If you’re new to SEO or you’ve been doing it for a while, then you know that SEO is a multistep process.
From On-Page SEO to Off-Page SEO, to Technical SEO, there are many different things you can do to score some edge points in the SEO game.
The better you are at all of these different areas, the better your website will rank on Google.
And who doesn’t love rankings?
However, one of the most underrespected, and also one of the most important ranking strategies is Off-Page SEO.
In a recent study, it was revealed that only about 20% of businesses invest in off-page SEO strategies, however, 50% of SEO experts say most of their results come from Off-Page SEO alone.
So it’s clear that a large majority of people doing SEO are missing a large chunk of potential growth, and it all comes from a proper off Page SEO strategy. In this article, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Off-Page SEO as well as the same strategies I use in my expert seo services company, https://levelu.co/.
SO…
What exactly is Off-Page SEO and Why Should You Care?
Off-Page SEO simply put, consists of all the different strategies you can do outside of your website to improve its rankings on Search Engine Result Pages(SERPs). Having a strong Off-Page strategy will tremendously improve the ranking power of your website, making it easier to dominate those keywords you want to rank highly first.
Some of you might be wondering… “why does off-page SEO exist? Why does Google consider outside elements when ranking a website, instead of just looking at the content itself?”
It’s a good question to ask and the answer shows itself in many different ways.
First, Google has far too much content, and its AI isn’t as smart as you would think to rank just on content quality alone.
Instead of developing a near-human level AI to read and decipher content, Google has opted to look for external signals such as backlinks and brand mentions across the internet to evaluate a website’s quality.
This leads me to my biggest point,
Given the absurd amount of content Google has to sift through, and how competitive SEO is…
If you want to rank high on Google, then YOU WILL need an Off-Page SEO strategy.
Google places a lot of value on Off-Page elements because it needs to be as efficient as possible while also delivering the best user experience.
Therefore, if you want to show up at the end of those SERPs, then you have to do what Google is actively looking for.
Now that I’ve shown you why Off-Page SEO is important, let me show you what you need to do and what a proper strategy would look like.
The Most Important Off-Page SEO Factors
Off-Page SEO is a complex topic filled with different layers that can all win you edge points. Much so, that some SEO companies specialize specifically on Off-Page SEO alone!
However, don’t stress yourself out about it, as with anything, 20% of the work you do will result in 80% of your results. For Off-Page SEO, the 20% you should care about are:
- High-quality backlinks from authoritative websites
- Ensure that your backlink profile looks natural
- Anchor text on your backlinks(ties in with #2)
Backlinks are a link from one website to another and are how Google organizes the world wide web. Google uses a computer AI called crawlers that go from website to website clicking on the links. If you can imagine it well, with one crawl run, Google can find A LOT of web pages and also evaluate the importance of them based on the quality of the backlinks.
Now, what determines the quality of a backlink?
1) A high-quality backlink comes from a website that:
- Receives a lot of traffic.
- Is related to your website’s niche
- Has links coming in from other high-quality websites that get traffic
That’s it.
It should go without saying, but you won’t find high-quality links in comment sections or by spamming them on social media. Spammy link tactics will instead get your website penalized, spoiling your SEO efforts.
This then brings me to my second point.
2) Your backlink profile needs to look natural
Google hates people who do SEO or anything that would artificially affect the results of their search algorithms. If they could, they would eliminate all SEO, but fortunately, that will be impossible so long as they use a predictable algorithm.
One of the easiest ways by far though, to actively declare to Google that you are doing SEO work on your website, is by having an unnatural-looking backlink profile. This means having a bunch of one type of link. For example:
- Have only comment links
- Having only dofollow links
- Having links only from extremely high authority websites
- Anything that a website that doesn’t do SEO, and instead ranks naturally wouldn’t have in their backlinks
This means you need to carefully audit your backlinks to ensure that nothing looks too suspicious because if you get caught, you can kiss your rankings goodbye.
Oh and you might be wondering, “but what if I do white hat SEO?”
Forget about it. Google also doesn’t like white-hat SEO and people simply use that terminology to imply “safer” SEO methods which Google is still against.
Now, once you have a natural backlink profile, you’ll also need a natural-looking anchor text profile.
Anchor text is the text that comes with the link and plays a surprisingly large role in what keywords you rank for.
Simply put, abusing this fact, and using keyword-rich anchor text will get you penalized as it makes it obvious you are doing SEO.
For the most optimal anchor text strategy, I recommend splitting your anchor texts like this:
- 20% general click here text. (click here, go now, buy now, visit this site)
- 20% keyword variations for what you want to rank for. If you use your keyword anchors too much, you will have the reverse effect on your rankings.
- 20% brand keywords. These are your brand name and variations of it. You typically want to point these to your homepage.
- 20% pure URL. Just link the naked URL of whatever you want to link to
- 20% partial keywords that you want to target. Only link to some part of the keyword and not the entire thing if it has multiple related words.
Using this strategy will ensure that your SEO efforts pay off, however, given the complexity and how easily it could blow up on your face, I advise you to find an SEO consultant. Consider hiring Levelu to do your Off-Page SEO, the only seo mount pleasant mi has that puts its money where its mouth is.