off-page seo

21 Steps to Thorough Off-page SEO

What is off-page SEO? Off-page SEO refers to all SEO activities done outside your site to increase your ranking on search engines. Reason it is also referred to as off-site SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) as a whole is an approach used to increase a website’s traffic by improving its ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Generally, there are 2 SEO buckets every internet marketer must fill, namely:

  • On-page SEO
  • Off-page SEO

Difference Between On-page and Off-page SEO

The difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO is that on-page SEO seeks to optimize your site and its contents while off-page SEO seeks to use tactics to increase your website’s authority. In other words, on-page SEO tells search bots what your website is all about while off-page SEO tells search bots whether or not your website matters.

21 Steps to Thorough Off-page SEO

In this article, we’re going to explore 21 off-page SEO techniques that work for every kind of website. Stay on the page as we explore this bundle of off-page SEO tips that can help you rank higher in the shortest possible time.

1. Build Quality Backlinks

Backlinks is king in off-page SEO. Backlinks is a way other content marketers vouch for the quality of your contents. The most natural way to earn backlinks is to keep publishing badass contents that make an impact. Over time, people will come to trust your brand and begin to point back to your site giving you those quality backlinks that you desire.

Also, you can reach out to your industry networks to share your contents. Additionally, you can also build backlinks for yourself when you share your contents on forums with reference sources pointing back to your web pages.

2. Utilize the Power of Social Media

Social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ are a great for off-page SEO.

These social networks have one thing in common. They engage users greatly, prompting internet marketers to leverage on such engagements to promote their brands. Promoting your brand on these social networks creates a buzz around your site. Social media generally help your brand’s visibility and increases your click through rate.

3. Leverage on Networks of Webmasters/Influencers

The idea is to network with your industry big players. Befriend them, impress them until they trust you enough to share your contents on their blogs.  You might also have to reference them in your contents.

Becoming a part of such influencer community could also earn you a lot of backlinks in the long run. As members of your influencer networks reference your contents to their large audience, your backlink profile will naturally experience a bump.

4. Consider Document Sharing

Sharing your contents on document sharing platforms like Scribd, SlideShare, and Academia etc. helps you to rank for keywords that you otherwise wouldn’t rank for due to strong competition.

You should optimize the document you intend to share like a typical content for your site. Also place call-to-action and backlinks pointing readers to your site. Although search engine crawlers can’t crawl such PDFs, PowerPoints documents but they do make them readable for search engine users.

5. Brand Mentions Matter

Brand mentions are a lot like backlinks but there’s a difference. When other sites make mention of your brand on their contents, that’s brand mention. Brand mention can be either linked or unlinked. Linked brand mentions add to your backlink profile.

Unlinked brand mentions also matters to Google. Often, people cite a brand or content without actually linking to the page. Google’s opinion about this is that this type of mentions should also count in ranking.

An active social media community is one way to bump your overall brand mention profile. The idea is simply to get your brand name on their lips. One of the easy way to do this is to go viral.

6. Optimize Your Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) is a great way to rank for searches with local intent.

This off-page SEO technique requires that you claim and optimize your business on Google My Business. Below is a sample of GMB results known as “snack pack” on search engine result pages (SERPs).

off-page SEO
Google Snack Pack Result

7. Earn Positive Reviews

In Moz’s finding, review signals are the third most important factor for ranking on GMB snack pack results. Positive reviews are also an important ranking factor for organic searches with local intents.

So having a bountiful number of 4 to 5-star reviews on GMB and other third party sites is a great way to boost your search engine ranking.

8. Use Email Marketing to Reach Out

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy where you send marketing emails to both your potential and existing customers with the intent of converting them all to repeat customers.

This is a great off-page SEO technique as most people tend to check their emails at least once a day. You can include link backs to your site using anchor texts and read more tags.

9. Become a Wikipedia Writer

Wikipedia has become a trusted reference resource of information on the internet. The fact that it provides link backs to its sources of data makes it an even better off-page SEO technique to embrace.

When you contribute on Wikipedia, you can include links to your web pages that are relevant to the topic you are writing on. This is a great way to get backlinks for your website.

10. Spy on Your Competitors’ Strategy

By spying on your competitor’s SEO strategy, you gain valuable insights that help your off-page SEO efforts.

There are quite a number of SEO tools such as SEMRush and Ahref that can help you research your competitor keywords, backlinks with the goal to develop a solid SEO strategy to compete against them.

11. Create Your Own Video Channel

Having your own video channel such as YouTube or Vimeo helps your potential audience link back to your site.  People love to watch videos on how to do things and how stuff works. Embedding your channel videos to your articles help to drive home your point and increase users’ engagements with your contents.

12. Publish Reports and Surveys

Publishing reports from online surveys as part of your off-page SEO strategy is also a great idea. People are always searching the internet for those kinds of information.

You can publish such results from opinion polls in tabular data or as infographics on your blog. Then proceed to share across your networks and social media channels. This type of off-page SEO is good for increasing your brand’s visibility and authority.

13. Submit Images on Image Sharing Platforms

Sharing your well optimized images on image sharing platforms like flickr, photobucket, istock. etc. is a great way to improve your SEO. It is important to optimize such images with titles and backlinks to your website.

14. Interview Big Wigs in Your Niche

Interviewing popular people in your industry and publishing the interview on your blog and video channels is a great off-page SEO technique. You can also share the interview with them to publish on their own blogs. This helps to increase your brand’s visibility to your interviewee’s existing audience.

15. Get Interviewed Yourself

Getting interviewed by an industry journalist is one sure way to be heard. You can choose a relevant topic for your industry to get interviewed on. Such an interview when published has great potential to deliver quality backlinks to your site.

16. Do Guest Blogging

In guest blogging, you write for high domain authority blogs in your niche. The advantage of this off-page SEO technique is that it exposes your bio to a wider audience who might click through to your site.

17. Paid Advertising

While all the other off-page SEO tips mentioned so far are free, advertising involves money. Paid advertising can help to increase your brand visibility and attract more traffic to your site. Depending on your industry, you may consider Facebook Promotion, Google Ads etc.

18. Write an Ebook

Writing an e-book is a great idea for attracting more traffic to your site. You can write on a topic relevant to your niche with relevant backlinks to your blog. The goal should be to let many people read it (even if for free) and then click back to your blog.

19. Host a Webinar for Your Target Audience

Hosting a webinar on your blog topics is a free way to create a target audience pool. By the end of your webinar, you must have also generated great content to share on your blogs. An advantage of hosting such industry webinars is that it provides you with great feedback in form of FAQs.

You will also have audience emails which can come in handy for email marketing, if they opt in or subscribe to your blog.

20. Article Submission Sites

Submitting your articles on article submission sites is a great way to earn backlinks for your website. Such third party sites like Sites.google.com, Github.com reveals your contents to a wider audience generating natural traffic for your site. It is important to submit only to sites that operate within your niche.

21. Write Product Reviews

If such applies to your niche, writing product reviews on review sites is a great off-page SEO technique. You can write these reviews on your site or on third party review sites. Where necessary, you can include links to posts about the product you have covered on your blog.

People are always searching for product reviews and writing some will help them land safe and sound to your site.

Conclusion

Off-page SEO is a real bear compared to on-page SEO. The reason for that is off-page SEO falls under your external business environment. Such environments are often not under your direct control.

However, that should not deter you. The whole point of off-page SEO is to prove that your brand is indeed valuable. So, if you can make a dent, you’re probably valuable.

Having seen the difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO and also off-page SEO techniques to help you rank, we hope you found this piece very helpful.

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