May 1, 2023

The Most Detailed Off-Page SEO Checklist with 24 Strategies

Off-page SEO is a crucial factor in ranking higher in search engines. Having a good off-page SEO strategy is a must. But what is off-page SEO in the first place? And why is it called off-site SEO?

Off-page SEO refers to actions that affect your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs) that are not on your website.

These include many essential SEO elements that support on-page SEO and aid in website ranking.

Today we'll be browsing the off-page SEO checklist to get your site higher in search engine rankings than other sites.

Backlinks

An external website or other online source's URL that points to your content is known as a backlink. This link informs search engines that somebody else thinks your content is worthwhile. For your rankings, this is excellent news.

To promote these beneficial backlinks, you can take specific actions. List posts, quizzes, videos, infographics, and how-to articles draw more backlinks, per a Moz and BuzzSumo study.

Using Link Explorer, you can also conduct a link gap analysis.

Unlinked mentions

Nobody likes to see potential lost. Your brand or product may be mentioned in an article without a link to your website, known as an "unlinked mention.". You can benefit from these unconnected mentions by searching the Internet for them. Then request links to specific website pages from the Web managers.

You can use the Content Explorer tool to find articles that mention your brand. To ensure you receive backlinks from trustworthy websites, you can filter the results only to display websites with a high Domain Authority.

Internal linking

Internal linking is one of the most straightforward SEO strategies to increase traffic significantly. You might wonder why I included internal linking in an off-page SEO checklist before I get into it.

The correct response is that preserving the benefits external links provide for your website is crucial.

In other words, your website may contain pages linked to numerous authoritative, relevant websites. While that's fantastic for those pages, what about the rest of your website?

You can spread the authority across more areas of your site by internally linking from those high-authority pages to other relevant pages.

Here are some pointers for internal linking.

You should clearly understand which pages on your site have the most authority if you completed the first task in this post, which involved analyzing your link profile. When building internal links, those pages are the most valuable. Therefore, giving these pages top priority is a good idea.

Consider the layout of your website. Internal links effectively inform search engines that there is a connection between two pages. This implies that you should have a good reason for linking between your pages.

The best way to accomplish this is to consider how pages are related thematically. Try to link all your pages within one theme or category, or, in other words, what broad topics your site cover.

After finding the right content, you must include pertinent keyword phrases in your anchor text. This will increase the relevance of your page.

When your site gets more prominent, and it becomes harder to find anchor text in your topically relevant pages, you can use Google's advanced search to locate appropriate anchor text.

Competitor analysis

Understanding how your site stacks up against competing websites in the industry is critical if you want to use link profile analysis to boost your SEO. As a result, you must first identify the websites that compete with yours for users' attention.

By conducting a little SERP research, you can achieve this. Simply Google all your target terms and note the top websites that appear.

SERP analysis is practical if you only focus on a few keywords. However, it pays to use SEO tools to scale this up.

You can research how they promote their websites when you have a list of your direct rivals. For instance, to establish a benchmark for your website, try to determine how many links they have.

You can get an idea of how competitive your site is by contrasting the link profiles of your rivals to your own. This will enable you to decide whether link building is something you should concentrate on. Understanding which websites frequently link to articles in your niche will also be helpful.

It's crucial to realize that not all links to rival websites are appropriate for your website.

Fixing 404 errors

Along with internal linking, your company should concentrate on 404 errors, which are broken links. When a link is broken, your website's 404 page is the only place it can take you.

While these pages can keep visitors on your website by listing other pages pertinent to their needs, they need to be of more use to users and raise a red flag for web crawlers. Not to mention that broken links can harm your off-page SEO. A competitor may contact you if they discover a domain linking to your website through a broken link.

Due to that outreach opportunity, your company might lose future clients and a link. Find and fix any broken links as a result.

It would be best if you made it a habit to check for 404 errors and fix them immediately. You can find 404 errors by conducting an internal linking audit. You should run Screaming Frog once a week, once a month, or once every three months, depending on how much content you produce and how many people work on your website.

On-page SEO

Together, on-page SEO and off-page SEO can help your website rank highly in search results. Both, therefore, need your attention.

Your site won't perform to its full potential in terms of website traffic, online leads, and revenue if only one is optimized but not the other. You can follow this on page SEO checklist and concentrate on the practices listed below for on-page SEO.

  • Make use of long-tail keywords.
  • Add keywords to title tags and meta descriptions to improve them.
  • Obtain a healthy keyword density without overusing them.
  • Frequently release SEO content.
  • Eliminate redundant content.
  • Design a responsive or mobile-friendly website.
  • Uphold the accessibility of the website.
  • Boost page loading times.
  • For the highest level of website security, use HTTPS.

Link building options

Off-page SEO is the same as link building. Even though it's one of the most popular techniques for enhancing off-page SEO, it's frequently the most challenging because it calls for patience, expertise, and cooperation from people outside your control.

Fortunately, there are a few options available to you when it comes to link building, and they are:

  • Inactive links.
  • Outreach.
  • Local references.
  • Advertisements that were purchased.
  • Blogging by others.
  • Social networking.

You'll probably employ multiple link-building techniques in your company. But your company and you will determine which ones you use. For instance, you could concentrate on broken links and outreach if you need more time or resources to guest blog.

Weigh your options using this section of the off-page SEO checklist. Determine strategically which tactics will benefit you the most. Be honest with yourself about your capacity, though.

Perhaps you would like to guest blog, but given your current obligations, it isn't a practical plan — unless you choose to work with a digital marketing agency.

Determine reliable sites in your niche.

It would help if you first looked at which domains dominate your industry when looking for a site to request backlinks from or to write guest blogs for. This could include official government websites or academic institutions, which drive high-quality traffic to your website.

Links from websites pertinent to or nearby your website are also preferable to links from pages unrelated to your brand. Considering who might see and click on your backlink from other websites makes this particularly important. You'll first want readers generally interested in your content to see links pointing to your website.

Guest posting or outreach efforts

Ensure you're investing in the right domain before submitting your content as outreach material for other websites. Do extensive research on the website where you will be guest blogging. See what kind of content they produce and their target audience.

Ensure you're targeting a particular audience more likely to visit your website and purchase from your brand rather than submitting a guest post merely for exposure.

Citations and Directories

Local citations and directories provide a grey area in off-page SEO. Many businesses, especially those new to off-site SEO, will unintentionally misuse and abuse this link-building strategy by submitting their website to spammy and dubious directories.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't use local citations and directories in your off-page SEO.

It would help if you used directories like Google My Business, for instance, as it is a reliable directory that significantly affects local SEO or the visibility of your business in local search results. Use these pointers to get going if you choose to add this tactic to your off-page SEO checklist:

Make a list of reliable local citations and directories.

Create a profile or submit your website for review.

Give the most recent name, address, and phone number (NAP) for your business.

Regularly update directory and neighbourhood citation information.

Your company will usually only appear on the most well-known directories, such as Google My Business, Yelp, and Apple Maps. However, based on your sector, you might come across some reliable sector-specific directory sites that could benefit your off-page SEO. This link-building strategy has a drawback in that it needs upkeep.

Like on Google My Business, you want your listing consistent and accurate. If your listing, particularly one that receives a lot of traffic like Google My Business, shares incorrect information, like your hours, it may result in dissatisfied customers and lost leads. A local citation management tool, like LocalFX or Moz Local, can be helpful in this situation.

These tools automatically update your company's information across hundreds of local directories. You can save a ton of time using these tools because you only need to enter your information once, such as your new hours.

Shareable quality content

By producing unique, pertinent content that readers and web managers want to share, you can persuade other domains to link to your website. This could take the form of market research or infographics that are featured as guest posts on other websites.

Web admins will undoubtedly want your website's sector-specific content if it offers fresh insights into your market or target audience. Original content can help your site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), in addition to appealing to consumers. Search engines penalize websites with duplicate content or articles that resemble one another.

Reputation on review sites

You can understand how customers view you by looking at your performance on independent review websites. When customers leave reviews about your brand, search engines are alerted that you are a reputable product supplier.

Consumers pay attention to how you respond to reviews, whether they are positive or negative. If you do, it increases consumer and brand trust, which increases your chances of ranking highly.

Broken Link Building and Reclaim Lost Links

You must move quickly to recover a link if you have lost it. Understanding why you lost the link is the first step, though. There are generally two reasons why you might have lost a connection:

  • The associated webpage was removed.
  • Having been removed your link has been removed from the linking page.

There is little you can do if the page is removed. Your page is no longer necessary for the linking website. Your link might have been accidentally released if the page had been updated. If that's the case, get in touch with the site's owner right away.

Time is of the essence because they just finished working on the post. You, therefore, stand a much better chance of persuading them to edit an earlier post.

Needs to be more link tracking. Perhaps some SEO automation would be helpful. The Rank Ranger Link Manager's email notification setup is a simple fix for this issue. Doing this lets you track your links and detect any missing links without doing additional work.

Reply to Haro Requests

If successful, you might obtain links from high-authority pages using this method, one of the simplest ways to build connections. HARO is a website created to assist journalists in locating knowledge from subject matter experts.

Create a source account to get going. As soon as you do that, HARO will send you a daily summary of the content requests journalists and website owners have made.

You have to respond to these inquiries consistently, and if your responses are high calibre, you might even get links back to your website. Remembering that requests from journalists are time-sensitive is crucial when doing this. As a result, quick action is required if you want to succeed.

The only drawback to this tactic is that it only allows you to create links to your website's home page rather than specific web pages.

Anchor text

Ensure the anchor text you use when adding backlinks to your outreach post and creating internal links on your website is appropriate for the page you are linking to. The text that is underlined and serves as an anchor for links to other pages is known as anchor text.

What the destination is all about is reflected in this text. Before clicking on the link, readers and crawlers evaluate the relevance of your anchor text. Your chances of ranking higher in SERPs increase when your anchor texts are relevant.

Social media in SEO

You are losing out on many opportunities if you are a web publisher and are not active on social media. The reason is that if any traffic is generated when you publish content online, it typically takes time for that content to rank and gain visibility.

This means that if you've produced a high-quality blog post or video intended to advance your business, leaving it and hoping for traffic in the future is a complete waste of time. Instead, please try to present it to your audience as soon as possible. Effective social media use can drive hundreds of visitors to your website.

Furthermore, social media can help your SEO even though it only offers no-follow links.

How?

You can: with social media.

  • Recognize the types of materials that will interest your audience.
  • Create brand awareness to boost branded organic traffic.
  • Get your content in front of a specific audience to improve your chances of acquiring natural links.

Google has also always crawled social media websites. Google can now use that data to better "understand" your brand as it becomes more sophisticated. Google can more accurately represent your brand in the SERPs as it better understands the brand's entity.

The implication is that you should have a well-planned social media strategy and allocate time to putting it into practice.

Forums, off-site discussions. And comment sections

Off-page SEO aims to draw attention to your business outside of your website. One way to accomplish this is to participate in off-site forums that are pertinent to your audience or brand.

Participating in Twitter trends or threads, asking questions on forums, and responding to questions about your product on discussion threads are a few examples.

In those circumstances, you can engage your customers in conversation and provide them with a solution by pointing them to a page on your website. Your website will become more regarded as authoritative and trustworthy as more people visit it.

Local SEO

This tactic entails increasing your visibility in Google's local search results.

Ensure that the directories consistently display your company's name, phone number, and website address. Additionally, updating this information as soon as possible is critical if any of it changes.

You can improve your presence in the SERPs and develop your off-page SEO by taking control of these platforms. (Check here for more.)

RSS feed subscription box

Every visitor to your website is a significant victory. However, only some websites can succeed in SEO over the long term based on new visitors. You need to turn new visitors into devoted repeat customers to draw in a steady stream of traffic.

Because of this, you should entice visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. Users can watch your website using this feature and a feed reader.

RSS feeds are already supported by default on all WordPress websites. By adding your site's URL followed by "/feed," you can view this feed.

You can encourage users to sign up for your RSS feed by including an RSS icon on your website. We advise placing this icon in your website's recurring sections, like the sidebar or footer, for the most significant impact.

To manage the content that appears in your RSS feed, you can also create a customized RSS feed.

Build trust

Users experiencing satisfying interactions is the aim of search engines. In their search results, they consequently frequently give high priority to trustworthy, reputable sites.

Search engines use Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) to determine a site's credibility. While PA only refers to one particular webpage, DA is the authority for the entire website.

The good news is that the many methods we've discussed will raise your DA and PA. Getting backlinks and posting as a guest on reputable websites, in particular, will increase how trustworthy people perceive you to be.

However, backlinks from spammy websites can lower your DA and PA. In light of this, watch these rankings using a program like Moz's Link Explorer.

You can use Google Search Console's disavow links tool if you encounter spammy links.

Build relationships with influencers and industry figures.

It is much simpler to contact business leaders thanks to social media platforms. These people will be more likely to interact with you if you cultivate a good relationship with them. Even sharing your content with their followers could happen during these interactions.

Even if these influential people don't explicitly endorse your content, any interaction with them will be positive for your website. These interactions influence other social media users to visit your website. You may receive additional traffic due to these visits from various sources.

We advise following all the essential industry leaders in your specialized area. Then, you can watch for chances to interact with these people.

It also helps to establish connections with reputable individuals on other platforms, like the comment sections of their websites. This diversification can significantly increase your chances of cutting through the clutter and forging personal connections with influencers.

Paid Promotion

When promoting content and building links, paid advertising is frequently ignored. The explanation is that advertisers prefer to spend money on advertisements that result in sales.

This is a pertinent point, but more often than not, getting your top-of-the-funnel content in front of a specific audience could have a positive impact, especially if that content is a strategic component of a carefully considered sales funnel.

Social media is a prominent place to advertise content. Social media is fantastic because it enables you to target customers who fit your niche.

Nevertheless, promoting blog content with Google Ads is a lesser-known tactic. Because only a few websites use it, it may be to your advantage. Additionally, the low level of competition usually translates into a low cost per click because Google Ads operate on an auction system.

Sharing your documents

Several websites create documents. These could include research and white papers presentations, ebooks, polling data, and user manuals. You can upload any independent resources you may have to third-party document-sharing websites.

Depending on your chosen platform, you can link to your website from within the document. Your external link-building strategy may benefit significantly from including this URL placement. If you are interested in off-site SEO, this top Singapore SEO Agency is for you!

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ABOUT THE WRITER
Thomas Tay
SEO Head at Khepri Digital’s Singapore branch. An SEO nerd by day, he is responsible for the research & development to assess the impact and changes in Google algorithms. His work powers the processes behind Khepri Digital’s SEO manual. When not looking at SEO experiments, he tends to be around the Northern Area of Singapore, chomping on Satay and Chicken wings.