Off-page SEO refers to all the things you can do outside of your website to improve a page’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
In short, it covers all SEO tactics that take place outside of your website.
Along with on-page SEO, it includes many of the factors of basic SEO practices that help a site perform well in search rankings.
While many people think of backlinks or link building when it comes to off-page SEO, there is a lot more you can do to give your site a boost.
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In this article, we will discuss what off-page SEO is, why it matters, and the different tactics you can use to boost your rankings in the SERPs.
What is Off-Page SEO?
You might have taken extensive measures to optimize your website for SEO, but the truth is, if you want your site to rank well on Google and you want to increase your business’s visibility and organic search traffic in today’s world, you have to look beyond your own site.
That is where off-page SEO comes into play. It basically tells Google what others think about your site.
Off-page SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for search engines without doing anything within your website. That means optimizing your website for off-site ranking factors.
Optimizing for off-site ranking factors involves improving search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.
On Page and Off Page Seo
To better understand off-page SEO, we should break down the most popular areas of SEO: on-page SEO, and off page SEO.
In the most simple of terms you can think about the two like this:
- On-page SEO: Your website
- Off-page SEO: Any other website or external platform
Technical SEO
On top of these two types of SEO, there is also technical SEO. Some SEO experts consider technical SEO to fall under the on-page SEO category, but technical SEO more relates to those things that directly impact the indexing and crawling of your site by search engines.
Technical SEO includes things like site speed, structured data, XML sitemaps, canonicalization, and more.
For the sake of this article, we are going to focus strictly on off-page SEO.
Why is Off-Page SEO Important?
The short answer to why off-page SEO matters is that without it, you will almost certainly struggle to rank for competitive search terms.
The underlying strategy behind off-page SEO is to establish and improve your website’s authority, and this can be done by increasing its popularity, relevance, and trustworthiness.
Google EAT SEO
Google refers to these areas as EAT SEO, which is an abbreviation for a set of factors Google uses to help determine the quality of web pages. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
In short, Google’s EAT guidelines help establish whether or not users should trust you, your website, or your content.
What that really means is that if you are not able to build your site’s authority, your site will not outrank other sites that already have higher authority.
That is typically demonstrated by content from higher authority websites ranking higher than content from websites with lower authority.
So if you want to boost your authority and build up your brand, you can’t ignore off-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO Tactics
Now that we know what off-page SEO is and why it is important, we can explore the different ways to increase it.
Below are some of the most popular and effective methods for increasing off-page SEO.
Link Building
Link building is by far the most common way to go about enhancing your website’s off-page SEO.
It is the practice of asking other websites to place one-way hyperlinks (also known as backlinks) on their site in order to improve your website’s visibility in SERPs.
When Google and other search engines crawl a site, one thing they look at is that site’s links to external sources. Those backlinks are a website’s way of saying they trust something.
Basically, the more times a website shows up on external sites, the higher its credibility. So by increasing your number of backlinks, you also improve your domain authority.
It is important to note that the type of backlinks used (nofollow, sponsored and UGC links) can affect how Google sees you.
There are different ways to go about securing backlinks, but each of those strategies are built around the same basic premise of identifying and targeting different backlink opportunities that exist.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a broad term, but when it comes to off-page SEO, think of it as the creation and distribution of high-quality assets.
When you create engaging assets, you increase the chances that external sources will want to share and link to your content.
These assets can include things such as:
- Infographics
- Blog posts
- Ebooks and Whitepapers
- Surveys, studies, and research papers.
Social Media and PR
Two of the top ways to go about link building are through public relations and social media.
Social media and PR tactics lend themselves to off-page SEO by giving you a strong way to promote and share your best brand stories and linkable assets.
While social shares are not a direct ranking factor, social media channels play a big role in the way internet users search for answers to their questions.
That means if you can run a successful PR campaign and promote your brand effectively on social media channels, you will be able to get your brand in front of a massive number of potential customers on the platforms they regularly use.
Here are some of the benefits of a successful PR and social media campaign:
- Increase brand awareness and search queries about your brand
- Improve site traffic
- Start a conversation around your business
- Reach your target customers
On top of that, social media can be used as a customer service platform. When customers have an issue or want to contact a brand, they typically do so through social media.
By effectively promoting your brand and reaching customers and clients on the platforms they use, you can increase your authority, establish yourself as a thought leader, and show customers that you are there to support them on their journeys.
Off-page SEO is an essential part of any solid SEO strategy.
If you are spending all your time on on-page optimization but ignoring off-page SEO, there’s a decent chance that you won’t see that big of a difference in where your website shows up in the SERPs.
Link building, content marketing, social media, and PR campaigns are all good ways to improve your off-page SEO, but they are far from the only ways to do so.
A good off-page SEO strategy (and any SEO strategy) is a diverse one that uses multiple methods to reach its goals.
Want to learn more about SEO? Check out our SEO for Beginners Guide.
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