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Off-page SEO is about everything that doesn’t happen directly on your website. Optimizing your website is called on-page SEO and includes things like site structure, content and speed optimizations. Off-page SEO is about, among other things, link building, social media, and local SEO. Or in other words, generating traffic to your site and making your business appear like the real deal it is. In this post, we answer the question: What is off-page SEO?
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What is off-page SEO?
“Off-page SEO” (also called “off-site SEO”) refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).
Optimizing for off-site ranking factors involves improving search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. This is accomplished by other reputable places on the Internet (pages, sites, people, etc.) linking to or promoting your website, and effectively “vouching” for the quality of your content.
Why does off-page SEO matter?
While search algorithms and ranking factors are constantly changing, the general consensus within the SEO community is that the relevance, trustworthiness, and authority that effective off-page SEO affords a website still play a major role in a page’s ability to rank.
While we don’t know the full algorithm Google uses to rank content, data from our Search Engine Ranking Factors study show that off-site SEO-related factors likely carry more than 50% of the ranking factor weight.
How to do off-page SEO ?
At a high level, improving the “off-page SEO” of a website involves improving search engine and user perception of a site’s quality. This happens by getting links from other sites (especially those that are reputable and trustworthy themselves), mentions of your brand, shares of your content, and “votes of confidence” from sources outside of your own website. Off page SEO also includes :
- Blogs
- Web page copy
- Videos
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Whitepapers
- Ebooks
- Interviews
- Case studies
- Original research
- Reviews
- Instructional articles
- Quizzes and poles
Local SEO is also off-page SEO
Local SEO is essential if you’re business is locally oriented. For local businesses, part of the off-page SEO is really in-person SEO. Word-of-mouth marketing plays a big role in getting people to your business. Not just that, happy customers can leave reviews online that Google – and other potential customers – can use to see how well you are doing.
On-Page vs. Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO is all of the things you can do on your page/post to help you improve SERP position. This includes things like keywords, anchor tags, meta tags, meta descriptions, page/post titles, and internal linking.
Off-page SEO refers to all the things you can do outside of your website to help you improve SERP position: link building, forums, influencer outreach, and content marketing, to name a few.
In laymen terms, off-page SEO helps search engines understand what others think about your product, services, or website. Even having just a few links from strong, relevant sites with high levels of authority will increase your chances of ranking higher.
Off-page SEO isn’t just about getting a link to your site from just anyone; it’s about getting a link to your site from the right one. And, you want to make sure that you’re getting the “link juice” from the backlink too.
Link juice is only passed along in do-follow backlinks. This type of backlink is like the source site is acknowledging and voting for the linked article, post, or page, resulting in an increase in the link’s authority.
The other type of backlink is a no-follow backlink. These are just links that don’t pass any authority from the source site to the linked site.
