What is Off-Site SEO?

When paired with strong on-site SEO, off-site SEO can help strengthen your brand’s authority and credibility online. 

Here, you’ll find:

• How to define off-site SEO
• What elements fall under this SEO umbrella
• Red flags to look out for
• Expert tips on maintaining healthy off-site SEO

There are three main pieces that make up a complete search engine optimization (SEO) strategy: on-site, technical, and off-site. On-site SEO includes things like content. Technical SEO includes alt text, meta descriptions, and site architecture. Then there’s off-site SEO.

Below, HawkSEM Director of Marketing Strategy Maria Smart helps explain everything you need to know about this vital SEO pillar.

What off-site SEO is

Also called off-page SEO, off-site SEO covers all the SEO tactics that take place outside of your own website. (Tactics on your own site are considered on-site SEO, for obvious reasons.) 

As Moz explains, optimizing for off-site ranking factors involves improving search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.

What elements factor into off-site SEO

Some elements of off-site SEO are things you have a degree of control over. Others may be out of your hands, though you can attempt to influence them. 

As HubSpot explains, this includes but is not limited to things such as:

• Backlinks
• Brand building
• Citation building
• Content marketing
• Video marketing (YouTube)
• Forums
• Local SEO
• Review management

How can you help influence good off-site SEO? Maria says that optimizing your citations is a great start. You can’t exactly control reviews published about your company, other than trying to offer the best customer experience possible. But what you can do, particularly with negative reviews, is mitigate, respond, and try to take the conversation offline.

The same goes for social profiles like YouTube and Google My Business pages. It’ll benefit your off-site SEO to clean up any duplicate efforts and know how your profiles look on the search engine results page (SERP).

Pro tip: Consider creating a recurring reminder or calendar alert to stay on top of profiles and check in on them at regular intervals if possible. This way, you can be sure all of your pages have the most up-to-date images, contact info, operating hours, and more.

How off-site SEO benefits your brand

Off-site SEO is an important component of a well-rounded SEO plan. It addresses a host of important ranking factors that Google considers when evaluating your website’s trustworthiness beyond authoritative content and having a technically healthy site. 

Social media signals such as likes and followers can also be considered off-site SEO, as well as guest posting, link building, press releases and the like, Maria adds. Basically, all of these elements come together to help paint a picture of your business in online spaces outside of your website.

Effective ways to maintain good off-site SEO

Luckily, there are strategic steps you can take to maintain healthy off-site search engine optimization that shouldn’t consume too much of your time. 

Here are some ways to keep yours in good standing:

• Monitor your social presence – Respond to reviews, update profiles, and add new photos when applicable.
• Join and participate in forums and relevant communities – Find out where consumers in your field are gathering online and having discussions so you can add your own thoughts and connect with potential new customers.
• Guest post on relevant websites and attempt to garner backlinks in the process – While some experts argue that simply guest-blogging to get a link isn’t efficient, we say it can be worth it in certain circumstances. Just make sure you’re creating highly relevant content that provides actual value for the reader.
• Link building – Reach out as often as you can to relevant sources to get the placement you want in their articles or on their website.
• Create and syndicate press releases – Press releases help you promote new solutions, business changes, and industry insights. (They also include a backlink when possible.)
• Local presence – Be sure to maintain related citations in places like Google My Business and Bing Places.
• Consider creating infographics – This type of content can be a source of engagement that can be easily shared on social media. To get good links, you need good engaging content, including graphics.

Pro tip: According to Ahrefs, “Google takes into account many off-page factors when deciding if and where to rank web pages. Links are one of those factors, but there are many others. For that reason, it’s challenging to rank on the merit of your content alone.”

Red flags to keep an eye on

When you’re assessing the current health of your SEO, Maria says there are a few things in particular to look out for. 

These include:

• Not ranking well for branded terms 
• A backlink profile that is small and not authoritative or relevant
• No local presence online
• Poor social engagement
• A website with low domain authority
• Online reviews that are poor, non-existent, or even just unanswered

Off-site SEO is affected by all of these things. Working to take care of these issues can make your business look more authoritative to search engines, since all of these “signals” get calculated into your overall domain authority, whether your company is new or established.

The takeaway

It’s clear that off-site SEO is just as important as its on-site and technical counterparts. The tricky thing is that off-site elements are a bit harder to control. 

However, when you know the best practices and what common missteps to look out for, you can include off-site SEO maintenance in your overall SEO plan and know that you’re being intentional about keeping yours in a good place.