How Important Is Off-Page SEO?

President & CEO at B&FPS
Daniel is a Search Marketing Consultant with 20+ years of expertise in Search Engine Optimization and Brand Development. He has a Master’s (MS) in Interactive Technology from the University of Alabama, a Bachelor’s (BPA) in Public Administration from Barry University, General Business from the University of Michigan-Flint School of Management; specializations from the University of Michigan, professional development from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and is a proud Belen Wolverine!
Daniel P. Borbolla
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Before diving in and performing off-page SEO on your website, let’s define what it is first. Off-page SEO involves performing actions that take place away from your website, which increase brand awareness, build trust, build authority, and drive traffic.

Two good off-page SEO examples involve using link building strategies to acquire backlinks and leveraging your social media and business directory profiles to drive engagement.

Building and acquiring backlinks is one of the most important ranking factors for Google, so we’ll briefly examine why off-page SEO is necessary, then go over a few techniques you can use to build up and fortify your website’s backlink profile.

On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO

On-page SEO is where you optimize your website’s metadata, keywords, internal links, image alt text, and content to inform search engines that your site is relevant and useful for its users. In short, on-page SEO tells search crawlers what your site’s all about, while off-page SEO shows crawlers why your site is valuable and important.

While it may be true that off-page SEO is harder to manage compared to on-page, it’s still worth the effort to combine the two into an overall SEO strategy that effectively builds your online presence and improves your rankings over time.

Do You Need Off-Page SEO?

In short, yes. You need to perform off-page SEO actions to fully maximize your online visibility and prove to search engine crawlers that your website is trustworthy, authoritative, and reliable.

Google’s algorithm takes into account all types of off-page SEO reputation signals like:

  • Backlinks
  • Mentions on Social Media
  • Online Reviews
  • Recommendations from Experts & Authority News Sites
  • Relationships with Similar Websites in Your Industry/Niche

Increase Off-Page SEO with Backlinks

So, just how important are backlinks to your off-page SEO strategy? Well, consider for a moment that a website with a handful of high-quality links will usually outrank another site with several low-quality links.

Here are some effective backlink building techniques you can begin using on your website:

1.) Provide Quality Information. One of the best ways to obtain backlinks naturally is by publishing well-written, well-researched, and verifiable content. Make sure to include statistical data that can easily be cited and shared, and insert multimedia elements where necessary to keep readers engaged.

2.) Use Broken Content Building. Broken link building is an effective tactic that involves locating resources that are no longer live or contain broken links, then recreating that content, and asking site owners to replace those broken links with your newly-created resource.

3.) Use Longer-Form Content. Did you know that long-form content is favored in the search engines? Simply open up an incognito window and perform a Google search for your target keyword, then write down the word length for each of the first few blog results and create a quality piece of content with a higher word count.

4.) Use Guest Posting to Your Advantage. Writing content for your blog is a good start, but you’ll also want to create guest post content that gets published on popular, high-ranking websites and blogs. Not only will you get a backlink in return, but you’ll also get exposed to a whole new audience.

5.) Send Out a Press Release. While press releases don’t help your ranking in Google as they’re only syndicated for a limited amount of time, they do help you indirectly by getting picked up by other publications, which leads to more backlinks. Press releases also help refine your messaging and provides content for other marketing channels.

6.) Get in on a Roundup. A roundup post compiles the best of the best within a specific industry or niche. They usually provide information on the featured experts, or asks them to share their own insights on a specific topic.

These types of posts usually get a high amount of views and shares because they contain valuable information, and because they get shared on the other experts’ networks.

7.) Land an Interview. Getting interviewed on a podcast or in an article is similar to guest posting as you’ll be able to reach an entirely new audience, but without doing all the heavy lifting yourself. The interviewer will be responsible for preparing all the questions and conducting the actual interview, then editing, publishing and sharing it on their platform.

Also, if you’re featured on a podcast, chances are they’ll write an accompanying blog article and you’ll receive a backlink.

8.) Land Quality Partnerships. A partnership or endorsement from a larger brand will give you plenty of attention. Seek out relevant companies and ask what you can do to assist them (offer value upfront!).

9.) Create Shareable Content. While writing long-form blog posts is recommended, try creating other digital assets like charts, graphs, infographics, and other image-heavy visual content that can easily be shared by others. Keep in mind that people love sharing visual content and you increase your online reach by showing up in visual search engines like Google Lens, TinEye and Bing Visual Search.

Conclusion

Both on-page and off-page SEO are vital pieces to your overall digital marketing strategy. Ignoring one or the other will often result in poor search rankings and untargeted site visits, which leads to a whole host of other problems like lower session times and higher bounce rates.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and not sure where to begin, start by focusing on your site’s backlink profile. As mentioned previously, Google and the other major search engines view this as a key ranking factor.

Finally, consider bolstering your off-page SEO efforts by creating high-quality written content and other digital assets that others can share on their networks.

We hope you learned something today about off-page SEO. Visit our blog for more articles and subscribe to learn more about search engine marketing!