What’s off-page SEO? Why does it matter?

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Off-page SEO indicates those SEO strategies which are taken outside your website to achieve a high rank on SERPs. Thus, off-page SEO is often called off-site SEO. But, it would help if you combined it with on-page SEO and technical SEO to obtain the best result. 

It helps to build your site’s authority and credibility. Therefore, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) becomes a significant off-page SEO factor. It helps you understand what the audience thinks about your brand, products and services. You can implement this by increasing social media engagement, getting links from high-quality websites, positive reviews, and more.  

Now, you will learn about the necessity of off-site SEO and valuable techniques. 

Why focus on off-page SEO?

You might think that on-page and technical SEO are enough for a site. But it’s not like that. So, here we will describe some valuable reasons behind it –

• Better search engine ranking

Backlinking is a major off-page SEO factor through which you can gain endorsement from reputable sites. Search engines prioritize those endorsements and consider them as helpful SEO ranking factors. 

Backlink and BuzzSumo jointly analyzed 912 million blog posts a few years back, revealing that 94% of pages have zero backlinks and credibility issues. Side by side, they also found that the pages with rank 1 on Google have 3.8x more backlinks than the pages ranked between 2 and 10. So, from this study, it’s clear that pages with backlinks grab more attention from search engines and receive high ranks. 

• Boosting online reputation

Off-page SEO plays a crucial role in managing your online reputation by responding to and monitoring customer feedback, reviews, and referrals. Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines have created assessment criteria which evaluate your website based on its reputation and reliability outside of its pages. That means you need proper off-page SEO techniques to qualify for this assessment. 

By integrating off-page SEO you can maintain a positive reputation which leads you to win trust from the users and the search engines. As a result, your site earns a high rank and your brand visibility increases. 

• Improving site visibility

Nowadays, social media platforms have become great weapons for sharing your thoughts, ideas, and work. So,  you can attract a broad audience by promoting your content on social media. After creating blog posts and articles you can share them on social media platforms. You can feature other types of content on social media. You can pick influencer marketing to extend your site’s visibility and reach. These techniques come under off-page SEO. 

• Increasing user engagement

When you share content on social media, people engage and interact with your content. They react, comment, mention, and share with other people. As a result, your website gets more visits, and lengthy sessions, and your conversion rate improves. It strengthens your overall online presence and brand image. 

Some useful off-page SEO techniques 

• Backlinks 

Backlink is the strongest off-page SEO tactic for a website. We have already discussed that Google prefers sites with high ranks with backlinks. But remember that you need to build links with the websites of high domain authorities. Also, the link should be relevant to your domain. 

Backlinks are categorized into two types – natural links and self-promotion links. 

1. Natural links: These are the backlinks which you gain organically. That means when highly authoritative sites find your site as a credible resource, they link back to you. As a result Google also trusts your site. 
2. Self-promotion link acquisition: You can also create backlinks through digital marketing. For instance, you can ask a site (like national-level newspapers, magazines, government sites, etc.) for backlinking with yours or an influencer to share your pages with others.

But ensure that your backlink strategy must align with the guidelines of the search engines like Google. 

• Social media marketing

Social media marketing is one of the best off-page SEO techniques. The primary reason is that social media platforms have the highest domain authority  (DA) sites. It’s a metric developed by Moz to compare a site’s performance on SERPs with its competitors. You can say that DA measures the probability of ranking your site on SERPs concerning your competitors. 

For instance, LinkedIn has a DA of 98. That means it has better site performance than its competitors. Thus social media marketing brings outstanding opportunities for your site to stand out in terms of search results. By utilizing social media, you can increase your site’s click-through rates and get some valuable backlinks. Also, when you collect some backlinks from social media, your social profile stands out on the SERPs.  Therefore you need to check whether your social media profiles are well-aligned with your brand value. 

• Guest blogging 

Guest blogging extends your off-page brand authority and generates more backlinks for your site. This technique is all about collaborative writing with other bloggers or website owners. However, the blogs must be relevant to their audience. Thus it helps you to reach out to a wide range of audiences and showcase your expertise to them. Ultimately, this off-page strategy improves your SEO ranks.

Only you need to find the right opportunity for guest blogging. But how to find those opportunities? Learn our blog Tips to find guest posting opportunities. 

• Broken link building

It’s an outstanding approach for improving on-page SEO and backlink strategies. The broken link issue happens when a page’s URL has been changed or has a typo, web hosting expires, changes in site architecture, or anything else. 

This broken link may belong to your site which you need to fix later. Otherwise, it could be an outdated link from your competitor which you can replace with your existing link of the same content.  

By fixing these broken links, you can enhance website traffic, improve user experience, build relations with other site owners, and grab more opportunities to promote your site on SERPs. 

• Local SEO

It’s another off-site SEO strategy that elevates your site’s visibility in local search results. Thus, your business becomes more visible to the users of a specific geographic location. Here are some valuable tips to improve your local SEO strategies –

1. Use location-specific keywords to optimize your site for local search results.
2. Welcome and manage user reviews through Google or industry-specific sites.
3. Focus on your Google My Business listing.
4. Build a consistent and transparent citation ( business name, contact number, address, etc.). 

Learn more details from here. 

• Participation in forums

By participating in forums you can credit more power to your entire SEO. Yes! It’s an off-page SEO technique through which you can participate in community discussions, forums or threads, solve others’ issues, and build meaningful connections. 

But before participating in any community, you complete your profile with an anchor text with your signature. As a result, when you comment, the signature will be displayed along with the anchor.  

Conclusion

So, off-page SEO is an undividable part of your entire SEO effort. The off-page strategy improves your website’s reputation, authoritativeness, and credibility. The major off-site strategies are backlink building and social media marketing. Also, you have learned the other strategies too. All these techniques improve your ranks on SERPs.