How to Use Off-Page SEO to Boost Your Business Website

Off-page SEO, as the term suggests, is any strategy that occurs outside the website that indirectly boosts your search engine rankings. It goes hand in hand with other SEO approaches, such as technical, local, and on-page SEO.

Among these different approaches, off-page SEO is the least that you can easily control but is also considered highly valuable.

Why Is Off-Page SEO Important?

The main aim of off-page SEO is to create exposure and build trust for your brand. It usually involves external link building (backlinks), social media, and guest blogging, among many other things.

An effective SEO strategy involves a good balance of all the four approaches we mentioned. However, several studies have shown that off-page SEO is the most important:

• According to Moz, off-page SEO-related factors carry 50% of the weight when it comes to ranking factors.
• BackLinko also found that on average, the #1 result in Google has about 3.8x more backlinks than those in positions 2 to 10. This means that those with more off-page SEO (backlinks, in this case) rank higher on SERPs.
• While social media is not a direct ranking factor for Google, several studies have found that social signals and ranking position have a high correlation. Hootsuite also concluded from an experiment that articles with a significant number of social shares received a 22% boost in their SEO rankings.

4 Off-Page SEO Tips for Beginners

1. Link building

A lot of off-page optimization comes down to link building or getting backlinks for your websites. However, it must be noted that there’s more to external optimization than just acquiring links.

The most essential consideration is, how do you get other reputable websites to naturally link back to your content?

Today, Google and many other search engines are bent on devaluing backlinks generated by manipulative link schemes and other black hat SEO techniques for link building. Thus, it’s important to focus on the quality of your content and relationship-building first and foremost:

• Create valuable content that others, especially authority websites, would want to link back to or share with their circle.
• Build meaningful connections not just with customers but also with industry experts, influencers, and other brands whose products/services could complement yours.
• If you do wish to manually build backlinks, do so prudently. Some effective strategies are collaborating with influencers to share your content or link back to your website and incentivizing customers to share a review about your website. We’ll discuss more on these later.

2. Business blogging and guest blogging

As a related point, link building is most effective if you have a regularly updated blog section on your website.

The key here is consistency: you need to regularly produce high-quality content on your blog. Google looks into relevancy and timeliness, among many other factors, in ranking content.

Another aspect of off-page SEO is guest blogging. While some laud the value of guest blogging, Google isn’t particularly fond of it. However, guest posting is not inherently bad. It only becomes problematic when you do it solely for the purpose of getting backlinks.

If you do wish to publish an article on another brand’s website, do so wisely and with caution. Your aim should be to build your reputation and authority in the field. A few things to consider:

• Relevancy: How relevant is the website’s content to your brand? Is their target audience more or less the same as yours? Will the content you produce for the website resonate with its readers?
• Authority: Aside from the website’s domain authority, how reputable are they? Are their existing content and the values they uphold consistent with your brand’s?

3. Social media marketing (SMM)

We’ve mentioned that social media in itself isn’t a direct Google ranking factor. However, it can have an indirect yet profound impact to drive traffic and click-throughs to your website.

Off-page SEO through social media does not only involve sharing your latest blog post to your page; it’s also about driving engagement and relationship building:

• Influencer marketing: One tried-and-tested SMM technique that goes well with off-page SEO is influencer marketing: you connect with popular figures on social media (i.e., influencers) with their own loyal following and collaborate with them to promote your content, product, or services. The keys here are collaboration and relevancy—the influencers you choose to work with should complement and reinforce your brand’s values, reputation, and credibility.
• Customer service: Another aspect of off-page SEO through social media is customer service. As we mentioned, the aim of off-page optimization is to build trust for your brand. A crucial part of social media customer service is community management: actively moderating comments, handling negative reviews, and proactively listening to what people are saying about your brand.

4. Local SEO

Local SEO combines both on-page and off-page SEO techniques to drive traffic to your website from people within your locality. Off-page optimization usually involves the following strategies:

• Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM): Whether by traditional or modern means, WOMM plays a huge role in off-page SEO. Several studies have echoed the same results that more than the majority of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family than ads. A good way to indirectly prompt this is to offer referrals or affiliate programs.
• PR and local news: Tapping into PR websites and the local news is especially helpful for brick-and-mortar startup businesses (it works well for online-only brands too!). It creates buzz and also helps in cultivating brand awareness.
• Customer reviews: As a related point to social media customer service, reviews from platforms such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and BBB can indirectly boost your SEO. Several studies have shown that people trust online reviews written by other customers as much as they trust recommendations from friends. Websites with plenty of positive reviews appear more credible as well, and Google takes credibility into account in their ranking factors.

Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy with SEO

Off-page SEO, on-page SEO, as well as technical and local SEO all come into play in defining the success of your digital marketing strategy.

However, it can be time-consuming and it involves diverse talent such as social copywriting, graphic design, web development, videography, and so much more to establish a well-rounded approach.

Let Ilfusion help you with your online marketing efforts. We’re a full-service digital marketing agency with over 10 years of experience, backed by a skilled team of various marketing professionals.

Call us at 888-420-5115, or send us an email at [email protected] to get started!

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