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SEO in general has grown very competitive over the years. It’s definitely harder ranking now than it was a few years ago and this trend won’t be stopping anytime soon. Every website owner has to bring their A-game if they want their website to get a nod from Google and this means optimizing your site to the fullest.
This article offers you tips on things you can do to get your page noticed by others and also by Google.
Before we get into the strategies though, let’s first define off-page SEO.
Most people assume that off-page SEO refers to having external links pointing to your site, but in all honesty, off-page SEO is more than that.
Any effort applied away from your website to improve your site’s ranking is considered off-page SEO.
So, let’s say that you write a really great piece of content and an influencer in your niche retweets a link to your content, then would be considered off-page SEO.
Now that’s out of the way, here are some things you can do to improve off-page SEO.
Work on Your Internal Linking Strategy
It might sound strange, however, if you want your off-page SEO to work effectively, you’ll need to enhance your internal linking strategy. When someone clicks on a link back to your site, you want to make them stick around for longer, and you achieve that by providing them with links that point to other pages on your site.
Consistently Create High-Quality Content
When writing your content, try and outdo all your competitors. You can achieve this by conducting your own studies and sharing the results with your targeted audience. Use various forms of multimedia such as attractive infographics, embedded videos, and other customized graphics that give your website a professional look.
By offering high-quality content on your site you encourage both influencers and your site’s traffic to share your page on their social media channels. Over time, you might find that you’ve become an influencer in your niche and others look up to you for reliable and comprehensive content.
Build A Strong Social Media Presence
Even though social media does not have a direct influence on ranking, but it certainly has a role in off-page SEO.
So, how do you go about this?
Basically, always ensure that you publish your content on social media channels where you have a presence. So you could promote your content on Facebook or LinkedIn. Because your article isn’t mediocre, it ends up generating shares and links which will have a direct impact on how well your site gets ranked.
Connect With Influencers
An influencer is anyone who has a cult-like following. A good example here would be Kylie Jenner, with a simple tweet she managed to wipe off over $1 Billion off Snapchat’s value. As incredibly insane that might sound this is the kind of power that influencers have.
Even though you may not be able (or afford) to get the Kardashian clan to promote your business on social media, there are influencers in your niche that can cooperate with you in promoting your brand and website.
Most website owners make the mistake of reaching out to influencers based on the number of followers they have.
Even though numbers matter they aren’t the only factors. How much the influencer’s followers engage with them as well as the content that they put out is a more important metric to use.
This means that if an influencer tweets a lot but doesn’t receive many retweets, they probably aren’t as influential as you think despite having a large following.
When you get connected to an influencer, you should realize that you’ve just opened a gateway to a whole new audience which might be a make or break kind of deal. It therefore pays to put in a lot of thought into the process of getting in touch with influencers.
There’s a 3-step process for reaching out to influencers:
- Discovering influencers
- Getting in touch with them
- Convince them to partner with your brand
Though there are a few steps the process is time and resource-intensive. To ease off your load you can use tools such as Followerwonk and BuzzSumo.
Comment and Interact On Forums and Blogs
Don’t get me wrong I’m not encouraging you to go spam someone’s blog. If you want to establish your name as well as your brand, you’ll need to get comfortable with the idea of giving your opinion about various subject matter related to your industry.
Of course, in order to do so, you’ll need to be well versed in whatever topic you’re giving your opinion on. Over time, people will begin to relate to you as the go to person for useful insights.
But don’t just leave it at that. Interact with like-minded people on forums such as Quora and Reddit. Engaging with others in forums will lead to your name getting recognized and will make it much easier to connect with influencers.
Create an Outreach Campaign
Most people make the mistake of thinking that by creating a high quality piece of content they’ll draw in a lot of traffic to their website.
While this is partly true, it’s not the whole truth. One of the first things you need to do to ensure that your content does well with the masses is that you’ll have to let them know that it exists. That is, you’ll have to promote it.
You’ll need to run an outreach campaign.
Outreach campaigns vary based on the outreach campaign that you’re trying to run. So for instance, if you want to reach out to influencers in your niche who run niche websites, you’ll need to find their email addresses and then pitch the content to them.
If the influencers you’re targeting have never heard of you, you will need to warm them up by commenting on their most recent blogs or you could send them a direct email introducing yourself and letting them know that you’re a huge fan of their work.
Guest Blogging
For the longest time guest blogging has been the way webmasters get other sites to link to them. Thankfully, this is still the case. When used in combination with other methods guest blogging can be a very powerful way of working on your off-page SEO.
To make sure that you get a reasonable response rate to your emails when you solicit for a guest post opportunity, you need to whittle down your prospective lists of websites to only include websites that allow guest posts.
Every now and then you might get a positive response from a site that doesn’t solicit guest posts, however those kinds of sites tend to be the exception and not the rule.
Once you’ve reached out to these site owners let them know introduce yourself and point to blogs on your own site that showcase your expertise and let them know that you’d like to partner with them.
Some sites require that you pay for a guest post opportunity, but our recommendation is don’t. Chances are there’s a Google algorithm that will catch up with such sites and make any links you receive from them toxic.