What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO implies the efforts, you as a business put towards strengthening your online authority, away from your own website. Optimization of your website or webpage which occurs on the page itself is called on-page SEO and off-page is exactly the opposite. It includes link building on other websites, social media efforts, and much more.

Why is off-page SEO important?

To build authority & trustworthiness of your brand on-page SEO would not be enough. Off-page SEO helps search engines identify your relevance, this is measured by the inbound & outbound links to your site or webpages. High inbound links show that your content is appreciated by others and hence is valuable in the eyes of search engines. Outbound links help with identifying the quality of the content and put you on the radar. The more links you generate, you’ll likely rank higher in SERPs’.

Lets look at these 8 factors which will help you improve your off-page SEO in 2021:

Traditional backlinks

Creating traditional backlinks is still relevant in 2021. Traditional backlink generation includes blog comments, anchor texts, forum mentions, local directory linking, etc., doing this can help you gradually build your domain authority. Your backlink efforts will also help your website improve its SEO ranking, but will that be enough? The links must be healthy, otherwise spammy and weak links would not add significant value to your SEO efforts and can negatively affect your page.

For best practices, you should focus on building strong links directing to your website for your off-page SEO efforts. To do so successfully, you start by choosing high authority websites to link to, if you’re a local business adding your sites to directories is super-helpful and while commenting try to add value to the author’s post and avoid spammy comments like “Hey Jim, Great content, here’s a link to my website”, these comments will most likely be deleted as they add no value, instead read the post, and add a personalized comment.

Site audit

There are several tools you can use to audit your site. It is important to audit regularly to preserve your domain authority and SERP rankings. An audit will let you know about links associated with your website & all its pages. This data can be used to identify broken links if any, associated with any of your pages. These links can be internal or external.

If any internal links are broken, you can rectify it quickly & remotely.

If any external links are linking back to your site are broken, you might have to contact the site owner for the issue, and (most likely) they’ll be happy to help.

To be extra confident with your off-page SEO efforts, you should also check your Google search console & Google my business to see if they have penalized any of your links. If Google identifies any penalty, they will also instruct you on how to solve that issue.

Guest blogging

Blogs help you create authority for your company for topics you want to be known for. It helps you establish a reputation & increase authority for your website. Guest blogging is a barter trade for two parties, out of which, one gets a strong organic link with recognition and an opportunity to expose themselves to a new possible audience & the other gets a relevant & well-written blog for their site.

For you to be successful with guest blogging, producing relevant, interesting, and original content is given. Your goal is to generate an organic link but to do that you have to add value to the other party’s content goals. You can refer to this step-by-step guide to guest blogging,

• Shortlist the organizations you want to associate yourself with
• Conduct research and identify their brand, audience, message, niche (if any), and topics they want to be known for.
• Some websites will have a ‘guest blogging requirements page’ for instructions and for the ones which do not have, you can contact them via their contact us section.
• If you get an opportunity to write for the organization, you can provide them with your author bio, which is recommended to be written in a third-person perspective.

These best practices will help you to create a strong organic link to your website which will benefit your off-page SEO.

Video off-page SEO

Video has gained significant popularity, especially after Covid-19. It has been growing in popularity since 2015 according to a study conducted by HubSpot. The study suggests that 86% of marketers say that they use video as a marketing tool. This was due to the change in consumption habits due to the pandemic. 68% of the consumers say that the pandemic impacted their content consumption, 96% said that it has increased in some form. That being said, video is not going anywhere.

There are multiple video-sharing channels like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch & more. This trend is evident with the emergence of social media channels like Instagram, Facebook turning their attention towards video. You can produce videos and leverage these channels to post videos and engage with your audience to gain impressions from a possible new audience and that will indirectly help you improve online mentions, if not create links.

Social media

Social media, as a medium has one of the highest engagement potentials with your audience. Whether your business is B2B or B2C, social media presence is a must in this day and age. Your accounts will help you connect with your audience or clients on a different level. You can leverage social media to share blog posts on different mediums, tailoring your messages, post educational videos about your product or services, post infographics, create events, create groups, and much more.

Remember that social media is flooded with brands and influencers trying to sell their own services & probably convey the same message, that is why you need to create content which adds value in their lives and is relevant to them.

Best practise is to not sell your product on social media, instead give customers some kind of value addition which they think is unique and shareworthy to succeed.

It may seem like too much work and honestly, it is. But you get the opportunity to interact with your audience, build your authority and create chances of mentions through your audience. Mentions on social media will not directly affect your SEO, but it can indirectly help your off-page SEO efforts as people tend to search your brand names if you are able to cause a significant impact.

Podcasts

People have started consuming content in many ways. Audiobooks, podcasts, video, voice feedback being one of the latest growing trends. Podcasts are not very new, they have been around for quite some time now, but they have recently started growing in popularity. With that, you can approach multiple Podcasters in your industry or related industries to get an invite as a guest. You can talk about a topic of your expertise, which you and the podcaster will agree upon.

Once the podcast is live, you will have created an organic link, may have exposed to a new audience, received mentions, and gained recognition. Although podcasts are fairly new, they’re effective and will help increase your brand name search.

Press Release

Press releases do not affect your SEO, as they used to before.  Press releases started growing as a popular way to create links and after a while just became spammy. There were several businesses releasing several statements in the press. This method was then identified by Google and was not considered as a reliable link generation medium. Publications, then started to add ‘nofollow’ links, hence the companies were not able to generate a links even after conducting a press release.

Well, it’s not all bad, when it comes to press release, otherwise, it wouldn’t have been on the list. If you avoid spamming by creating a non-value-adding press release, it wouldn’t gain needed traction. Even though the links are no-follow links, your brand gets a mention through these publications, from that you get the chance of readers acknowledging the brand & increased awareness. It can also lead to possible engagement on social media. Keep in mind that you have to share something worthwhile and value-adding for the readers to have a successful press release.

E.A.T. principle

As a business that wants to achieve online success, EAT (Expertise-Authority-Trust) is something you just cannot ignore. Building authority is important to rank higher in SERP rankings. It is a gradual process and there is no secret formula that can help you with online success, overnight. EAT principle was enforced so that Google can analyze crawl sites based on how strong their brand strength is, this is discovered in many ways, such as social media engagement, number of backlinks generated, organic reach, awareness, resourcefulness, etc.

All your efforts with regards to SEO should also have a strong focus on improving EAT of your brand. You should identify important KPIs and focus on aspects of the business which are lacking efforts. The process, as discussed takes time and hence should have a long-term objective with short-run goals as well to have a realistic vision.

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In 2021, a lot has changed. This change has increased screen time for people around the world and forced them to change or adapt to new digital norms to live comfortably. As a business, you have to adapt to make sure that all possible opportunities are capitalized on. To achieve digital success, on-page and off-page SEO both are critical, go through our affecting factors to make sure you don’t miss anything out.

Let us buy you a free coffee and discuss how we can improve your off-page SEO efforts.