Off-page SEO, or sometimes Off-site SEO, are a set of tactics and practices outside of your own website to improve your site’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs). The basic idea of off-page SEO is to benefit from reputable online sources that link to or promote your site’s content. In a broader sense, any activity that occurs outside of your website and improves your site’s ranking position can be considered as an off-page SEO practice.
What is Off-Page SEO and why it is important?
Relevance, trustworthiness, and authority are the three main factors that effective off-page SEO improves on a website. One of the major indications of quality content for search engines to rank a site is the high value backlinks to that site.
There are several types of links that impact site’s SEO. Natural links are those that are built without any efforts from the page owner. For instance, any links from this blog article to Google Analytics is considered a natural link to that website. Manually built links are the result of the page owner’s efforts to convince customers or influencers to link back to the business’s website. Finally, self-created links are those initiated by the page owner from open sources like forums, page comments section, or directories. Beware that some self-created link practices may fall under black hat SEO with possible negative consequences.
It is important to receive links from popular sites with relevant topics. Fresh links with anchor texts contribute more to your site’s SEO. Furthermore, trustworthiness and authority as well as the number of links on the linking page are significant factors.
Off-Page SEO vs. On-Page SEO
While off-page SEO includes actions outside of your website, on-page SEO means controlling factors associated with your website like text, blog content, images, keyword usage, URL, and internal links. It is best to combine both off- and on-page SEO strategies to make sure your website ranks high on search results. What follows is a list of most effective strategies that can form the basis of your off-page SEO:
1. Improve Off-Page SEO with Backlinks
There is a clear positive correlation between the number of total backlinks and Google rankings. Google still use PageRank as an important ranking algorithm. To build effective backlinks, you need to prioritize quality over quantity. Quality links are those authority links from websites relevant to your business.
A good starting step to build authoritative backlinks is to include statistics on your page. Other website owners value informative statistics and would more likely refer to your site in their content. Another way is to find broken links in your niche to build links to your site.
Crafting long-form content is also an effective way to generate quality backlinks. The longer your blog post is, the more likely people link to it. You can also guess blog on reputable sites. It draws attention to your original site when people see an interesting content from you on their favorite platform.
Google’s algorithm combines popularity (i.e., counted hyperlinks) and relevance to search query’s when deciding on the rank of a specific page. Popularity is easier to measure compared to site traffic. Number of external links is also a more stable metric. To determine relevancy, search engines often look at anchor texts and how well a link reflects the content of the page.
2. The importance of Brand Signals
To ensure Google that you have a legit brand, you should use brand signals. Brand signals are also used in off-page SEO. To get a broad picture how people search for your brand, you can use the Google Search Console and get the performance report of your exact brand name or your brand name with additional search terms. An important measure is to look at the impressions column and try to improve it each month.
A good tactic to boost your brand signal is through video marketing. YouTube is the best platform to make sure people see your videos and then search for your brand online. If you want to track how many times people mention your brand across platforms online, you should invest in brand tracking tools. This is especially helpful to identify whether your brand is trending up over time.
If you want to increase the number of references (aka., Backlinks) to your site, make sure to publish plenty of research-backed content. Though sharing your content on social media might not help with off-page SEO, it is still beneficial indirectly because more views could lead to more brand searches and mentions.
3. Have you heard about E-A-T?
There is nothing more important than showing expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) of your business through your website. It is important to know that both links and mentions can positively affect E-A-T of your website. Linked mentions would do best, but don’t sweat it if you only get unlinked mentions especially on a large enough platform that can attract considerable audience.
Positive customer reviews not only help your business in general but also affect your site’s E-A-T and signals Google’s Quality Rater to rank your site higher. If you don’t run a B2C business, you can showcase awards and experts’ opinions on your website.
Actionable Off-Page SEO techniques
There are actionable techniques that you can implement to boost your off-page SEO. To increase the rate of brand mentions and generate more backlinks, you can send out a press release. Make sure the content of the press release is newsworthy, but more importantly embed mentions and links to your business in the release. Other sites will find this press release informative and will publish it which will lead to more links and mentions.
Compared to guest posting, roundup posts are easier to generate backlinks and mentions. Participating on interviews, podcasts, and guest appearing on video contents can also boost your off-page SEO. An interview will include a link to your site and a podcast will generate a search online by curious listeners. These activities signal Google that your brand is getting links from authority sites.
Partnering with bigger brands can also help direct traffic to your site. Figure out what value you can create for a bigger brand in your industry an offer collaboration on a small project. Receiving credit for what you did for the bigger brand is a huge credibility booster for your business.
Visual content like videos, graphic designs, and infographics are the best content you can offer to other brands when establishing your partnership. They can share your content on their blog and link it to your page as the original source.
Take Home message
Off-page SEO effort is essentially telling Google that others think positively of your site. Off-page SEO is essentially link building. When there are many links to your site, search engines consider your content valuable and informative to target audience and consider a higher rank for your page.
Most business owners spend more time on on-page SEO. That makes sense. However, on-page and off-page SEO should go hand in hand to be most effective. Here we reviewed basic yet most effective off-page SEO strategies you can implement to boost your site’s ranking on search results. Don’t forget that our SEO specialists at Lyla can help you get the most out of your investment in your site.
