Off-page SEO is a strategy that involves actions taken outside of your website to improve your search engine rankings. This includes building backlinks, acquiring citations and social mentions, and fostering partnerships with authoritative websites. It enhances the perception of your site’s expertise, trustworthiness, and relevance, helping you achieve higher visibility in search engine results. On-page SEO, by contrast, involves optimizing elements directly within your website that you fully control.
The brand-building approach focuses on establishing your brand’s unique value proposition and building awareness among your target audience. Strong brands naturally attract more attention, mentions, and links, creating valuable off-page signals without direct outreach. Local SEO involves optimizing a business’s online presence to attract customers in specific geographic areas through improved visibility in location-based searches. This strategy focuses on enhancing your business’s prominence in local search results, Google Maps, and business directories. Local SEO combines on-page location signals with off-page citation building to establish geographical relevance and authority. Search engines recognize high-quality engagement as a credibility signal, strengthening your off-page SEO efforts.
There’s no better way to build your brand’s topical expertise than to be quoted in an article on a major news outlet. This may not feel like an “SEO tactic,” and that’s probably because it’s largely just marketing 101. But it’s also the most basic, ground-floor element of all off-site SEO strategies.
Common Off-Page SEO Techniques
- To perform the analysis, you’ll need the help of link-building tools like Ahrefs or Semrush.
- When you have high ratings and plenty of positive reviews, answer engines will likely mention your brand.
- It’s critical that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) appear consistently across all your citations.
- It is the place where you can get the best answers for any type of question.
Aim for specific, long-tail keywords until you’re ready to tackle the more general ones. Local citations are mentions of your business and its contact information around the web. Google uses them to verify your business details, so having various citations can boost your website’s domain authority. As the best-ranking piece, this would be your main competitor, so you’d want to examine its backlink profile. A perfect example is Bankrate’s mortgage calculator—it has a whopping 36,000 backlinks from 3,000 unique websites. Each website has a backlink profile made up of external links pointing to its pages.
How does off-page SEO work?
By contributing regularly to discussions, you will understand where your audience hangs out more and at what time. Find broken links, contact the owner, and tell them about their dead links. There are chances that they will do a return favour by including your link on their website or you can offer replacement link too. The one good point is broken pages don’t affect your site’s ranking. If your customer service is bad, then 85% of your business could be lost according to the Sacramento Design Network.
Steps to Conduct Keyword Research
You can use tools like aHrefs, Moz Link Explorer, Majestic, Backlink Checker, and others to examine the backlinks of your rivals. It helps your business appear in local search results and on Google Maps. Listening to feedback helps you improve your products or services, keeping current customers happy and attracting new ones.
If your content is outdated or missing key information that’s now relevant, it won’t perform as well in search results. By updating the page, you can ensure it follows on-page SEO best practices and provides helpful information to your audience. Having little to no internal linking on your pages negatively impacts the user’s ability to access content on your site that is valuable to them. And if they can’t access it, that directly affects your conversion rate. Internal linking often gets overlooked when it comes to on-page SEO. As your site grows, however, it’s critical to develop an internal linking process.
On an average, 38.4% of businesses spend between $1,000 to $5,000 on link building monthly. Next, you’re going to have to compare where you stand against your competitors. So, if you find excel or G-sheet more convenient, consolidate all your backlink profile data at one location.
If the sites use similar on-page SEO strategies, off-page SEO signals can help determine which site ranks higher in search results. Get a free trial of Semrush to access all the data and tools you need to execute this off-page SEO checklist and monitor your efforts. Below the charts, you’ll find the “Prospects for” section—make sure your domain is selected and click “Best” to generate a list of domains linking to competitors’ sites but not to yours. Then, focus on checking off the tasks one by one to increase brand awareness and authority.
The strategies in this guide should give you everything you need to start improving your site’s off-page SEO signals. For example, in our guide on LSI keywords, I asked our designer to create this graphic. A while back, Google search team analyst Gary Illyes stated that SEO Anomaly both links AND mentions can help determine a site’s E-E-A-T. If you want to get started with YouTube, I recommend reading my YouTube SEO guide to optimizing and ranking videos. And in this chapter, I’ll show you how to boost your site’s brand signals. With most broken link-building campaigns, you look for broken links that point to a specific page.