A different aspect than the average – Introducing Off-site SEO

Many people associate off-site SEO with link building, but it’s not all about that. Other methods that are away from standard linking can be also important from an off-site optimization point of view.

While on-site SEO is all within your site, off-site SEO is all that is happening outside your website. Just like guest blogging or commenting on another blog, or even on social media platforms.

Off-page search engine optimization goes deeper than having links on other sites. : It tells Google what others think about your site.

Basics of off-site SEO

For example, if you have a lot of valuable links on other pages, search engines will assume that you’ve got content that is worth reading for others.

Otherwise, why would people refer to it? Google assumes that when people cite, reference or share a content, that means that they like it. Is your product or service helpful and affordable? They are going to talk about it!

And all activities that you or others do while pointing on your website, will raise the ranking of your page.

What should I start with?

Bloggers and content marketers usually start with on-site SEO.

But they shouldn’t stop there. Because things that happen away from your website might matter a lot to Google…

A lot of website owners spend about 30% of their time on off-site factors, and 70% on on-site optimization. For other website owners, those percentages are reversed.

But why is the difference?

It depends mostly on marketing goals. If you have a smaller target segment, on-site SEO will be more highlighted. If your site is about a service/product or any theme that can be interesting for a wider audience, you will definitely need to start preparing the content in order to provide value for the users. What else would motivate people to waste time linking to it?

If you can develop a basic understanding of not only on-page, but also off-page optimization, you’ll be way ahead of your competition.

Getting ready for off-site SEO

It is really important to have some initial preparation before starting link building.

1. Highlight your cornerstone content and interlink in between your pages using specific keywords for each. Don’t forget to emphasise your brand name.
2. Internal pages have to be structured and evenly linked for a great ‘SEO value’. Best practices are never mentioning that you should always point to the home page. You’d rather remove half of your links than putting them unevenly. Restructure!
3. Basic on-site SEO job: Set up the correct meta tags and keyword density.

When Google is looking at your site, it looks for fresh content (sometimes depending on your sitemap settings), it indexes your new pages and prepares them for search users.

After your pages are added into its search results when relevant search queries are detected, Google uses several algorithm factors to determine where those pages will rank. Google’s ranking factors are numerous but for a while we know that the quality of backlinks is one of the most important.

The most common off-site SEO tools

• Guest blogging : when you offer your services to some popular blogs – in order to be able to insert your link along with your brand name / company name in their website.
• Social media : you share and you create content that others are happy to share. Infographics are getting increasingly popular for years now. It’s worth giving it a try with an original idea!
• Influencer marketing : it is not the less expensive way to promote your product/service but definitely working for some sectors that are reaching their audience sometimes hardly – new luxury brands for example.
• +1 : Broken link building: works faster than guest blogging.

• Find a valuable blog and run a backlink analysis on it
• Find broken links
• Contact the owner and tell him/her about what you found
• They will be happy and you could ask them the favor to link to your website
• You can eventually offer them a replacement link as well if they need it

The efforts you put in today will pay off in the future, and will gradually increase your search engine rank and lead you to the wished Google result. An experienced digital marketing agency in Geneva and Zurich is here to answer all your questions and helps you to find the best solutions for your target audience.