To get your page showing on top of a SERP, a vast and elaborate SEO strategy is involved. And while this may sound complex, they can all be broken down into two main categories: on-page and off-site SEO.
As the name suggests, on-page SEO involves the elements that take place on the front end of your individual pages of the site, like a keyword usage. Basically, these are the strategies that you have full control over. While optimizing these elements can be time-consuming, these results can be monitored as you have the main control.
On the other hand, with off-site SEO, optimization isn’t quite as straightforward and these are factors that aren’t quite in your hands. It takes time and effort to see results from your off-site SEO strategy.
If you’re reading this article you definitely know the value of SEO. Through this blog, we aim to explain the importance of off-site SEO, and how you can start optimizing certain off-site factors to increase traffic and achieve your digital marketing goals.
What is Off-site SEO?
Off-site SEO involves working on strategies elsewhere, which in turn affect your website’s ability to rank higher. These factors or strategies are much more difficult to control since you don’t have any control over content another site’s owner may publish and the links they choose to include.
And that’s the main point: Backlinking!
The credibility of your site is based on the links pointing to your website. When another site points to your page, search engines look at it as a confidence certificate, that your site has valuable information. And because Google is made up of a strong AI system that can’t manually evaluate the trustworthiness of every website on their own, they use these backlinks to determine quality.
Link building
Now that we know Google uses links as a measure of authority and quality, it’s a no brainer that pages with a high total number of backlinks tend to rank highest in Google’s search results. However, do not commit to the common mistake of focusing solely on link quantity, as it’s also important to keep quality in mind when selecting link targets.
Links from high-quality sites hold a strong value in Google’s eyes as they have the potential to make a significant impact on your rankings.
Domain authority
Domain authority or website authority is based on a scale from 1-100 that rates the trustworthiness of your site based on its backlink profile.
Higher the number of quality links, the greater this number will climb — and the easier it will be for your pages to rank well in search results.
Website Authority Checker is a tool to check your Website authority score. There are numerous ways you can increase your score, which we’ve listed out in our blog on “How to increase your website authority through backlinking”
The higher your score, the more you increase your chances for your site to rank in search results.
Promotion on Social Media
The impact of social media links from popular networking sites like Facebook, Pinterest, etc. is much less clear than the impact of regular links and it’s hard to say whether social shares have any impact on rankings in search results. That being said, there’s is a correlation between social signals and rankings.
It’s highly possible that a strong social media presence can have a positive impact on your ability to rank well in search results even if social shares don’t play a direct role in Google’s algorithm. The logical connection here is that social media presence can help increase your visibility and attract a wider audience to your site.
And if you’re lucky, some of these visitors may be site owners, choosing to link to one of your pages as a resource.
So although social platforms linking might not have a direct way to measure as yet, they can help you generate more traffic and improve brand awareness — which can indirectly have a positive impact on your overall results.
Off-page SEO Tools
Now that you know the complexity as well as the importance of improving your site’s authority, let’s view some tools to help make your off-page SEO efforts much more successful.
1. Ahefs
Ahrefs is one of the most famous tools used to identify link opportunities.
With a user-friendly interface, simply enter the domain you wish to analyze, and you’ll be presented with a report of the sites that link to that domain The report will also contain the individual pages that they link to.
You can use this to evaluate where your site stands in terms of your backlink profile. Another great advantage of Ahrefs is that you can use it to research your competitors. By entering their domain, you can obtain a report of what kinds of pages on their sites are attracting high numbers of links and where their links are coming from.
You can then use this data to improve your own link building strategy.
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular tools utilized by digital marketers or anyone related to the SEO industry and can also be extremely useful for finding link building opportunities.
With the built-in Link Building Tool, you can evaluate link prospects, track new links, and track link building progress.
Conclusion
Off-site SEO is a tricky game and much more challenging when compared to its on-page counterpart. But when it comes to improving online visibility, it’s vital in its own unique way.
Off-site SEO is the reason why your website is spotted by search engines and adds credibility that your site is a reputable source of information. It is what gives them the confidence to recommend your pages to their users.
If you’re new to the whole process of off-site SEO and its best friend backlinks, then you might be wondering how to get quality backlinks. While it’s not always easy to get it in the first try, with the help of a few proven hacks, it might make the task less complex and reach your SEO goals.
