What is Off-Page SEO?
Any external activities that you perform are considered off-page optimization. These include social media, directory listings and link building. It basically revolves around gaining the confidence of search engines and users. A lot of off-page SEO is about earning backlinks and citations. This is the practice of enhancing your site’s popularity and trustworthiness by promoting it on other websites.
Off-Page SEO Checklist for Ranking Higher
01Secure valuable backlinks
A backlink is a URL from an online resource or external website to your content. This link signals to the search engines that a third party sees your content as valuable. This is a benefit for your rankings.
There are measures that you can take to promote these valuable backlinks. As per a study by BuzzSumo and Moz, list posts, quizzes, videos, infographics, and how-to articles invite a huge number of backlinks.
You can also use a link gap analysis using Link Explorer. This process includes discovering sites that link to your competitors but not your content. You can then try to connect with these websites or research the type of posts they want. By generating the same articles, you might protect valuable backlinks from these sources.
02Be more active on social media
By sharing your content regularly on social media, you can bring in traffic from different sources. This diverseness can assure the search engines that your site is valuable to people across the web.
If you’re fostering all of your content across social media, then you’re off to a great beginning. Despite that, you can also increase your engagement by answering every mention of your products or business.
03Guest post on third-party websites
Some sites receive guest contributions. These posts can be an amazing opportunity to secure valuable backlinks. All the websites will have their own rules concerning guest contributors. Some sites may enable you to include various URLs to your guest posts. Some platforms will only let you mention your company or products in your author bio.
04Give importance to comment sections
It may be appealing to see all other websites as the competition. Anyway, you can actually find sites that function within your chosen niche but aren’t your direct competitors.
After regarding these sites, it’s better to get involved in their comment sections. You can position yourself as a leading industry figure by continuously making positive, helpful contributions.
In the end, the site’s customers might notice your contributions and examine your profile and finally, your website. This increased visibility can grow your visitor numbers and include a new traffic source to your repertoire.
Several sites also let you include a link to your site in the comment. While these links aren’t strong, every tiny bit is counted when it comes to off-page SEO.
05Consider investing in local SEO
If you have a physical store, you will have to consider investing in local SEO. This idea leads to improving your visibility in Google’s local search results.
To begin with, ensure that you’ve added your company to Google My Business. It’s also crucial to claim your listing on third-party review sites like Yelp and the Tripadvisor platform.
Make sure that your business name, address, phone number, and website URL are constant across all directories. Moreover, it’s important to update it as soon as possible if any of this information changes.
You can increase your visibility in the SERPs and grow your off-page SEO By taking control over these platforms.
06Include an RSS feed subscription box
If any individual lands on your website then it is a success. Even so, several sites can gain long-term SEO success depending on new visitors alone. If you want to tempt a steady stream of traffic, you’ll have to transform new visitors into loyal repeat customers.
To do that, you might want to motivate visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. This feature allows users to monitor your website through a feed reader.
You can drive users to subscribe to your RSS feed by including an RSS icon to your site.
You can also develop a custom RSS feed to manage what content appears in your feed.
07Post on forums
Like comment sections, forums can be amazing sources of referral traffic. You must only post in threads when you have something important to contribute to the discussion for the best results.
You will have to stop explicitly promoting your own content. Even though you’re linking to a part of your website that resolves the original poster’s question, your typical forum user is cynical about self-promotion. Rather, you should aim on developing a positive reputation on third-party forums.
08Build trust
Search engines need their users to have good experiences. This means they give importance to reputable, trustworthy sites in their results.
When calculating a site’s credibility, search engines consider Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA). DA is the authority of the whole website and PA refers to a particular webpage.
The many of the methods we’ve already shared will improve your DA and PA. to be specific, securing backlinks and guest posting on reputable websites will increase your perceived trustworthiness.
09Build relationships with influencers and industry figures
Platforms like social media make it remarkably simple to interact with industry figures. If you can develop a good relationship with these people, they’ll be more prone to engage with you in the future. These communications might even include sharing your content with their followers.
However if these leading figures don’t openly promote your content, any engagement with these people will be considered positively on your website. Other social media users might even see these interactions and think to check out your website. These visits can gain you additional traffic from a variety of sources.
It also supports developing relationships with esteemed figures across additional platforms like the comment sections of their websites. This variety can optimise your probability of breaking through the noise and building a personal relationship with influencers.
10Share your documents
Many websites produce documents. These may add anything from research studies and whitepapers right through to presentations, survey results, ebooks and user manuals.
If you have any stand-alone resources, you can upload them to platforms like third-party document-sharing. Some well-known examples include the Academia network, Scribd platform and the SlideShare presentation-sharing site.
Relying on your selected platform, you might even be able to add some links to your website along with the document. This URL placement can be a better addition to your external link-building strategy.
11Image sharing and Video sharing
Share and publish your images on photo sharing sites like Pinterest, Flickr or Photobucket. You can consider these pages the same like they were a social network or document sharing site. Follow filename and title optimization best practices, and add a description using your keywords. Add a link back to your pages in the description. These pages often have high PageRank and trust, so it’s better to have your content connected with them. Additionally, users can comment and share your content, which will help your brand awareness.
Videos are one of the well-known types of content online, especially for advertising: A third of users’ time online is consumed watching videos. And it’s a hope for businesses: 55% of consumers think a company website should have a video. So making short, entertaining videos with better production quality makes your content more useful to users. After creating video content, make sure to share it through video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion.
Develop a profile with your brand name and follow the document sharing best practices for filenames and video titles. Add a link to your website and utilise your keywords naturally in the video description. The links don’t pass link juice but they’re still crawled, indexed and served in search results.
Image and video files are one among the best ways for the candidates to go viral, which can have huge short and long-term positive effects on your SEO.