Both on-page SEO and off-page SEO have a big impact on your rankings in the search results. It’s difficult if not impossible to put together an SEO strategy without a focus on both these areas. Both local SEO and national SEO benefit from on-page and off-page SEO.

I am going to go over 5 important off-page SEO factors that you can focus on when implementing an SEO strategy. If you have your on-page SEO in place, then implementing these off-page SEO strategies will help improve your rankings in a big way.

Link Building

Link building is the most well-known and common form of off-page SEO. It’s one of the most important SEO ranking factors in general, so it’s important to know about.

Link building is the process of convincing other websites to link to one of your pages within one of their pages. The reason this is a ranking factor is because it shows search engines that the linking site trusts your website. It essentially acts as a “vote” that they think your content should be noticed.

With this being one of the most important ranking factors, it’s important than you include link building in your off-page SEO strategy. There are many ways to do this, but most methods are time consuming.

My favorite method of link building is to try to get similar links that your competitors have. I especially like this method if your competitors are outranking you in the search results. If they are, there is a reason they are, and there is a good chance that it is because they have more high-quality links than you do.

Using tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush will allow you to see what backlinks different websites have. The best way to get those links is to try to determine how they got those backlinks. If they did a guest post to get that link, it might be a good idea to reach out to that site and see if they would be willing to accept a guest post from you as well.

Promoting Content on Social Media

If you use social media, it’s a great idea to promote your content on the platforms that you are on. If you are not on social media, then you are missing out on some opportunities to improve your rankings and get your content noticed.

Promoting your content on social media does a few great things for your website.

1. It gets your content noticed
2. Leads to more potential backlinks
3. Increases social shares of your content

All these benefits are going to make a difference in the traffic you receive and help improve your search rankings.

The more you promote your content, the more people that are going to see it and notice it. You could have a great piece of content, but if nobody sees it in the first place, then it won’t matter.

The more people that notice and like your content, the better the chance that they will want to link to your website from their own website. Since this is one of the most important ranking factors, getting these backlinks will help your site out a lot.

While social shares are not a confirmed ranking factor, a lot of website owners believe it is a ranking factor. If you are able to get more social shares for your content, you could improve your rankings, or at the very least see more traffic coming from social media to your site.

Linking out to other high-quality websites

Linking out to high-quality websites is technically an on-page strategy, but it has off-page SEO effects, which is why I included it on this list.

Not only do you want to provide good resources for your own website visitors but linking out to other high-quality websites will help improve your SEO. Most high-quality websites have some sort of SEO strategy in place. This means that they most likely monitor their backlinks and which websites are linking to their content.

The reason this is beneficial for you, is because if you are including their resource in once of their pages, there is a good chance they will either send a link back your way or share your article on social media. Both of which would be beneficial for your SEO.

To go even further with this and to make sure that website sees that you linked to them, you should find their email address and just let them know that you linked to their page and that they should check it out. Don’t ask for a link back or share, because that will sound too “pitchy”. If you just let them know about it and don’t ask for anything in return, they might return the favor.

Guest Blogging

I think that guest blogging is a pretty powerful tool. This is another method that can help your off-page SEO in a variety of ways:

• Improves your authority
• Gives you more exposure
• Gives you some referral traffic
• Can potentially give you backlinks

The most important part about guest blogging is finding the right sites to guest blog on, and making sure that you provide a useful resource to them. They aren’t going to want to publish your blog post if you put together a low-quality blog post with the sole intention of getting a backlink to your website.

When done right, I think guest blogging is a great trade for both sides. You provide them with a high-quality blog post, and they let you utilize their platform for more exposure, traffic, or a backlink.

Answering questions on forums

Forums like Yahoo Answers and Quora are great places to get some exposure for yourself and your website. The best part about it is relatively easy to do.

Most forums give you the ability to search for topics. I would recommend searching for topics that you know you can answer questions on. Start off by answering a few questions per day and providing as much value as you can for those users.

The more questions you answer if high-quality answers, the more you will be seen as an authority figure. When it makes sense, feel free to link back to your own website within your answers. This also gives your content some more exposure. Most of these forums will “Nofollow” your links which means they will likely not affect your rankings. Your goal here is to provide value and increase exposure for yourself and your blog though, so that is no problem.

Takeaways

Off-page SEO is just as important as On-Page SEO, if not more important. My favorite off-page SEO strategies include:

• Link building
• Promoting content on social media
• Linking out to other high-quality websites
• Guest blogging
• Answering questions on forums

Including these strategies into your complete SEO strategy will be sure to help you improve your rankings and receive more traffic to your website.