When planning your SEO strategy, there are two approaches to consider. These are on-page SEO and off-page SEO practices. The former encompasses the actions you can take on your website to increase your search engine rankings. The latter includes the steps you take outside of your site to boost search engine rankings and will be the focus of this article. Read on to find out why it should be an essential part of your marketing strategy.
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to the actions taken beyond your website to improve your search engine rankings.
When it comes to off-page SEO, the dominant aspect is building backlinks. Usually, websites with high-quality backlinks have higher search engine rankings. This is because search engines use backlinks as an indicator of content quality.
Backlinks can be gained naturally when people link to your site in their content, without you taking any action to acquire this. Perhaps they found your content helpful or liked the products and services you offer.
You can also take specific actions to create or acquire backlinks. If backlinks are self-created, this means you have generated them yourself through intentional action. This might include adding your links in forums, online directories or blog comments, for example.
If backlinks are manually built, this also means you have taken specific action to generate them. However, the actions themselves differ from self-generated links and might include things like requesting influencers to share your content or getting customers to link to your site.
The most crucial factor with backlinks is the quality of the links, as this will determine the impact on search engine rankings. Quality links are said to pass equity from one site to another. In other words, high-quality links increase your site’s authority. Certain factors are important in determining a link’s value. These include topical relevance, the linking page’s authority and the linking site’s HTTP status, amongst other factors.
Beyond backlinks, there are some other elements of off-site SEO. This includes unlinked brand mentions, guest blogging, social media marketing, Google My Business, NAP citations and influencer marketing. The fundamental aim of off-site SEO is to acquire quality references to your site to improve your position in search engines for targeted keywords.
Why off-page SEO is important
Off-site SEO is a significant factor in ranking for competitive keywords, and this is what makes it such an essential element of a digital marketing strategy. Building your website’s authority is vital if you want to appear at the top of the search engine results for targeted keywords. Off-site SEO practices are central to the process of building site authority.
Put simply, Off-page SEO helps search engines like Google determine what other individuals and organisations think about your website, products and services. Optimising your website for off-page SEO should be central in your digital marketing strategy because it will help to boost your credibility, relevance, popularity and authority from the perspective of both individuals and the all-important search engines.
Most people search for products and services online these days. While you may have great products and services to offer, you will struggle to reach people if you are not ranking well on search engines for the terms they are looking for. An effective off-page SEO strategy will not only help you build a strong reputation but also ensure the right people find you. This will significantly increase relevant traffic to your site, which is likely to convert to sales.
So, as you can see, off-site SEO is vital to building your business and increasing your revenues through specific practices that boost your authority, reputation and search engine rankings.
