OFF-PAGE SEO – A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE

PART 1 OF 5

What is off-page SEO?

“Off-page SEO” is the search engine optimisation activity you do away from your website to help your business rank well in organic search results. It is an effective SEO technique used to tell Google that people trust and value your business or website.

Off-page SEO factors include link building, digital PR, brand reputation management, social signals, and reviews. Essentially, it is the “self-promotion” of your company, brand, or website. Most businesses engage in off-site SEO as part of their overall marketing activity, but just don’t know that it’s also an SEO tactic.

While on-page optimisation is often prioritised, don’t underestimate the power of off-page SEO. You might struggle to significantly improve your search rankings if you don’t use both these strategies.

PART 3 OF 5

Which technique is better?

Neither. On-page and off-page SEO should work together to increase your organic rankings. Doing one without the other will stop you from reaching your full potential in organic search.

There’s only so much content optimisation you can do until you find yourself asking, “why am I stuck ranking behind this competitor?” The likelihood is, they’ve also been promoting their content and building a great reputation.

Although off-page SEO is generally more effort, investing in it will reward your site in the long-term.

PART 4 OF 5

Why is off-page SEO important in 2023?

Google uses off-page SEO factors when deciding whether to rank a particular page or site. How authoritative and valuable a site is to real users is a strong ranking factor in the algorithm. This is measured by the number, quality, and relevance of inbound links pointing to a website.

Positive brand mentions and online PR are also important. Algorithms have evolved to understand the relationship between entities online, which means they can understand the sentiment of your company based on what other websites are saying about it.

For example, Google will understand “upUgo” and “great” as separate entities. But, if Google sees both these entities together often, it will start to understand the relationship between the them. The algorithm will learn to connect them together as “upUgo is great”. And because this is a positive sentiment, it will eventually help upUgo’s rankings.

This concept also works the other way round. So, if a company is often mentioned negatively online, it could harm their SEO.

Entities and SEO are making it even more important for businesses to manage their online reputation. In the future, this will become an even bigger focus for off-page SEO.

PART 5 OF 5

How to do off-page SEO

Off-site optimisation is generally about getting backlinks, brand mentions, reputation building, and social signals.

It should form part of an integrated marketing strategy, aligned with brand, PR, and social media activity.

The digital PR activity should include getting relevant backlinks as a goal. SEOs should then complement this with targeting link building. Likewise, the brand and PR teams should ensure online reputation management is at the forefront of their activity.

Backlinks

Learn about backlinks, how to build them and what you need to consider.