You’ve probably heard that you need to be doing off-page SEO if you want your website to show up higher in search engine results pages, but what does that actually mean?
Off-page SEO is one of the most important things you can do for your website.
By focusing on a few key activities, you can improve your website’s ranking and increase traffic to your site.
This article is here to help make off-page SEO easy for you.
What Is Off-Page SEO?
Off-Page SEO are the efforts you make for your website to increase its traffic and ranking.
For example:
- Link Building
- Local SEO
- Branded Search
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Reviews
You’ll learn all about these strategies in detail later in this article.
What’s the Difference Between Off-Page SEO, On-Page SEO and Technical SEO?
On-Page SEO is the effort you make on your website to increase its traffic and ranking.
These are all the efforts that you take outside of your website to increase your site SEO.
For example:
- Keyword Research
- Meta Tags
- Title Tags
- Internal Linking
- Site Content
Technical SEO makes it possible for search engines like Google to crawl (which Google uses to scan your content) and index it.
Technical SEO elements could be for example:
- Sitemap
- Site Speed
- Accessibility
- Structured Data
Source: SemRush
SemRush created a visual that depicts the 3 different SEO tactics. All of these 3 SEO tactics work together to improve your traffic and ranking. However today we are going to focus on off-page SEO.
Now that we know what off-page SEO is let’s look into why it’s important.
Why is Off-page SEO so Important?
Whether you’re a new or established business, off-page SEO is an absolute must.
Off-page factors play a crucial role for search engines to evaluate your website’s expertise, authority and trust.
Off-page SEO has a lot to do with creating strategies to get other reputable sources searching for, talking about and linking to your website.
It’s an excellent indicator to Google if other sources think highly of your website and that they want to be affiliated with you.
This will make search engines more inclined to rank websites with good off-page SEO, helping to improve traffic and rankings by showing them that high authority sites value your site.
In other words, off-page SEO tells Google that their users are interested in your content and that Google should rank you higher so your users and others can easily search for and access your website.
Now that we have established that you need to do off-page SEO, what happens if you’re unsure where to start?
There are so many different things you could do, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
So, we’ve created a list of the most common off-page SEO strategies you can implement.
Off-Page SEO Strategies
Link Building
A backlink (inbound link) is when another website links to your website.
According to Hubspot, “A link to another website is more than just a link — it’s a vote of confidence, a recommendation, a way for publishers to say to their readers: “Here’s a source I trust. Go check it out yourself.”
For example, I have linked to several external resources in this article. For each website that I link to, I have essentially given them a vote of confidence.
Link building is by far the most important strategy to consider and implement as this is most search engines’ biggest ranking factor.
Link building is a long term strategy. It is advised not to build too many links in a short period. It’s important to also link responsibly as too many links can work against you if they are no timed correctly.
“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.” – Google support
Therefore the more quality backlinks you have, the more it signals to search engines that there is something of value here and that your content should rank higher.
Source: Backlinko
There are 3 types of links
- Natural Links
These are links that are organically created.
These links naturally visit your website through a Google search or word of mouth referral.
These links are shared without your influence and are often a result of good content marketing.
- Built Links
These are links that you earn from reaching out to gain exposure.
This is when you reach out to website owners, publishers and journalists and ask to be mentioned on their websites or in their articles.
Built links are when you let people know about your content with the hopes that they’ll find it valuable enough to link to.
- Created Links
These are self-created links.
This is when website owners manually add themselves to the list of websites linking back to their own site.
These include: Self-submissions on blogs, forums, directories, press releases and comments.
Search engines consider this to be a black-hat SEO practice as this is an attempt at tricking the system into thinking you are relevant and topical. This tactic should be avoided.
Local SEO
This strategy is vital for brick and mortar businesses because it helps them optimise for local search results.
For instance, it signals to Google that you are valuable to Google users looking for your product or service in a specific region.
This means that you will likely appear higher on Google’s search engine results pages when people search for your product or service locally.
There are a few ways you can optimise for local SEO:
Create a Google Business Profile.
This allows you to create and manage the information that is displayed on Google about your business.
Such as:
- Google Search and Maps.
- Add address, phone number and open hours.
- Photos, offers & promotions.
- As well as respond to reviews.
Branded Search
This refers to the number of direct searches that have taken place on a search engine for your business (company name, products or services).
A branded search is likely to happen when someone has come across your name or product but doesn’t have a direct link to it.
For example, let’s say you were mentioned in a viral social post, blog or YouTube video, but they didn’t add a link to your website. This is known as an unlinked mention.
If someone is interested enough, they may search for you on Google, adding to direct searches.
For example, I went on to SEMRush and typed in ‘Hubspot’ to see their average monthly searches for the US alone which is 246k.
The results show a high branded search for the company. You can also see other interesting data from where people are searching for the brand to their intent which shows navigational based on the overview.
For example, we went on to Google Trends and typed in ‘Hubspot’ to see their trend in search which shows their popularity and domain authority.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is a great way to create awareness for your brand and generate traffic to your site.
Let’s take a look at the following example: A new blog post.
The Gottman Institute shared a quote on their Instagram account. In the caption, they talk about family therapy and a call to action (CTA) to “Read more on the Gottman Relationship Blog.”
Social media makes it tricky to share links to their website from posts, but adding it to your bio (biography) or Linktree which allows you to share multiple links on social media can increase traffic, engagement and backlinks.
As you can see, strategies can work together and help the other – social media can indirectly impact backlinks.
You can encourage followers to interact with your latest content and those who have just discovered your brand and are interested in learning more.
This is an excellent Off-page SEO strategy as you have control over your social media efforts and can directly encourage others to visit your site.
This also signals to Google that users are interested in your content, increasing the likelihood of ranking higher.
Content Marketing
Often we focus on On-page content marketing (e.g. blog posts and site content).
By including off-page content marketing strategies, you can help improve your site’s traffic, ratings and links.
Ask yourself this question – what’s in it for them? (WIIFT)
- What information are they looking for?
- Why would someone want to read my content?
- Why would they share it?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can create intentional content.
For instance, this article has a Twitter post from SemRush and an Instagram post from The Gottman Institute.
If you found SemRushes Keyword Overview Tool interesting or valuable, you’ll head over to that link and maybe even use it in one of your blog posts.
Here are a few ways to use content marketing for Off-page SEO:
- Guest Posting: Write guest posts on other authoritative sites so that Google knows there is a connection to the other domain.
- Infographics: Create infographics for social media and other blogs to make use of.
- Ebooks: Create downloadable content that your prospects are interested in.
- Whitepapers (authoritative reports): Create detailed reports on any topical or pressing issues within your industry.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a powerful strategy to be making use of.
By partnering with trusted influencers in your industry, you can tap into their follower base.
Influencers have already earned the know, like, and trust factor with their followers, so the work has already been put in.
They do all the promoting for you by sharing your brand story and message to their audience base.
Reviews
It’s no secret that reviews are excellent visibility and traffic sources.
They also indicate to Google that people love your product or service.
This is a great ranking factor because it directly links users’ experiences with your website and company.
- Good reviews = a greater chance of ranking higher.
- Bad reviews = a greater chance of ranking lower.
Google updates its algorithm to prohibit spam and fake reviews, so local businesses should invest in quality customer reviews.
If you want to see better results from your off-page SEO efforts, follow these 6 strategies.
Not only will they help improve your website’s ranking and increase traffic to your site, but they will also provide a better experience for your audience.
Implement these strategies, and you’ll be on your way to seeing better results from your off-page SEO efforts in no time!
Need some help with off-page SEO? Our team of experts are here for you.
Contact us today for a free consultation!
Now that you know how important off-page SEO is, you can start to implement it into your SEO strategy. Proceed to the next section of the KAMG SEO Content Hub to begin to learn what backlinks are.
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