Did you know you could employ SEO tactics outside the boundaries of your web page? Well, you can. In fact, this form of SEO plays a critical role in determining how well you perform on SERP rankings.
Off-page SEO or off-site SEO includes all the marketing practices that work outside the limits of your site to optimize your content. They aim to increase the visibility of your content, act as an SEO strategy, improve your SERP rankings, direct more organic traffic to your site, and attract more viewers.
How does Off-Page SEO work?
Off-page optimization techniques are performed outside of your site and are mainly involved with links, shares on social media, and web or brand mentions across the internet. So, all events where there is an opportunity to mention your website name and contents come under the umbrella of off-page SEO.
What do link building and brand mentions ultimately achieve? When another reliable source is related to the field of work your business stands, talks about your company or content or product, and generates a link that guides its readers to your site, it increases credibility and views. What does this mean exactly?
Well, when another source presents the search engine spider with a link to your site or mentions your content or web page, that acts as an additional quality score. That score brings your SERP ranking up, increases link-building and rankings.
Off-page SEO becomes extremely crucial as it tells the search engine that your website is essential to others on the web. Backlinks, off-page links, and brand mentions act as endorsements from a trustworthy source, in turn making your content reliable.
In today’s world, almost everyone is aware of SEO and practices various on-page optimization techniques. So, the competition is pretty cut-throat already. Off-page is that edge or tie-breaker between similar sites that differentiate between increased organic traffic and better SERP rankings.
If we look at two similar cooking sites that publish recipes of popular dishes, they probably have the same format, follow the same SEO tactics. In cases like these, off-page SEO would give you the boost you need to rank better than your competition.
So, between the sites mentioned above, if one of them, let’s call it HomeBakers.com, works on link-building, what will be the outcome? A reputable chef may say they followed HomeBakers’ instructions on their blog, etc. HomeBaker.com will probably rank much better than the competitor site.
Search engines measure off-page SEO factors as the number and quality of backlinks to your site. The quality of backlinks would depend on the reputation of the external source.
Backlinking
The most widely-used off-page SEO technique is backlinking. Backlinking, as the name suggests, refers to the links generated by credible external sources that redirect users from their site to yours.
Think about it. Links are the primary way to surf the internet. Generally, search engine users will type a query and click on one of the top-ranked web pages and jump through several sites via the links provided by the first one.
Backlinking is the easiest and also a significant way any search engine measures content quality, trustworthiness, and user experience of any web page. This is probably why off-page optimization is included in Google’s and other engine’s algorithms.
How to Build Links?
How do you convince other businesses and reputable external sources related to your industry to link back to you? There are a few simple ways to backlinking-
- Guest Blogging — Log onto relatable sites and write good quality content to attract more organic traffic and get links and mentions.
- Join a Group — You know the saying ‘strength in numbers’; well, that holds the truth even for online businesses and websites. Joining an association of websites similar to yours is a creative way to get backlinks to your company site via the association’s website and other businesses involved.
- Quality Content — No SEO tactic or marketing strategy will work if your work does not reflect quality. Include infographics, visual aids, keywords, updated information, detailed reports, proper language, and tone.
- Media — Branch out to social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, and Linkedin to connect to your audience. Ask them to like and share your posts and links. Use the help of influencers to garner more attention. Try talking to a local journalist and bloggers as possible sources.
Backlinks need to be looked after and constantly checked to ensure they are performing at their full potential. You can use tools to analyze the competitor’s profile and your own to know where you need to work.