The Power of SEO: What is off-Page SEO and Why do you Need it?
So you’ve figured out how to start optimizing your website for search engines. What else can you do to improve SEO? Off-page SEO tactics are a good place to start. Off-page SEO (sometimes called off-site SEO) means taking actions outside, or off, of your own website to improve that site’s ranking on a search engine results page. Off-page SEO for small businesses and off-page SEO for B2B organizations can be particularly difficult. But, there are a few different ways you can improve off-page SEO for your site:
How to create an off-page SEO strategy that works
Link building is the oldest and most prominent of the off-page SEO strategies. Link building is, essentially, having other sites link back to yours. A website that is high quality or actually offers useful solutions or information is more likely to have lots of links back to it from other websites. Search engines have noticed this. Which is why the more strong links you have pointing back to your website the better your search engine rank will be.
So how do you get links to point back to you?
The answer is it’s not easy, in fact there isn’t really a surefire way to make this happen. You can’t control other websites to force them to link to you, but there are a few things you can do to help grow your off-page links.
Firstly, it’s important to remember that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to links. The more reputable and popular the other site linking to yours is, the more “weight” this link will have. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t need/want smaller sites to link to you, but just remember the legitimacy of that other site, and it’s relevance to your business is significant.
How do you get these other sites to link to you? Well, you could try outreach to related sites to get them to link back to you, but this isn’t usually very effective. The best way is to publish link-worthy content. There’s no secret strategy, just publish things on your site that other sites will find interesting enough to want to show their audience.
Related: How a Lack of Consistency can Kill Your Content Marketing
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Local SEO (NAP, Reviews, etc.):
This is particularly important for local or small businesses. Off-page SEO for small businesses can be more difficult than for larger ones because of limited budgets, reach, and more. Off-page SEO for B2B organizations can face the same challenges due to having a small target audience, or limited options in terms of related websites to link back to you.
For this reason, local SEO strategies become very necessary. Start with NAP (Name, Address, Phone). Google looks at NAP to determine whether a business is legitimate and where they should rank in search results.
Most businesses will have their company name, address, and phone number on their website. In order to verify that this business is legitimate, a search engine will scan the web for instances (citations) of that NAP. If they are consistent across many sites, it will assume the business is genuine, which will help increase its ranking. Getting your business’ NAP posted on sites that list businesses, like directories, is a good way to get your NAP verified.
Reviews of your site are also important. Though they may not directly impact a search engine’s ranking of your site, reviews that rank high in a search will impact visitors to your site.
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Social Media SEO and Ads:
Social media and ad content doesn’t have search engine-locatable keywords, and most of the links your site gets from social media or ads will not “count” with search engines. But social media SEO still has significant value.
Social media, and ads, when done right, will get people to notice your content, and hopefully share it. The goal here is to get people to head to your website, where they can share full links to your content from their site.
At Flawless Inbound, we understand the importance of off-page SEO for B2B organizations. That’s why we put a lot of effort into link-building, local SEO, and social media for our clients. To learn more about how we can help your business, contact us for a discovery call today.