The goal of off-page SEO is to get search engines and users to see your site as more trustworthy and authoritative. It’s an essential part of a successful SEO strategy and one of the most difficult parts of digital marketing.
While your website is vital to your SEO strategy, there are additional actions to take outside of your website that will help you rank. For example, if you’ve got a lot of valuable links pointing to your pages, search engines will assume that you’ve got great content that provides value for users. Off-page SEO simply tells Google what others think about your site.
However, off-page SEO is not just about building backlinks though. It goes deeper than that. Learn exactly how to build the type of off-site SEO signals that Google wants to see or book a 1-to-1 consultation.
What is Off-Page SEO?
The narrow definition of off-page SEO is link-building. An expansive definition embraces all the actions taken outside a website to improve its search engine rankings, including press exposure and links, brand awareness campaigns, being active on social media and newsletters.
Search engines weigh many factors when determining a page’s ranking. While some of the factors are based on website content and performance, Google also gathers its understanding of your website through sources outside of your domain. That’s why off-page SEO is so valuable.
Link building, for instance – an effective off-page SEO strategy – is one of the top ranking factors. That’s because Google is built on PageRank, an algorithm that looks at a page’s backlinks for quantity and quality. However, many activities that don’t result in a standard link on other sites are important for off-page optimization.
An off-page SEO strategy supports your website efforts (i.e., on-page SEO) and works to add credibility, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority to your domain.
Why is Off-Page SEO Important?
The most accurate description of what makes off-page SEO important is that it provides forward momentum to a site by helping it rank higher for more keyword phrases.
Think about off-page SEO as building your site’s reputation.
And off-page SEO factors like backlinks, reviews, and recommendations help search engines see your site as reputable. Which can lead to better visibility in search results.
A website lacking citations from other sites resembles a site that’s not worth crawling and indexing. Because off-page ranking factors, like links, measure how important a site is, failure to attain any links may very well contribute to stagnant search traffic.
One of the best ways to build your credibility in the eyes of search engines is to focus on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)—a concept Google’s Quality Raters use when evaluating search results and providing feedback to improve future algorithm updates.
Which all means: Off-page SEO plays a major role in your site’s ability to rank.
On-Page SEO vs Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO is about optimizations done on a website that make it easier for search engines to crawl and understand. That includes internal linking, using proper canonicalization, editing for content clarity, creating descriptive title tags, and writing unique meta-descriptions.
On-page SEO ranking factors are about what a page is relevant for and are considered stronger signals than off-page SEO factors. That’s why content is understood to be the strongest ranking signal.
Yet without off-page, a web page will struggle to rank, especially in highly competitive niches such as forex SEO, cryptocurrency SEO, and the broader fintech SEO. Learn more about SEO for financial services.
Off-page SEO helps search engines discover webpages to crawl and understand what the pages are about. It’s best to think of off-page SEO as promotional activities related to attracting links. But it can also include promotional activities to let consumers know the company exists and what it does.
Off-Page SEO Checklist
Off-page SEO techniques can provide you with an edge over your competition. Your site gets to be more authoritative by acquiring more backlinks and mentions around the web. All of which can result in more organic traffic.
Follow these five different off-page tactics to boost your site’s authority and organic (unpaid) search traffic:
Link Building
Links from other sites on the web server as votes of confidence in your domain.The more votes you get, the more likely you’ll rank on search engines. Conversely, the fewer votes you have, the harder it will be to convince Google that you’re a trustworthy, authoritative site.You need other pages to vouch for you — that’s what backlinks do. Building an external link is an off-page strategy that should be number one on your list.
However, site owners are often tempted to skip initial preparations for link building. But it’s important that you give this top priority because preparing a site will ensure that you’re mindful of the links you sent to them.
So how do you ensure that your website is ready for link building?
- Conduct a backlink audit to understand how strong your backlink profile is, strengths and weaknesses;
- Identify and analyze competitors’ link profiles to discover high quality websites that link to them but not you;
- Optimized internal pages laying out the pages so that each link will pass SEO juice to other interconnected pages;
- Do on-page SEO first, linking to your internal pages using the keyword that best defines that page;
- Pick primary keywords and related keywords for off-page SEO if you want to improve the odds of driving organic traffic to your site.
Once your website is ready for link-building, you have a couple of options:
1. Broken Link Building
Broken link building is one of the most popular link building tactics in off-page SEO. Basically you find dead links on other websites and convince web admins to replace them with working links to your website. A link is “broken,” “dead,” or “invalid” when it points to a page that’s inaccessible.
Broken link building can have a higher success rate than other link building tactics. Because you’re helping web admins solve an issue on their site. And providing a reason to link to you.
Plus, the strategy can help you:
- Earn backlinks on pages with established traffic and authority
- Inherit links that previously pointed to competitors
- Generate link bait ideas (i.e., link-worthy content ideas)
Broken link building is a four-step process:
- Find broken pages with backlinks. Use SEO tools to look for your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks, broken pages about a topic, broken links on competing websites.
- Vet the link prospects. First check link quality to see whether the dead page has desirable backlinks, and then check link reasons to understand why your broken page got links helps you add points that allow you to create compelling outreach angles.
- Create a replacement page. Craft a piece that fulfills the same purpose and talks about similar things, bake in linkable points, and find other ways to improve it.
- Do outreach. Pitch your replacement resource to those linking to the dead page, sending the same email to everyone with no personalization, or sending unique, personalized emails to everyone.
2. Unlinked Brand Mentions
Unlinked brand mentions are online references to your brand name that don’t include a link ((e.g., “SEO Magnates” rather than “SEO Magnates”). In many cases, publishers will be willing to add a link if you ask nicely enough.
Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions is a great way to take advantage of low-hanging fruit. The people who mentioned you know who you are, and adding a link only takes a few seconds for them (assuming they’re willing to do it). Plus, you can automate most parts of the process, which means you can get really strong backlinks on autopilot.
Here is how to find unlinked brand mentions and turn them into backlinks:
- Find unlinked brand mentions. identify the keywords and phrases that other people might use to refer to your product or brand.
- Filter your prospect list. Focus only on the highest-value mentions with Domain rating over 30, decent domain traffic and page words over 500.
- Clean your prospect list. It’s important to do the manual work here, so you can personalise and segment your outreach.
- Find the right people to contact. Find email addresses of decision-makers for outreach, craft personalised email copy and follow up.
- Be flexible in negotiations. Offer something in return, respond quickly and be flexible.
Make sure you’re monitoring new mentions, not just reviewing existing ones.
3. Journalist Requests
Share your expert advice through interviews, podcasts, and media requests platforms so writers and journalists add a link to your website when they cite you.
Journalists often need expert commentary or other brand assets (e.g., images) for their articles. If you can fulfill those needs, they may be willing to link to your site in return.
First you need to find the right keywords. A journalist’s keyword includes any and all search terms that news writers use on search engines to find the information they need. It differs from other keywords in terms of intent — that is, journalists’ keywords focus mainly on finding studies, research, and expert opinions on a subject.
High-quality keywords can come from a wide variety of sources, including Google itself. You just need to know where to look for them and then dig deep.
- Hop on social media. Journalists are always on the lookout for new information, and sometimes social media beats them to the punch. X, for one, is a major internet highway for the latest updates anywhere. Instagram and YouTube are excellent alternative sources as well, especially for trending topics.
- Check Google SERPs. Like you, journalists rely on search engines to bring them information. Ordinary people likewise pose their questions to Google for answers. That makes suggested keywords and ‘People also ask’ snippets goldmines for potential journalist keywords that you might not have considered.
- Look at new studies. Research data and statistics are backlink magnets, so looking at news publications that cite them (especially industry statistics) gives you clues on what information to focus on providing. While not everyone can fund a research study, you can make data roundups to gain backlinks.
- Check news outlets. Similar to the other points above, you can conveniently find hot-button issues on news sites themselves. Again, it has to do with patterns of what they want and need from sources. You might even find articles to which you can contribute insider information; you never really know.
- Sign up on platforms like Connectively or HARO. These are online platforms where journalists and sources can reach out to one another. Simply signing up to receive the daily email digests is enough to get the ball rolling on your journalist keyword research strategy — and you get it straight from the source.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an important off-page SEO technique. Publishing great content is an effective way to earn backlinks, gain media attention, and show E-E-A-T. And finding ways to distribute that content to other channels can help boost off-page signals.
Let’s look at some of the best ways to distribute content you’ve created:
1. Guest posting
In off-page SEO, guest posting means writing a useful piece of content for a reputable site in your niche in order to get a backlink to your site.
Guest posts are not inherently bad for SEO. Google does not discourage [guest posts] in the cases when they inform users, educate another site’s audience, or bring awareness to your cause or company.
But guest articles can be bad for SEO.
Because Google may issue a “Google penalty” (or “manual action”) against a site that engages in manipulative linking practices. This can lead to the site ranking lower in search results. Or being omitted from search results altogether.
Manipulative linking practices include (but are not limited to) the following:
- “Excessive” guest posting: The same (or very similar) guest posts published on multiple sites, low-quality content, or lots of unnatural links to the brand’s site.
- Failure to nofollow guest post links: Google says the link should be set to nofollow. You nofollow a link by adding the rel=“nofollow” attribute to the link’s code.
- Failure to disclose guest posts: When you pay for a guest post placement, the host site must be transparent with readers. All sponsored posts should be clearly labeled.
Guest posting for off-site SEO in 2024 is about building your brand profile—not links. And it requires a focus on quality. Not quantity.
The best guest post websites check three boxes:
- They are authoritative. Only guest blog on authoritative sites—i.e., sites that have earned a reputation for high-quality content. Do not publish on spammy sites. This can harm your off-site SEO.
- Their niche overlaps with yours. Guest blog posts deliver value when they demonstrate your experience or expertise. And interest the host site’s readers. That only works if their niche overlaps with yours, or is directly related to yours in some way.
- They have published guest posts before. If a site has published guest posts before, it shows they’re open to receiving contributions. Some sites have a “no guest posting” policy.
It’s important to use white hat strategies to gain backlinks, as methods like flooding forums and comment sections with links to your webpage can get you penalized by Google. For creative ways to gain backlinks, check out this backlinks strategy guide.
You can also jump to this section where we cover what to look for in a backlink opportunity.
2. Digital PR
Digital PR involves using PR techniques to gain backlinks and is now the link-building tactic of choice for many SEOs. It’s a great way to earn authoritative links at scale.
A great PR campaign can also:
- Increase brand awareness and branded searches
- Put your business in front of your target audience
- Drive referral traffic
- Show E-E-A-T
While there are many more, the most popular and effective campaigns in digital PR tend to be the following four:
- Trading up the chain. It comes from an understanding of how modern media works and how stories get picked up. Essentially, you start out by seeding your content or story into low tier publications, forums, or low barriers to entry blogs.
- Original research. Creating original research is one of the strongest ways brands can generate backlinks at scale, as long as the research is interesting and the outreach is executed well.
- Newsjacking. Instead of generating a story from scratch and hoping it will catch on, you take a trending topic and try to hijack it and inject your own brand or narrative into the already trending topic.
- Use Newsrooms to amplify your SEO signal. These are digital spaces with your brand name in the URL where you can share anything & everything a journalist might need.
- Surround Sound SEO: Define your product-exploration keywords, determine your current performance for those product-exploration keywords, understand your brand’s current visibility on the SERPs, identify ways to improve it, and start outreach for long-term partnerships.
3. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves working with popular bloggers and social media creators to promote your products or services.
It’s a phenomenal way to build your brand, amplify your content, and reach new audiences. Influencers have large audiences. And can help ensure you’re present on relevant platforms.
But how do you go about building a solid off-page SEO strategy with influencers that drives a strong ROI?
- Set your campaign goals. To get the most out of it, set common goals such as rich, traffic, sales and conversions.
- Define your campaign’s target audience. Keeping goals in mind, identify who it is that you want to target, understanding specific demographics.
- Define your campaign messaging and brief. Focus your efforts on putting together a campaign brief that clearly communicates both your goals and what it is that you want an influencer to collaborate with you on.
- Set a budget. When setting an overall budget, you need to keep in mind the split between compensating influencers and covering the cost of products or services.
- Find the right influencers and reach out. You can start by analyzing hashtags and determining who your competitors are working with, but the most effective way to find the right people to work with is by using a dedicated tool.
- Track your campaign’s performance. You can do this by assigning a hashtag for each influencer to use alongside their posts on social platforms.
4. Social Media
Social media doesn’t directly impact Google rankings. But it’s great for getting more attention.
The more people share your content on social media platforms, the more traffic and links to that specific piece of content you’ll probably get.
And even if you don’t get a link or immediate traffic, you’ll get more attention. And more attention leads to more branded searches and mentions.
That’s a win-win for your off-page SEO. Using social media to build links is ideal for:
- Making connections
- Promoting your content
- Reaching a larger audience
- Building more do-follow links on the way
Local SEO
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence to increase traffic, visibility, and brand awareness in your business’s local area.
Local SEO works by helping Google understand where your business is located and what it offers. It can also help Google perceive your business as more popular and trustworthy.
All these factors can help you rank higher when people search relevant queries.
When ranking businesses in Google Maps and the local pack, Google considers three main criteria:
- Relevance: How well the business matches what the user is looking for
- Distance: How far the likely search location is from the business location
- Prominence: How well-known and well-reviewed the business is
To increase your local rankings and boost traffic. The following steps will help you get started:
- Do local keyword research. To get started, you need a short list of keywords people can use to find your local business. You can research your competitors, use google autocomplete, and leverage google keyword planner;
- Optimize your google business profile. To get started, you’ll need to add and/or verify your Business Profile. And fill it out as much as possible, providing contact details, opening hours, photos and videos, or business attributes.
- Keep your business profile active. Update the business and consider posting. It’s also a good idea to ask customers for Google reviews. If you have more reviews and a higher star rating than your competitors, you stand a better chance of outranking them.
- Get and monitor local citations. The more Google sees consistent NAP citations for your business, the more confident it is that your business is legitimate and trustworthy.
- Encourage and respond to online reviews. Reviews provide social proof, validate your expertise, and give potential buyers confidence in your business. Generally, you should try to get reviews on Google because they’re visible in search results and an important local ranking factor.
Your site’s local keyword rankings will regularly change. For any number of reasons. That’s why you need to monitor your progress as part of your local SEO strategy.
Off-Page SEO Is Site Promotion
It may be helpful to think of off-page SEO as something that encompasses more than just the limited scope of link building. For that, one has to think of strategies for exposing the company to thousands of decision-makers.
Link builders leave behind many valuable, useful opportunities for building sales and indirectly creating popularity signals that search engines might pick up on. Off-page SEO is useful for promoting a website to increase rankings, traffic, and earnings.