinating, high-quality content.
This is why it’s critical to engage your community on social media and leverage it to distribute content. More interaction means more shares, backlinks, and hits, all of which assist to increase domain authority.
3. Local SEO
Local SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website for local search results. This is usually reserved for physical stores or enterprises that service customers in specific geographic regions, such as hair salons, air conditioning providers, or supermarkets.
For this to work, you must send signals to search engines that service consumers in local areas. How do you do this? Here are a few key ways:
- Add your company to local and national business directories, namely Google My Business.
- Claim your listing on review sites, like Trip Advisor and Yelp, and respond to reviews.
- Encourage your customers to leave positive reviews online.
- Have consistent contact information across all digital platforms
4. Content Marketing
You can use content marketing to reach out to your target audience and entice them with material that meets their requirements and pain issues.
You may use strategies like guest blogging, downloadable offers, surveys, and reports in addition to your on-page content marketing efforts, such as blog articles.
These strategies can help you increase website traffic, generate new leads, and boost your search engine rating.
Take, for example, guest posting, which has several advantages. The first is the capacity to reach out to a new audience inside your target market. The worth of the backlink you may get by being published on another high-authority domain is the second factor to consider. Finally, guest writing can increase website traffic, which is an essential ranking element.
Conclusion
Your site is an intrinsic part of the ever-evolving Internet ecosystem where you are constantly being evaluated and graded by Google. Thanks to the ongoing updates to Google algorithms, the quality of content now is better than ever before, meaning you have a lot of competitors to contend with.
Even with these techniques, off-page SEO can not be done as a one-time thing and then forgotten about. It must be a frequent practice part of your SEO strategy to truly work in increasing rankings, traffic, and site engagement.
The bottom line is, your best course of action is to continue to strengthen the technical performance of your site and create original content, meaningful articles, make videos, etc. but just don’t stop here. Whenever off-page SEO is concerned – think big, think bold!
If you have any questions or are unsure of any of the recommendations in this post, please leave a comment.
