The Definitive Guide

 Off-Page SEO Fundamentals

Off-page SEO Fundamentals

Let’s start things off with a quick review of the basics.

Specifically, I’m going to share what off-page SEO is and why it’s important in 2021.

You’ll also learn the major differences between off-page SEO and on-page SEO.

What Is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO includes activities done off of a website in an effort to increase the site’s search engine rankings. Common off-page SEO actions include building backlinks, encouraging branded searches, and increasing engagement and shares on social media.

In other words: off-page SEO is all the stuff that you do off of your site to get Google and other search engines to see your website as trustworthy and authoritative.

Why Is Off-Page SEO Important?

Backlinks and other off-site signals still form the foundation of Google’s algorithm.

In fact, our 2020 search engine ranking factors study found a clear correlation between total backlinks and Google rankings.

Top ranking pages have more backlinks than lower ranking page

And Google has gone on the record saying that they still use PageRank.

Google still using PageRank

That said: links are only one part of off-page SEO. Google themselves state that they use other off-site SEO signals to size up your website.

Google uses other off-site SEO signals

For example, Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines largely relies on a site’s off-site reputation to figure out whether or not that site can be trusted.

(They call this “Reputation Research”).

“Reputation Research” includes looking at online reviews:

Google Guidelines on user reviews

Recommendations from experts:

Google Guidelines on expert sources

And mentions on authority news sites and Wikipedia.

Google Guidelines on authority sites

The bottom line? Links are by far the most important off-page SEO signal. But they’re one of many.

I’ll cover links and the other off-site factors that you need to know about in the rest of this guide.

But for now, it’s time to learn about…

On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO

On-page SEO is everything that you can directly control on your website, including content, title tags, keyword usage, SEO-optimized URLs, internal links and image alt text. Off-page SEO are actions that happen away from your website, like links and mentions on other websites.

For example, I published this complete list of seo tools a few years back.

Backlinko – SEO tools post

And to optimize that page, I used my main keyword in my title tag, URL, and a handful of times in my content.

SEO Tools – Keyword in content

I also sprinkled in synonyms and LSI keywords to help Google understand the content of that page.

LSI Keyword "best SEO software" in post

Even though that page was “perfectly optimized”, I knew that my job was far from done.

My target keyword for that page has an Ahrefs keyword difficulty score of 81.

Ahrefs – SEO tools – Keyword difficulty

Which meant, if I wanted to rank that page on the first page of Google for that keyword, I needed some serious off-page SEO.

Which is why I promoted that post on social media.

SEO Tools post – Promotion tweet

And used email outreach to build links directly to that page.

Because I combined on-page and off-page SEO, this page now ranks in the top 3 for that keyword.

SEO Tools – Google SERP

With that, let’s get into the strategies that you can use to improve your site’s off-page SEO.

CHAPTER 2:

Boost Off-Page SEO With Backlinks

Boost Off-page SEO With Backlinks

When it comes to off-page SEO, backlinks are SUPER important.

That said:

Building backlinks for off-page SEO is all about quality… not quantity.

And if you want the links you build to actually boost your rankings in the SERPs, they need to be authority links from related sites.

In this chapter I’ll show you 4 ways to build authoritative links that are working great right now.

Be a Data Source

A few months ago I was looking at the links pointing to Moz’s keyword research guide.

Backlinks to Moz Keyword Research Guide

And I noticed something SUPER interesting.

The vast majority of that page’s links cited a specific stat from that page (that long tail keywords make up 70% of all searches). Here’s an example:

Shopify longtail keywords quote from Moz

In other words: people didn’t link to the page because it was a piece of “high quality content”.

They linked in order to cite a stat on the page.

That’s when it hit me: What if I added more stats to my site? Would that get more people to link to me automatically?