A Practical Guide to Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is one of the most important ranking factors. Unfortunately, it is probably the hardest part about SEO to successfully implement. Without a solid off-page SEO strategy in place, there is a good chance that your content will never rank in the search results. This guide is going to cover everything you need to know about creating and implementing an off-page SEO strategy.

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is the optimization away from your site that you can make to improve your search rankings. Link building is a big part of off-page SEO, but off-page SEO covers more than just that.

Generally, off-page SEO will include any way that you use to promote your website. This includes setting up social media profiles and building a following to your website.

Link building is a major part of off-page SEO and should be the primary emphasis on any off-page SEO strategy. Google has mentioned link building as being one of the most important ranking factors, so putting a focus on that area can bring big benefits to your search rankings.

Importance of Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is important because this is what drives your rankings for your target keyword. Although on-page SEO is important, off-page SEO if what is going to give you the boost you need to outrank your competitors.

You could have great content and perfect on-page SEO in place, but if you ignore off-page SEO, there is a good chance your content will never rank. This is because search engines treat these backlinks as “votes.” When other websites link to your website, it shows search engines that you have high quality content. As a general rule, the more sites that link to you, the more search engines trust that you have good content.

Link Building Strategies

Link building can be a tough task but mastering it will help you improve your rankings in a big way. Since link building is such a big part of any off-page SEO strategy, we will cover some of the best ways to build more backlinks to your website.

Resource Page Link Building

Resource page link building is a popular way to build links. This is when you attempt to get websites linking out to many resources, to include one of your pages as a resource. The reason this is a popular method is because it is easier to convince someone to link to your content, since they are looking for as many resources that will help their readers.

The best way to do this is to find these resource pages linking out to similar content to yours. You can do this by searching “topic + resources” or something similar. This will give you resources based around whichever topic you enter.

You can then reach out to these website owners and let them know about your resource. If your page is helpful, there is a good chance they will want to include your link as well.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is probably one of the best ways to build backlinks for beginners. The nice thing about guest posting is that you can provide value to the website by giving them a high-quality article, and then you benefit from a link back to your page. Depending on the website, you can either link back to your website within the content, or in the author bio.

When writing these guest posts, you need to be sure that you are providing real value in your content. It’s also important to know what to write about, to be sure it is relevant to both you and the website you are guest posting for. No website is going to post the content, if you provide a low-quality article just to try to get a link out of it.

Stealing Competitors’ Links

I know stealing competitors’ links sounds questionable, but you are not actually taking the links from your competitors. The goal here is to get the same links that your competitors have. So you are more-so stealing their ideas to get similar links.

The nice thing about this strategy is that if they are linking out to your competitors with a similar resource/page, there is a good chance these websites would be willing to link out to yours as well.

You can find your competitors’ links with tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Ubersuggest. Ahrefs and SEMRush are very powerful tools, but they are expensive to use. Ubersuggest is a free tool that Neil Patel created, and is a great place to start.

Broken Link Building

Broken link building is more of an advanced SEO tactic, but can be very effective. To successfully use this strategy, you need to find websites that have pages with broken links on a  certain topic. You can then reach out to everyone linking to that page, letting them know that they are linking to a broken page. You can then pitch your resource to replace that broken link.

The hardest part about this strategy is finding the broken links. If you use a tool like Ahrefs, it allows you to search for specific content. With this tool, you can search for content on a topic and then filter the results for broken links. This gives you a list of all the broken links on your specified topics.

The next part, and probably the easiest part is to reach out to the website owners and let them know about the broken link. In our email outreach you can also let them know about your resource and how it will be a good replacement for that broken link.

They will likely want to remove the broken link since it is providing a poor user experience for their website visitors. Instead of researching a replacement, they will have your resource that you mentioned to fill in the empty space. It’s a good strategy with a high conversion rate. You just need to be able to find these broken links.

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Use Statistics to Create a Resource/Infographic

Using statistics to create your own resource is a great way to build links to your website. Even though these links will be pointing to the page you have the resource on, they will help your site rank as a whole. These backlinks will give your domain authority and trust, and it will make your other content rank better.

When using this strategy, you can use statistics that you find on other websites, and then create a resource or infographic based on those statistics that is easy to consume. This resource can be something that other people reference often, and that is where you will get those links. Just be sure to include where you got your statistics from.

Consistency is Key

Being consistent is the most important part about off-page SEO. There is no sense of building a few links and then letting it sit there. Continue to build links to your pages and you will be sure to see your rankings skyrocket.

The best way to stay consistent is to find methods that work for you. It’s unlikely that all of these methods I mentioned will work perfectly for you. But if you try them all, you should be able to find at least a few that work very well. Stick to those methods and scale as much as possible.

Takeaways

Off-page SEO is just as important as on-page SEO. Finding the best ways to implement off-page SEO will help you drastically increase your rankings.

After you find out what works best for you, be consistent with it. The more links you build, the higher you will rank. This will also grow your domain authority and trust which also makes it easier for your website to rank for target keywords.

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AUTHOR BIO

Tyler Nalbach has worked in the SEO industry since 2018 and is the owner of SEO Align. Tyler’s goal is to help other website owners increase their organic website traffic. Information about SEO and SEM strategies can be found on his blog at https://seoalign.com/blog/.