When it comes to digital marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial to the success and visibility of your website. Having a brightly lit sign at the front of your shop is an important way to attract more customers, but having your shop featured all over the news will draw in even more people with doors open! On-page SEO is like that brightly lit front sign, whereas off-page SEO is more like the appearance of the company all over the news. And just like curating your off-site presence, whether it’s in newspapers, radio, or TV, it takes more than simple luck to make it big as a business online. In this article, we discuss everything you need to know about off-page SEO and offer a detailed checklist to help you perfect your off-site SEO game. What is off-page SEO? In simple terms, off-page SEO refers to the tactics you use outside of your own website to build trust about your business and establish its authority on the internet. That might come across as a strange question to begin with, but read on to understand why it’s an important piece of the SEO puzzle.
Off-page SEO refers to everything you do outside of your own website that will affect your search engine rankings. Common off-page SEO activities include off-page link building, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and contacting shoppers who have made purchases with your business to request a review. You can drive more targeted traffic to your website via off-page SEO, which will increase your conversion rates and authority with the search engines, leading to increased search engine rankings and organic traffic. This ultimate off-page SEO checklist will guide you through five specific steps to make sure you are on top of your off-site optimisation. You will learn which important off-page SEO components you can get started with today.
Understanding Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is just the opposite of on-page SEO. It comprises all the things you do away from your website to raise its search rankings. While on-page SEO is about optimising things on your website, off-page SEO is about building your website’s authority and reputation from outside. The most fundamental off-page SEO activity is backlinking, which is about getting other websites to link to yours. When other websites link to your content, Google interprets that as a vote of confidence and sees your website as one it can trust. Off-page SEO also consists of any social media engagements, collaborations with influencers, and content marketing or brandment activities that you do elsewhere to raise awareness of your website.
Off-page SEO is everything that happens outside of your website that influences search engine rankings. With Google’s algorithm being heavily influenced by off-page SEO signals such as backlinks, having good off-page SEO increases a website’s visibility in SERPs and consequently traffic. It’s not a case of pure mathematics. The quality and relevancy of backlinks also weigh heavily in SERPs. Off-page SEO is an ongoing process that needs to be constantly monitored and updated as search engines tweak their algorithms. Therefore, businesses need to stay on top of the latest developments and best practices.
Building High-Quality Backlinks
Arguably, the most important of all off-page SEO factors is backlink-building (sometimes called link-building), which refers to the process of securing links to your site on other websites. Backlinks are seen as votes of confidence by search engines, with each vote or link deeming your site more valuable and authoritative than the other content on the internet. Of course, as you’d expect, not all backlinks are of equal value. Links from more authoritative websites in your niche are more valuable than links from fly-by-night sites with low quality content. So, the emphasis in this area should be on securing high-quality links in order to improve search rankings.
Using content marketing, guest blogging and broken link building strategies will help you get quality backlinks for your website. Content marketing means that you create content that is unique, informative and attractive to readers and hence links are naturally shared by your site. With guest blogging, you write on other high authority websites and they link back to your site. Broken link building helps you find broken links on other sites and then use your content in place of those broken links in order to get a backlink.
Leveraging Social Media for Off-Page SEO
When it comes to off-page SEO, social media will also come in handy by increasing the visibility of your content and driving more traffic to your website. Again, social signals are not actual ranking factors for the search engines, but they do indirectly influence your SEO as your content is more likely to attract backlinks to your website the more it is shared and engaged with on these social media platforms. And simply through the engagement with influencers and industry leaders, social media will also help contribute to your off-page SEO.
The best way to achieve this is to generate and share content that resonates with them, in the form of blog posts, infographics, videos and other media that is likely to be distributed on social media platforms. Second, engagement with your followers in the form of comments, likes and shares also helps develop a community around your business, which helps to embed your business into the fabric of the web. Third, influence can be built through collaborations with those who have already created large online followings: influencer marketing is a direct way of leveraging others’ credibility to distribute your content, with the added benefit of including high-quality backlinks to your website.
Engaging in Influencer and Blogger Outreach
Influencer or blogger outreach is an off-page SEO tactic where you reach out to influencers and bloggers in your niche to promote your content. These people have large and active audiences that look up to them and take their word for it. Hence, if you can get such influencers to promote your content, you can get your content in front of a bigger audience, attract more traffic to your website and also get some great quality backlinks. This type of engagement helps with your off-site SEO and also helps you establish your brand as an authority in your niche.
What are the first steps of an effective influencer and blogger outreach campaign? Identify those who have a large following and whose productions carry some form of weight within your industry. Pitch to them your idea and provide some form of value through your content. Offer those with influence content only they or their audience can have, or free products, or even pay them to talk about you. Relationships with influencers and bloggers ought to be genuine. Gaining their trust can pave the road to a long-term relationship founded on helping each other achieve success, and open doors for continuous off-page SEO value-building.
Maximizing Content Marketing for Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is an essential process in your content marketing, as it helps you work with your content to create specifically valuable content that resonates with your audience and makes them want to share and link to your content. Along with other research and off-page optimisation processes, off-page SEO helps you create the type of content your audience wants and ties different content types together such as meta descriptions, title tags, backlinks, and more, to create a cohesive narrative around your content that results in greater brand audience and higher rankings in search results. To utilise content marketing for off-page SEO, you’ll want to focus on creating a variety of content types that resonate with your brand and target content creators in your niche. Content types that work best for off-page SEO include blog content, statistics and facts, infographics, videos, podcasts, links, testimonials, and any other type of content that helps you connect with and resonate with your audience.
Create evergreen content: It is a long-lasting content which retains its usefulness over time, isn’t dated and continues to bring in links Content syndication: Republish your content on other online media platforms with a link to the original post (backlink), which leads to a wider audience.Shareable: Create content such as infographics and similar data-driven articles which other websites will most probably link, use them as a reference.Over a period of time, you’ll have created useful, linkable unique content on your site.
Monitoring and Evaluating Your Off-Page SEO Efforts
It is just as important to keep an eye on your off-page SEO to see what is working and what isn’t, so you can make adjustments as needed. By tracking your backlink profile, social media engagements and referral traffic regularly, you will gain more insight into the strategies you’re using and determine what to change or continue. Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Moz are just a few of the many tools you can use to track your off-page SEO performance. These tools give you different reports to track your backlinks, domain authority and hold overall search engine rankings.
It is easier to determine how well you are doing if you define your off-page SEO goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). For example, your goal could be to have 50 quality backlinks, referral traffic, social shares and 20 positions improvement in search engine rankings. Set those KPIs by developing a strategy for each measure and then reviewing the results every month to identify trends and any issues that need to be addressed, so that you adapt to what is happening. Continuously tracking and adapting your off-page SEO will empower you to tweak your optimisation tactics to achieve your business goals.
Conclusion
When it comes to SEO, off-page is about as important as the on-page. To boost the power of your SEO strategy, make sure you build high-quality backlinks consistently, follow the right steps for social media, reach out to influencers, and ensure that your content marketing activities are up to date. Always track your progress when it comes to off-page SEO and use the insights from your reports to make important pivots for your long-term success. Understanding the future of off-page SEO can give you an edge in the world of search results, as SEO algorithms are always shifting. And remember, when implementing off-page SEO, make sure you have double checked against this off-page SEO checklist to ensure that your off-site optimisation efforts are as all-inclusive as they can be.
