What Is Off-Page SEO? Your Complete Guide to Off-Page Optimization in 2024
Search engine optimization (SEO) famously consists of multiple qualities, and one of the most important is off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is essential to ranking well in search engines. But what is off-page in SEO?
Simply put, off-page SEO involves optimizations done outside your website. Keep reading to learn more:
- What is off-page SEO?
- [Video] Off-page SEO
- Off-page SEO vs. on-page SEO
- Why does off-page SEO matter?
- How to do off-page SEO for your SEO campaign
- 3 types of links for off-page SEO
- 6 factors that influence link value for off-page SEO
If you’d like to speak to a specialist about off-page SEO, you can reach us at 888-601-5359.
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO definition
Off-page SEO is a set of optimization techniques that can improve your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) through efforts outside your website.
Also known as off-site SEO, off-page SEO involves tactics that attract links from other websites, social media shares, and mentions across various reliable sources on the web.
[Video] Off-page SEO: What it is and how to do it
Learn all about off-page search engine optimization, from what it is to how to do it, in this helpful video! You can also get a head start on implementing these strategies with our off-page SEO checklist.
Off-page SEO vs. on-page SEO
Difference between off-page and on-page SEO
Off-page SEO focuses on optimization efforts done outside your website. Meanwhile, on-page SEO focuses on optimizing elements on your website.
Search engines like Google use a page’s off-page SEO to measure its credibility. Off-page SEO tactics involve earning backlinks from authoritative websites. These links are like a vote of confidence for your content and website.
Meanwhile, search engines use on-page SEO to measure your page’s relevancy. On-page SEO efforts include optimizing your content, URL, and meta tags among other elements.
Make sure to implement both strategies, along with technical SEO, to see your pages rank in the SERPs.
Why does off-page SEO matter?
Importance of off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is tremendously valuable because it tells search engines that your website is important to others on the web.
Every link that you receive acts as an endorsement from another source that your website is quality. This lets external sources act as tie-breakers for websites that have the same quality of on-page SEO so search engines know the best way to rank websites on SERPs.
Sites with off-page SEO earn higher search engine rankings because of backlinks, mentions, and social media publicity.
For example, if we look at two wedding websites with similar content, which site would rank higher?
If the sites use similar on-page SEO strategies, off-page SEO signals can help determine which site ranks higher in search results.
Search engines like Google measure off-page SEO factors, like the number and quality of backlinks to websites.
If one of the wedding websites has more backlinks from reputable sources, while the other site has received zero online mentions, the site with more backlinks (and better online reputation) will likely rank higher.
Using numerous off-page and on-page SEO factors, search engines determine how valuable pages are to searchers’ queries and return relevant results accordingly.
Just remember — a page without off-site optimization is like a wedding without invitations. It’ll become a no-show.
How to do off-page SEO for your SEO campaign
Now that we’ve established how important off-page SEO is to a website’s success, we can delve into the specifics of how to improve off-page SEO:
Off-page SEO strategies
- Link building drives traffic to your website and improves your domain authority.
- Content marketing attracts natural links and showcases your expertise in your field.
- Social bookmarking promotes your site and its content among various online users.
- Earning reviews online improves your business’s trustworthiness.
Let’s dive into each one:
1. Link building
The most popular off-page SEO technique is backlinking, which aims to generate natural links to your page.
Getting reputable websites to link back to your website has two main benefits: driving traffic to your site and helping determine your rank. Links from reputable sites are hugely beneficial to your website.
That’s because links are the primary way to navigate the internet. Links improve your users’ experience. With links, your users can easily navigate to other information they find relevant.
Links are also the simplest way to measure the expertise, authority, and trust of a site. That’s why Google includes links as part of search ranking factors.
But how do you convince others to link to you? Here are a few backlinking strategies for your off-site SEO efforts:
- Join an association: This could be an industry association or the local Chamber of Commerce. Make sure that your company gets a link on the association’s website.
- Reach out: Reaching out to journalists and bloggers as possible sources for their writing, or asking them to host something you’ve published, provides future opportunities for you to earn links to your website.
- Employ broken link building: Broken link building is a strategy of looking for dead links on other websites and asking the site linking to them to link to your page instead.
- Share on social media: Promoting your content on social media can help it gain traction. Post appropriate content, like infographics, blog posts, and more, to social media channels. Optimize your posts for discoverability, like by using hashtags on X (formerly Twitter).
Some links have more weight than others. For example, links from influencers in your audience’s community have much more authority than links from spam sites.
Those high-quality links will tell Google that you’ve earned the recognition — that your site knows its material — and Google will rank you higher.
To make sure that your off-page SEO strategy is performing up to par, regularly check your backlinks. You can use tools to analyze your and your competitors’ backlink profiles. Some of our favorite backlink tools are:
When implementing your off-page SEO strategy, don’t just know how to build links, understand why you’re building them. You’re building them so you can have a more significant presence and reach the people that you think your services and products could help.
2. Content marketing
Making high-quality content like blog posts, infographics, videos, and white papers are all excellent ways to draw clicks and natural links to your site. If you have interesting and useful content, natural links will come.
That said, content is an essential off-page SEO element. Publish helpful content that will engage site visitors and show search engines that your page’s content showcases Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-E-A-T).
Then, distribute your content through the following to reach more online users:
- Guest posting: Guest posting not only lets you reach new audiences, but it also boosts your authority on the topic and helps you earn backlinks from reputable sites where you’ve contributed.
- Social media marketing: Social media doesn’t directly influence your ranking on SERPs. However, it improves your site’s discoverability, brand’s credibility, and increases the chances of earning backlinks.
- Influencer marketing: Influencer marketing can drive more traffic to your site and let other people discover your business.
- Digital PR: Digital PR is a strategy of growing your online presence through building relationships with journalists and establishing your trustworthiness. It’s an excellent way of earning backlinks and becoming a resource person for journalists.
Pro tip: Repurpose your content to boost the reach of your messages and your chances of earning a backlink.
For example, let’s say you own a travel agency business and you published a survey about the most popular destinations and tour activities in Europe among your clients. You can create a press release about the topic and share it with digital publications, which may link back to your site.
You can repackage your study into an infographic summarizing the results of the study. Influencers and bloggers in the travel niche can share your infographic with a link back to your site.
3. Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is the process of submitting your content to sites like StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Reddit, and others. These sites segment their content to appeal to certain niches, which you can use to appeal to customers in the specific demographics that you want to target.
Pro tip: Before you submit any content, though, make sure to research the audiences and rules of each site. You don’t want to spam these communities. Instead, you want to offer actual value with your content.
4. Get more reviews online
Earning more reviews online can improve your business’s trustworthiness. When your Google Business Profile features several positive reviews, more online users will trust your business and visit your website.
3 types of links for off-page SEO
Links are a critical component of off-page SEO. Before you start building or earning backlinks, it’s essential to understand the different types of links, as well as the factors that influence the equity of a link to your website.
The three types of links include:
Let’s discuss each type:
Natural Links
A natural link comes to your website naturally.
Your team doesn’t take any action or conduct any outreach to earn the link. The person writing that content decided to link to your content, whether because they follow your brand or discovered your content via search.
Either way, they found your content valuable and worth highlighting.
Built Links
A built link comes to your website from outreach.
Your team worked to earn this link, whether by reaching out to webmasters, publishers, or journalists. You may have even promoted the content with an ad campaign, providing it with the exposure that helped people uncover the content.
Even though you built this link, you still created valuable content for users.
Created Links
A created link comes to your website from self-submissions in directories, forums, or press releases.
Your team created this link intentionally and without conducting any outreach. This off-page SEO tactic for link building tends to register as a black-hat SEO practice because search engines look down on this kind of link building tactic.
When building links, focus on natural or built links.
6 factors that influence link value for off-page SEO
You also want to think about the equity or value and authority passed by a link.
While you could attract dozens of low-value links from spammy or untrustworthy websites, they won’t help your business rank well in search results. That’s why it’s essential to focus your off-page SEO link building efforts on trusted websites with excellent link equity.
The six factors that influence the equity passed by a link include:
- The anchor text used to link to your site
- The freshness or age of the link to your site
- The number of links on the linking page
- The relation between the linking site’s subject matter and yours
- The trustworthiness of the linking site
- The authority of the linking site and the linking page
If you use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, you can assess the potential link value of a site.
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Contact us today or call us at 888-601-5359 to build your business with our off-page SEO services!
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