If you arrive at this article, you already know a little about SEO, that is, non-paying. Or maybe you have heard of this digital marketing concept and want to find out why it is important for companies.
You are aware that since the advent of the Net, people mainly carry out their research for goods or services online. For a company, it is, therefore, a question of obtaining the best possible placements for a given query on the results page.
For this, some pay Google Ads; others call on SEOs who implement a series of techniques to raise your site in the SERPs (search results) and thus gain more visitors. These are the general principles of SEO referencing.
Generally, there are several categories in the field: On-page and Off-page SEO. The “On page” has the particularity of working on what is on your site itself and your pages. These include image optimization, meta titles, meta descriptions, Hn tags inbound linking, etc.
What concerns us today is off-page SEO. That is to say, the optimization of what is outside your site.
Let’s see this in more detail about Off-page SEO:
What is it, and how to work with it?
How to improve the position of your site on Google?
Off-Page SEO, What is it?
In Off-page SEO or “Off-site SEO”, we will focus on what leads to your site, the mentions made by other sites, pages, people…
For this, we will, in particular, seek to obtain incoming links or backlinks. These contribute to work on the authority & popularity of a website, factors highly appreciated by search engines to place it in a good position.
Indeed, when Google crawls the sites, it calculates ranking by counting all the incoming links made to a site and their quality (as well as many other factors).
Finally, it’s somewhat comparable to the recommendations on choosing a renovation contractor, for example, Wouldn’t you rather trust those recommended to you massively and by people you trust?
As you will have understood, this backlinking work is, therefore, one of the essential criteria for performing in the SERPs. It’s about winning votes of confidence.
An SEO will therefore work to improve the perception that search engines have of your site, and another factor to consider is that of social networks. In short, off-page SEO is a bit like your site’s reputation in search engines’ eyes.
Do you want to know a little more about the terminology and jargon you read – sometimes without understanding anything – in the forums dedicated to SEO?
Off-Page SEO, Why Does it Matter?
The Off page is complementary to the On-page in an SEO strategy: we will work on and outside your site. At Google, algorithms and ranking factors are subject to many changes, and no professional can boast of knowing perfectly the SEO criteria that make the Mountain View firm rank your website well or not: it remains very discreet on this point.
No doubt precisely to avoid manipulation. Nevertheless, some studies of moz tend to prove that the influence of Off-page SEO probably exceeds 50%. All the more reason to pay due attention to it.
Off-Page Optimization and Benefits
As we have seen, the interest lies in the popularity gained in the eyes of the search engines: your positioning can only be improved, but not only.
Off-page optimization brings you greater visibility since backlinks are created. However, visitors will likely click these links, and your business has more chances of being discovered.
How to Work on Off-Page SEO?
Let’s come to the part that probably interests you the most: improving your Off-page! Let’s discuss the main components:
Backlinking
A web portal with multiple quality backlinks will often rank higher than a similar site with fewer. And it is the job of an SEO consultant or specialized web agency to work on this backlinking.
Here's How to Find Quality Backlinks?
As we have seen, search engines use backlinks as a measure of popularity, and you will have to work on it for your site too! We will therefore seek, of course, to obtain a good number of backlinks. But is one link worth another? Nope!
The reliability and authority of these links play an essential role in whether or not they are taken into account. The first quality criterion is that the sites that give you a backlink have a theme related to yours: a lack of relationship with the subject can lead to a poor evaluation.
If you have a site or blog dealing with canine education, you will preferably try to obtain it from sites dealing with the same subject: veterinarians, animals, etc. We will also consider the anchor text, the clickable part of the hyperlink, for which we will write a combination of relevant keywords related to the targeted page.
These links will ideally be placed in an entire paragraph, in page content, and as contextualized as possible around the subject matter. For example, we will not make a link named “Techniques for educating your dog” in a paragraph dealing with automobiles. Well, it seems obvious!
And the timing, then? Be aware that too fast link building may seem suspicious to Google.
It will be a question of building it over time, as publications on your Blog, for example, or the buzz that your shares make on social networks (we can hope!).
Social Networks
We talked about the role of social networks in the “Off-page”, but how do they intervene? Although Google has declared that it does not consider social signals (reactions, shares), a relationship has been observed between these indicators, when positive, and the positioning of sites.
In addition, by developing your authority on social networks, you increase your opportunities to receive backlinks and develop a continuous traffic flow. All good!
Want to know how you can increase your traffic with off-page SEO? Read this: 7 Off Page Techniques to Increase Organic Traffic
How Can You Improve Your SEO via Social Media Marketing?
Put in place a strategy: creating a community around your theme, sharing your articles, and participating in groups dealing with your subject will allow you to strengthen your notoriety. This way, the rate of mentions of your brand/company will increase, which can only have beneficial repercussions.
links posted on social media platforms are “nofollow” (which means the link will not be considered for your ranking). There is no point in posting your articles hoping to create “good” backlinks…. but it can help as social signals.
Also, there’s an opportunity to interact with communities and increase your notoriety.
Notoriety = more visits. And more visits = more conversions. It’s the virtuous circle!
Off-Page SEO Essentials
The criteria to be met to boost your pages via off-page SEO are as follows:
Off-Page SEO Tools
The tools most commonly used to work on off-page SEO are:
Semrush
An “all-in-one” tool, Semrush is a reference in the field. It will help you in your backlinking construction by indicating opportunities. If poor-quality links point to you, the tool allows you to disavow them without going through the Google search console.
Ahrefs
Like the previous one, Ahrefs is indicated to monitor your competitors’ backlinking strategy and improve yours. You can check the frequency and relevance of your outgoing or incoming links and other essential analyses.
MajesticSEO
A final reference: Majestic initiates the acronyms TF (trust flow) and CF (Citation flow), synonymous with trust and popularity. It also helps to get the overall idea of the page quality via visualization in the form of a graph for more ease. It will help you better understand your site’s link profile or another.
Conclusion
In a ranking strategy, both on-page and off-page levers must be activated. These approaches, although different, are related and must be worked on together.
Popularity is the consequence of off-page work, but it is first a question of checking whether everything is technically ok on your website (robot.txt, presence of a sitemap, etc.) and designing qualitative content.
Only then will one seek to obtain votes of confidence from external sources to climb and gain places.
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