For SEO strategies, there are two approaches you can consider. First, there’s onsite or on-page SEO, where you’re focusing on making your website as SEO-friendly as possible. The second approach is off-page SEO, also referred to as offsite SEO. Off-page SEO includes all the activities you do off your website to help boost your search engine rankings. So why is off-page SEO just as important as on-page SEO? Let’s find out.
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO is actions you take beyond your website to help improve search engine rankings. Why does off-page SEO matter? While search algorithms and ranking factors are constantly changing, the consensus within the SEO community is that the relevance, trustworthiness, and authority that effective off-page SEO allows a website still plays a significant role in a page’s ability to rank. Off-page SEO plays a crucial role in ranking competitive keywords, making it an essential element in digital marketing. Building your brand authority helps you appear at the top of all search engines with outstanding results using targeted keywords. Off-site SEO practices help build your site’s authority-making visitors notice your brand.
So, using off-page SEO helps the search engine determine what others think about your site, service, and products. That is why it is essential to optimize your site using off-page SEO and needs to be part of your small business digital marketing strategy. It helps boost credibility, popularity, relevance, and authority for both individuals and search engines.
Building backlinks to your site
While other factors contribute to off-page SEO, link building is by far the most critical to this off-site effort. It is building backlinks to high-quality sites with a high search engine result on pages.
Link building can be time-consuming but can reap great rewards. How do you get backlinks to your website? You can gain backlinks naturally when visitors link to the site in their site’s content without you needing to take action. An audience typically does this when they like your service or product or reference a page of your website in their content. By far, generating quality content that attracts backlinks naturally is the most solid approach to link building. You can also create quality content for third-party sites as a guest blogger or by contributing other content that is placed on other sites and linked back to your website. Seek out industry sites that would be open to accepting a quality guest post or another content piece from you. Not only does it help establish you as a subject matter expert, but you can also get a nice link back to your website. You can also obtain links through featured articles. Get a feature article about you or your company posted on a third-party site. If you do any guest speaking, a speaker bio is an easy way to get a link back to your site. Another method is acquiring backlinks by generating them and including them in forum links, blog comments, or online directories but be sure to be very prudent when doing this. Remember, links only help your site if they’re from quality, relevant websites! Other ways to obtain quality backlinks to your site can be found in a helpful article by SEMrush, including:
- Broken links
- Unlinked brand mentions
- Business association links
- Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
- Testimonials and reviews
Only quality backlinks help your off-page SEO
As stated above, backlinks are only useful to your off-page SEO efforts if they’re from quality, relevant websites. Therefore, the goal of your link building efforts is to acquire quality references to your website to improve your position on the search engines using targeted keywords.
Of course, links will also potentially bring people to your website should people click through from other websites. However, once they land on your website, you need professional, useful, and engaging content. Aspects such as creating a high-quality logo, which you can make here, and having professional images shouldn’t be overlooked as they play into the overall on-page experience for the web visitor.
Off-page SEO is an important aspect of your overall marketing strategy. Leveraging link building goes a long way to boosting your offsite SEO. Investing the time in link building is worth the effort and will benefit your overall online presence long-term.
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