Everyone wants their website to rank high on search engine result pages. SEO is one of the key ways to improve your website’s ranking. Strictly speaking, SEO is the act of optimizing your website’s visibility and footprint online. There are two types of SEO, namely on-site and off-page SEO. While on-site SEO includes all the optimizations that are done on the website, off-page SEO includes techniques and optimizations that happen outside your website. In this article, we will look at off-page SEO, to help you understand what it is and see how it can increase traffic to your website.
What is Off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO, also called off-site SEO, includes strategies, techniques and everything else done outside your website to improve its search engine rankings. Off-page SEO strategies include content marketing, link building, social media marketing, guest posting, video marketing, podcasting and more.
In short, we can include any activity that does not include optimizing your own website or adding content to it in off-page SEO. Done correctly, these and other aspects of off-page SEO can give search engines an idea of what people think about your website by signaling its authority and trustworthiness or the lack of both. Authority, trustworthiness and relevance play a critical role in your website’s ability to rank high on search engine result pages.
Now that you hopefully understand off-page SEO a bit better, how can you use it to drive traffic?
Use Link Building to Your Advantage
Although the number of links pointing to your website is no longer ranked highly by Google, it is still a great way to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website. Link building involves getting inbound links to your website. Inbound links help link your website to other websites to form a bridge between your website and other websites. This can help people come to your website through other websites, thereby increasing traffic.
Links pointing to your website, especially if they come from reputable websites, are still a powerful indicator to Google and other search engines that your website is a reliable authority on a subject. The reason they are no longer as highly regarded as they once were is that they are prone to abuse. However, inbound links are still used alongside other ranking signals to help rank websites.
There are two major ways to get inbound links. One is when people share or link to your content, which is why being an authority on a subject is so important. The other is seeking link building opportunities through websites that are like yours or that can include your link(s) somewhere in their content or on their website.
Content Marketing
Content marketing can be included as part of both on-page and off-site SEO strategies. Off-site content marketing involves publishing detailed and authoritative content outside your website. This can be in a publication, another website, survey, case study, or even social media.
The key behind successful content marketing that drives traffic is creating engaging and informative content. Such content, especially if it satisfies a need, is likely to be shared, thereby bringing more attention to your brand or website. Some publications and websites allow you to add a link to your website or other content, which is great for getting high-quality inbound links to your website.
When used alongside link building and social media, content marketing can also help your website rank higher, thereby increasing traffic.
Leverage the Power of Social Media
In the current world, over 95% of people visiting the internet have at least one social media account. While search engines like Google do not consider social media links and shares when ranking websites, they can still be leveraged to engage with your audience and drive traffic to your website.
Social media postings can increase the reach of your content and brand by acting as a discovery platform for your website and brand. Using social media as a customer service portal can also act as a door to brand promotion and advocacy, which helps existing and potential users and audiences discover your brand and website.
A strong social media presence also makes people feel as though your business or brand is open and approachable. When your brand seems friendly and approachable, people will often reward you with real engagement and shares. Both can attract attention, leading to more brand mentions, links and shares, all of which have a direct impact on your search engine rankings and website traffic.
Get into Podcasting
It seems like every brand has a podcast these days, and for good reason. Podcasts can be instrumental in not only driving traffic to your website but also in helping your website rank higher and in your brand’s growth. Podcasts are insanely popular, with over half of all Americans having listened to at least one podcast and over a third listening to a podcast at least once a month.
Podcasts have become an important marketing tool because of their ability to reach large audiences, directly leading to increased website traffic. One thing thought to be driving their reach is Google’s indexing and ranking of podcasts.
Much like any other content you can post on your website, Google is making it easier to discover podcasts covering certain topics. Because of this, podcasts are great for reaching new audiences, gaining visibility and sharing other avenues that can lead people to your website such as social media pages.
To make podcasting even more effective, businesses are advised to add transcriptions to their podcasts. This will convert the audio to text which can then be posted on your website or another website as content search engines can then pick that up and rank them on their result pages.
Off-page SEO has grown to include aspects of SEO that were not thought of as SEO in the past. New and old off-page SEO strategies can be used together to not only help websites rank higher, but to also increase their traffic massively.