Off-page SEO is one of the most difficult parts of digital marketing.
It can feel like there are more ways to get it wrong than to get it right.
Somewhere in between the “do this, not that” advice are useful approaches to promoting websites that don’t give you a reason to look over your shoulder.
Off-page SEO traditionally means acquiring links.
And because links remain an important ranking factor, off-page SEO is an important part of SEO.
Google’s John Mueller recognized the importance of links when he said:
“Links are very important for us to find content in the first place.
So it’s like if no one ever links to your website, we’ll have a hard time recognizing it even exists.”
But Mueller also said you shouldn’t create links:
You should generally not link to your site. I recommend that you refer to our Webmaster Guidelines for more information.
— 🥔 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🥔 (@JohnMu) November 10, 2021
Google’s documentation on how to do SEO mainly focuses on optimizing what’s on the web page (also known as on-page SEO).
Google’s SEO advice is rarely about off-page SEO, except in the context of guidelines on what not to do.
Realistically approached and with the clear eyes of a pragmatist, it’s possible to navigate an off-page SEO strategy that stays within the narrow boundaries defined by Google – and makes more money.
What Is Off-Page SEO?
The narrow definition of off-page SEO is: it’s link building.
A comprehensive definition includes off-site promotional activities, including press coverage and links (with or without nofollow), and brand awareness campaigns that may involve publishing on other sites and newsletters.
SEO is normally considered in direct relation to imputable search rankings.
When something is done with SEO in mind, there is an expectation of better rankings and more search traffic.
And that’s because in the early days of SEO, search analytics revealed which keywords were responsible for each search-derived site visitor.
So it was easy to assign search rankings directly to traffic.
And from search traffic, it was possible to directly attribute clicks from search results to conversions.
That made connecting the dots between SEO activities, rankings, and revenue easy.
But that is no longer possible, because browsers hide the keywords.
And that made it easier to start thinking about SEO in terms of traffic and revenue, even if it can only be indirectly attributed to SEO.
Anyone who has ever worked in niche B2B knows that there is more to cultivating online traffic than what is available through search engines.
Search traffic is relatively low for many B2B keyword phrases.
For B2B marketers, survival often depends on reaching potential customers who may not even know a solution exists – as is the case for specialized tools such as org chart software or performance management applications.
While promotional activities don’t directly affect search traffic, they do affect traffic in the short term. In the long run, as will be seen, it can ultimately affect search traffic.
No one can search for a product or company if they don’t know that either one exists.
Underscoring the importance of promotional activities, Google filed a patent describing how brand name searches can be used in the same way as links to associate a business with a search term and rank that business higher in search results.
From that perspective, it makes sense to include online promotional activities in an off-page SEO description.
On-Page SEO Versus Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO is about optimizations on a website that make it easier for search engines to crawl and understand.
That includes internal links, 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 to and are considered stronger signals than off-page SEO factors.
That is why content is seen as the strongest ranking signal.
But without off-page SEO, a web page will struggle to rank, especially in highly competitive markets.
Off-page SEO helps search engines crawl web pages to crawl and understand what the pages are about. Off-page SEO is best thought of as promotional activities related to linking. But it can also include promotional activities to let consumers know that the company exists and what it does.
The documentation available from Google for on-page SEO is extensive. That’s not the case for off-page SEO, presumably because providing that information can provide hints about how to manipulate rankings.
Why Off-Page SEO Is Important
Off-page SEO is important because a website without citations from other sites looks like a site that isn’t worth crawling and indexing.
Because off-page ranking factors, such as links, measure how important a site is, failing to reach links can very well contribute to stagnant search traffic.
It’s no different than having a car without gas.
The most accurate description of what makes off-page SEO important is that it boosts a site forward by making it rank higher for more keyword phrases.
Do Links Help Build Authority?
While SEO professionals like to think about abstract concepts such as website authority associated with links, Google doesn’t actually have any metrics that correspond to authority.
Google often says it strives to rank authoritative content. But that word is generally used in the context of the quality of the content itself – not as a standalone ranking factor that flows into the web page and imbues it with “authority.”
Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller debunked the idea that Google uses an authority metric.
“In general, Google doesn’t evaluate a site’s authority.
So it’s not something where we would give you an authority score and say it’s the overall authority score on your website. We would not apply that here.”
Do Links Build Domain Authority?
Another misconception about links is that they help build domain authority.
The concept of domain authority has its origins in the early days of SEO, when Google still showed PageRank values for web pages.
What was clearly seen was that sites with high PageRank scores tended to rank better than sites with lower PageRank scores.
The homepages of those sites have the highest PageRank scores.
So it was clear (at the time) that domains with high PageRank scores scored better.
Since domains with high PageRank scores were considered authoritative, it was easy to say they were authoritative domains.
Everyone could see the PageRank scores and how domains with a high PageRank were ranked higher than those with a lower PageRank.
That led to a belief in the concept of ‘domain authority’.
But Google has never actually used any form of domain authority metrics.
The concept of domain authority was just a loose idea based on what could be confirmed visually.
Ultimately, Google adjusted the ranking of web pages so that PageRank scores played less of a role in determining which pages ranked highest.
Relevance then began to play a bigger role in determining which pages were ranked.
It took more than PageRank to get a page to rank and once again the proof was in the search results themselves.
You could see that web pages with low PageRank scores were ranked higher than web pages from sites with higher PageRank.
But the idea of domain authority persisted.
Articles insisting that Google uses domain authority never cite patents, research papers, or statements by a Googler to back up those claims (because there is no official confirmation).
In a Reddit AMA, Google’s John Mueller answered the question of whether domain authority exists with a witty answer:
“Of course it exists, it’s a tool from Moz.”
Three Kinds Of Links
In the SEO Starter Guide, Google’s documentation explicitly approves promoting a website by telling others about it.
Here’s what Google has published about getting links:
“While most links to your site are added gradually as people discover and link to your content through search or other means, Google understands that you want to let others know about the hard work you’ve put into your site. content.
Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those interested in the same topic.”
While Google follows that statement with the caveat that promoting a site at “extreme” levels can damage a site’s reputation, the advice still leaves plenty of room for promoting a website.
Here are three types of links that can be reached safely:
1. Research, Write, Tell Others About It
In the planning stage of web page content, it is important to research what types of sites link to content pages on that particular topic.
One way to do that is to identify what types of sites are linking and, most importantly, why those pages are linking.
Any linking strategy I create for a client always starts with researching which sites are linking and identifying the topics that drive them to link.
Writing the content is done after identifying the right content to publish.
The biggest mistake companies make is writing the content and then trying to get links to it. That doesn’t always work, no matter how good the content is.
Some sites consistently link to smart content that capitalizes on trending topics such as very popular media.
Other sites tend to link according to the zeitgeist.
Every site that links out has a reason for linking out. Find that pattern and write for it.
2. Be Proactive About Getting Quoted
There is a service called Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where publishers ask qualified individuals to provide citations on topics — and perhaps provide a link to a website.
You could say that HARO has been overrun for the past 10 years as there is a lot of competition from link builders overflowing the system to links.
And some publishers dangle a quote, but never give one.
For example, in my experience, some publishers abuse the system to collect citations and article ideas from others with no intention of ever citing any of the contributors, let alone linking them.
Thus, a whole business model has sprung up around helping companies get what has come to be known as ‘HARO links’.
But why scurry like a pigeon looking for crumbs? There is a better way.
And that way is to be proactive and approach the high-quality sites you want a link to.
Everyone loves a gift – and there’s no better gift for a content publisher than an article that writes itself.
The best way to do that is by doing research or compiling statistics relevant to the readers of whatever publications are ideal for a link.
As long as the topic is highly relevant, being quoted in a ready-made article created by a press contact is a good way to get links.
Be sure to request that the article be kept under embargo, which means that publication will be delayed until a certain date.
For added spice, publish the full dataset on your own website, then provide some of that data to the publishers and ask them to consider linking to the full report page.
Back in the day, people produced infographics by creating a visual representation of government statistics, turning dry text into an easier to visualize infographic.
But people consume media on mobile phones and infographics don’t always look great on mobile devices.
The infographics approach to off-page SEO can be considered an outdated practice.
In the long run, it may make more sense to build a list of preferred sites for publishing. Then research each site to see what relevant article topics have been published, the types of resources they link to, and article pitches they may find interesting.
They also don’t have to be sites that offer linking opportunities.
Positioning a company’s name in front of tens of thousands of potential customers is immensely valuable.
3. Good Old Resource Links
Some sites still post links to sites that provide some kind of resource such as a download, templates, how to do something, patterns, etc.
Websites like to link to useful content.
But again, don’t build the content and find someone to link to it.
Find out who links to resources and then build that kind of content.
Be sure to give it a great angle – a twist that sets it apart from other sites.
Guest Posting For Links… Not
Guest posting has been officially off the table since 2014, when Matt Cutts (a Google engineer at the time) publicly posted that guest posting for links was over.
“So put a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it just got too spammy. In general, I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you’re willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well.
Likewise, I would not recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a link building strategy.
As late as 2020, Google’s John Mueller explained that Google’s machine learning algorithms contain a lot of training data to identify and automatically devalue links from guest posts so that they don’t help sites rank better.
He had this to say about guest posts for links:
“The other thing is that because this is so old, we have a lot of training data for our algorithms. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of those links are just automatically ignored.”
He then suggested doing something useful instead:
“If all that work is for ignored links, why not just do something useful?”
Guest Post For Higher Earnings, Not Links
A better approach to guest posts is to use them to build awareness of a site for an audience that might be interested in it.
SEO professionals will seize an opportunity to build sales by pushing for links.
Why not just guest posts to build sales? Isn’t money the point of link building and search marketing to begin with?
There are many opportunities to present your product in a favorable light by forgetting links and just doing it for sale.
Making money is the point of marketing, so make money while everyone else is wearing their brains out trying to figure out a way to trick a site into giving them a link.
That’s true off-page SEO, because once people get to know a site, word of mouth kicks in — and that’s when Google understands that a site is popular, meaning the kind of site people expect to see.
There’s even a Google patent on how Google could use branded searches as a form of links.
I wrote about the Google patent using searches that include brand names as if they were links here: are branding important to Google’s algorithm?
This shows that awareness can have an indirect impact on rankings.
The importance of this is to emphasize that off-page SEO is not necessarily just about links.
Off-Page SEO Is Site Promotion
It can be helpful to think of off-page SEO as something more than just the narrow scope of link building.
For that, one has to devise strategies to expose the company to thousands of decision-makers.
Link builders leave behind many valuable, useful opportunities to build sales and indirectly create popularity signals for search engines to pick up.
Off-page SEO is useful for promoting a website to increase position, traffic and revenue.
Featured Image: Myvisuals/Shutterstock
On-page SEO refers to SEO factors and techniques aimed at optimizing aspects of your website that are under your control. Off-page SEO refers to SEO factors and strategies aimed at promoting your site or brand on the web.
What are the 3 common types of search intent?
Common types of search intents include informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional search intents.
What is SEO in simple words?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – so much has stayed the same. It refers to techniques that make your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Why SEO is important in simple words? Importance of SEO SEO is important because it helps people find information and discover pages on the world wide web. SEO is especially important for businesses because it ensures they answer their audience’s biggest questions about search engines, while driving traffic to their products and services.
What is SEO in easy language?
SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization’. In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines.
What is SEO and examples?
Off-page SEO refers to actions you can take outside of your own website to improve rankings, such as link building or guest blogging. There are also two styles of SEO: White Hat and Black Hat SEO. White hat SEO is based on using ethical, transparent techniques to build the rank of your pages.
What is SEO in plain English?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic rankings. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks.
What is SEO Answer?
What is SEO? The practice of optimizing the architectural layout of a website is known as SEO. It helps with content relevancy and link attractiveness so that the pages are found more easily, are more relevant and prominent in response to the use of internet searches, and thus rank higher in search engines.
What are SEO examples?
6 Top Examples of SEO Tactics in Action
- Integration of long tail keywords. Keywords are one of the most essential parts of SEO. …
- White space. …
- Engaging title tag and meta description. …
- Reputable backlinks. …
- High page speeds. …
- Responsive design.
What is SEO and examples?
Off-page SEO refers to actions you can take outside of your own website to improve rankings, such as link building or guest blogging. There are also two styles of SEO: White Hat and Black Hat SEO. White hat SEO is based on using ethical, transparent techniques to build the rank of your pages.
What is SEO and how it works?
Well, SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial or natural search results in search engines. It is intended to improve your website’s position on search results pages. Remember that the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.
How does SEO work in simple words?
How does SEO work? SEO works by making certain changes to the design and content of your website that make your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in the hope that the search engine will show your website as a top result on the search engine results page.
What is SEO and how it is used?
Search engine optimization is the science of improving a website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services. The more visibility a website has with search engines, the more likely the brand will win business.
What SEO Complete Guide?
Welcome to the new Google SEO guide!
- Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of continuously optimizing a website for a higher position in organic search results, with a focus on popular search engines such as Google.
- In fact, SEO can and should involve other disciplines within digital marketing, including:
What is SEO for a beginner? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of growing a website’s traffic from organic search results. It includes things like keyword research, content creation, link building, and technical audits.
What is off-page SEO a complete guide?
Off-page SEO includes activities performed outside of a website in an effort to increase the site’s ranking in the search engines. Common off-page SEO actions include building backlinks, encouraging brand searches, and increasing engagement and sharing on social media.
What is off-page SEO a comprehensive guide? “Off-page SEO” (also called “off-site SEO”) refers to actions taken outside of your own website to affect your position on search engine results pages (SERPs). Along with on-page SEO, these include several factors of basic SEO that help a site rank.
What is off page SEO and what is the best?
Off-page SEO refers to all the things you can do outside of your website to help you improve SERP rank: link building, forums, influencer outreach, and content marketing, just to name a few. In layman’s terms, off-page SEO helps search engines understand what others think of your product, services or website.
What is a good off page SEO score?
If you’re curious about what makes for a ‘good’ off-page SEO score, check out this breakdown: 70 or above: Excellent – you have a few areas where you can improve your website. 41-69: Good â you have some areas where you can improve your website.
Which SEO is better on page or off page?
On-page SEO includes delivering good content, good keyword selection, putting keywords in the right places, giving an appropriate title for each page, etc. Off-page SEO includes link building, increasing link popularity, search engine, link exchange etc. 2. On- page SEO analyzes the entire website.
What is off page SEO with examples?
While earning links from external websites is the most widely adopted off-page SEO strategy, almost any activity that a) takes place outside of your own website and b) helps improve your ranking in search results can be considered “off-page”. page SEO’. These include things like: Social media marketing. Guest blogging.