Off-page SEO, covers all SEO tactics that take place outside of your website - i.e. any tactics that you use that don't involve making changes to your own website or publishing content on your own siteThese signals help both search engines and users to gain a perception of your site's authority and are also used as key trust and relevance factors.

What Is Off-Page SEO?

<ul><li>Link Building</li><li>Brand Building</li><li>Content Marketing</li><li>PR</li><li>Local SEO (Google My Business & Citations (A citation is a mention of your business online that typically references not just your business name but also your name, address, & phone number))</li><li>Social Media</li><li>Forums</li><li>Influencer Marketing</li><li>Events</li><li>Guest Posting</li><li>Podcasts</li><li>Reviews</li><li>Content Syndication</li></ul>

Off-Page SEO Techniques

Learn the 13 Off-Page SEO techniques that work in 2020. Also, see why off-page is so important and the tactics that you need to be using if you want to rank on Google.

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Off-page SEO, in short, covers all SEO tactics that take place outside of your own website.

It is often thought to just be link building, but in reality, there are far more off-page SEO tactics that you should be using if you want to gain a competitive advantage.

Tactics such as brand building, citation building, content marketing, social media, and more all play an important part in a comprehensive SEO strategy.

But as a simple explanation of off-page SEO, this covers any tactics that you use that don't involve making changes to your own website or publishing content on your own site.

These signals help both search engines and users to gain a perception of your site's authority and are also used as key trust and relevance factors.

Think of it like this:

<ul><li>Your website = on-page SEO </li><li>Another site or platform = off-page SEO  </li> </ul>

But to complicate things further, you also often need to turn to technical SEO to rank on Google. To help to clarify the differences between these, let's explore these three core SEO approaches in more depth.

On-Page vs. Off-Page SEO vs. Technical SEO

Pretty much all SEO tactics can be categorized into one of three buckets:

<ul><li>On-Page SEO </li><li>Off-Page SEO </li><li>Technical SEO </li> </ul>

But what is the difference between these?

Quite simply, we can define these approaches as:

On-page SEO covers the tactics that you use on your site that help search engines to better understand and rank your content. From creating great content on your site, optimizing title tags, meta tags, and H tags to internal linking, image optimization, and more — these all fall under <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/on-page-seo/">on-page SEO </a>.

Off-page SEO includes those tactics that relate to activities carried out away from your own website. Link building is often considered to be the main off-page tactic, but this also includes tactics such as content marketing, social media, appearing on podcasts, landing reviews, building local citations, and more.

Technical SEO  covers those things that directly impact the indexing and crawling of your site by search engines. Some argue that this falls under on-page SEO. However, it is also widely considered a discipline in its own right: site speed optimization, structured data, canonicalization, hreflang, and more all class as technical SEO.

Without off-page SEO, you will struggle to rank for competitive search terms.

Think about off-page SEO as building your site's authority, and without this, your site won't outrank those that already have higher authority. And it is usually the case that content from higher authority websites ranks higher than those with lower authority.

And when you stop to think about it, it makes sense. This example helps you to understand the importance of off-page SEO. It is all about increasing your site's authority, something that often goes alongside building a brand.

Links are by no means the only off-page signals that Google's algorithm uses to rank a website, despite being perhaps the most important.

An off-page strategy that doesn't include link building is unlikely to drive the needed results, based on the fact that <a dir="ltr" href="https://searchengineland.com/now-know-googles-top-three-search-ranking-factors-245882" rel="nofollow">links are one of Google's top three ranking factors </a>.

But to think you can only focus on link building is a mistake. There are many other off-page SEO techniques and tactics that you should be using — they will not only help you to drive success from SEO but also help to build your brand.

13 Off-Page SEO Techniques That Work in 2020

Let's take a look at 13 different off-page tactics you can use to grow your brand and organic search traffic in 2020:

Link building should be the backbone of any off-page SEO strategy, given the weight of links in Google's algorithm, but it is important to understand how you should be approaching link building as an off-page tactic.

One of the key goals of off-page SEO is to build your business' authority. Links from authority websites help to position your own site as an authority — they are a vote of trust from one site to another.

The #1 goal of link building should be to earn quality links from authority sites. You should always focus on quality over quantity. It is important to understand what the link gap between your own site and your competitors looks like.

But there is a little more to link building as an off-page tactic than simply targeting authority sites (note: it is not easy to get authority sites to link to another, but with the right approach, it is absolutely possible).

Here are the three primary factors you should be considering with link building:

By now, hopefully, you already understand why the authority of links is so important. You can find the authority of any website that you are looking to earn a link from or to understand the authority of links that currently point to your domain using our own proprietary metric — <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/kb/747-authority-score-backlink-scores"> Authority Score </a>. But what exactly is AS, and what does it measure?

Authority Score is our compound domain score that grades the overall quality of a website and tells you how impactful a <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/what-are-backlinks/">backlink </a>from a site can be. The score is based on the following SEMrush data:

<ul><li>The domain’s quantity and quality (authority) of backlinks. </li><li>Quantity of referring domains and quantity of referring IPs. </li><li>Follow vs. nofollow links. </li><li>Organic search traffic (from our Organic Positions report). </li><li>The number of users (from our Traffic Analytics report). </li> </ul>

To gain insights into the authority score of current links, you can use the <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/analytics/backlinks/">Backlink Analytics </a>tool. You can view your site's links and their associated authority score on the 'backlinks' tab:

You will see that the authority score in the first column header 'Page AS.' The higher the score, the higher the authority of the link.

But what about when prospecting for new links?

You can run any domain through the Backlink Analytics tool, and you will see the AS for that domain, not just those that link to it. You will find this on the domain's overview tab:

Remember, the goal of link building should be to earn links from sites with a high Authority Score, and with the data available from these tools, you can layer these insights into your prospecting.

Another key metric of link building success is the number of linking root domains that point to your site, even above the number of backlinks. <a dir="ltr" href="https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking" rel="nofollow">Studies </a>have shown a clear correlation between the number of linking domains and higher rankings. Domain diversity should be a key focus as part of your strategy.

You can see the number of unique domains that link to your site using the referring domains tab of the Backlink Analytics tool.

You should always aim to land links from sites that topically align with your own. As an example, if you run a travel site, you should aim for the majority of the links that you earn to come from other travel sites; bloggers, online publishers (such as Lonely Planet), tourism boards, and the like. It makes sense.

Sites typically link to those that cover a similar topic, not those that aren't related. That said, it is OK to have some links that come from other topics if they are natural and make sense; just aim for the majority to be closely topically aligned.

But what about specific tactics that you can use to build and earn authority links?

You can check out our detailed guide to <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/link-building/">link building strategies that work in 2020 </a>to gain a detailed understanding of tactics that you could be using, but our favorites include:

<ul><li>Digital PR </li><li>Unlinked Brand Mentions </li><li>Resource Link Building </li><li>Newsjacking </li> </ul>

That said, there are a lot of effective tactics you can use to build great links, and diversifying your link profile should also be a key focus.

It is now a well-known fact that Google rewards brands.

And brand building activities should form a key part of not just your wider SEO and marketing strategy but also part of your approach to off-page SEO. And once again, it all hooks back to build your online authority, both for users and search engines.

But just how does brand building intersect with your SEO strategy, and what are the metrics of success?

Perhaps one of the strongest indicators that you are building your brand is an increase in brand searches.

You can see more insights from <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/brand-authority-as-an-seo-ranking-factor-semrushchat/"> our #SEMrushchat on this topic </a>.

This could be searches for your brand name, products, or a domain name.

To see how your branded searches have changed over time, head to the <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/analytics/keywordoverview/">Keyword Overview tool </a> and enter your brand name. You will see a 'trends' box that indicates how search volumes have changed over the past month.

You should also take a look at <a dir="ltr" href="https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US" rel="nofollow">Google Trends </a>to help track interest in your brand.

Again, enter your brand name and see how interest has changed over time; it is possible to look back as far as 2004.

There is another reason why it's so important to focus on brand-building efforts, too, and that's brand SERPs.

What are brand SERPs? These are the search results that show when someone searches your brand name.

As <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/brand-serps-you-should-be-tracking-improving/">Jason Barnard </a>writes...

"Search queries in the SERPs for your brand name are vital touch-points for both people and machines and are therefore absolutely essential to your business. You should be tracking, evaluating, and improving them consistently."

At first, you may consider these just to have a reputational impact, but there is a strong SEO consideration, too. Barnard continues:

"The first pages of results for the search query {Brand} indicate how well Google understands your brand, and the first 2-3 pages of results for the search query {Brand + review} indicate Google's assessment of your credibility."

Brand-building efforts help Google to understand your credibility, which is why it has become such an important off-page SEO tactic. When you build a brand, you will also find that you naturally earn links and mentions across the web, even without having to proactively work on these.

Off-Page SEO Tactic #3: Content Marketing

When we think of content marketing, it is all too easy to think of it only as an on-page SEO tactic — that being the creation and publishing of content that sits on your own website.

But, taking a holistic view, content marketing spans both on-page and off-page tactics. Publishing great content on your own site is only one part of content marketing; any content that you create and publish anywhere on the web falls under content marketing.

If you go ahead and write a <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/guest-blogging/">guest post </a>, that is content marketing. Publish an infographic that gets linked to from a top-tier newspaper? That is content marketing.

The appeal of using content marketing as a tactic is that the creation of great, engaging assets make it easier to focus on off-page factors. And this, typically, comes from the promotion of the content that you are creating — publishing great, engaging assets that others want to share and link to.

Common content marketing tactics that work well to promote to build off-page signals includes:

<ul><li>Blog posts </li><li>Infographics </li><li>Surveys, studies &amp; research papers </li><li>Whitepapers &amp; eBooks </li> </ul>

Content marketing, as a tactic, is closely intertwined with link building, social media, and PR, as well as also helping to build your brand.

Quite simply, if you have a great piece of content, tell people about it. You can use our <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/content-marketing/">Content Marketing Toolkit </a>to help you not only find popular topics that are gaining traction online but also find the most relevant industry media to promote your content.

For a long time, PR and SEO were seen as two totally different marketing disciplines, but in recent years, the lines have blurred, and the two have come together.

Digital PR is now the link building tactic of choice for many SEOs, given that it is the perfect way to earn authority links at scale. You can use PR tactics to promote a great story and corresponding linkable assets, and it is possible to earn significant volumes of links as a result.

In fact, <a dir="ltr" href="https://digitaloft.co.uk/digital-pr-success-study/" rel="nofollow">a recent study </a>highlighted that the average campaign earns links from between 10 and 24 unique linking domains.

PR contributes to off-page SEO signals in more ways than simply helping to build links. A great PR campaign can also:

<ul><li>Increase brand awareness and resultant brand searches. </li><li>Puts your business in front of your target audience and gets them talking about you. </li><li>Drives referral traffic. </li><li>Positions you as a thought leader in your industry and helps to build trust signals. </li> </ul>

Off-Page SEO Tactic #5: Local SEO (GMB & Citations)

While <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/what-is-local-seo/"> local SEO </a>is a complete discipline of SEO in its own right, there are certain elements that are key off-page SEO tactics — two are Google My Business and citations.

Google My Business plays a vital role in the online presence of pretty much any local business, and it is easy to forget that optimizing your page and getting it to rank on the map pack is actually off-page SEO.

GMB isn't your own website, and let's not forget that any efforts that focus on anything but your own site counts as off-page.

It has recently been reported that <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/local-seo-stats" rel="nofollow">46% of all Google searches are looking for local information </a>and that <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/advertising-channels/search/how-advertisers-can-extend-their-relevance-with-search-download/" rel="nofollow">4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find local information </a>. It is a simple fact that if it is not your business that is showing amongst local GMB results, it is one of your competitors.

Take a look at our <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-my-business/">ultimate guide to Google My Business for 2020 </a>to learn the tips and tricks to help you optimize your listing, and understand how to make the most of the platform as part of your off-page strategy.

A citation is a mention of your business online that typically references not just your business name but also your NAP (name, address, and phone number). Think of them as business listings.

If you are a local business looking to rank for geographically targeted search terms both on the standard SERPs or as part of the map pack, you simply cannot avoid the importance of citations, given that they are considered to be one of the main off-page ranking factors.

But one of the keys to success with citations is consistency.

Inconsistent citations demonstrate a lack of coherency, and, for that reason, it is important that you take the time to ensure that all of your NAP references match up.

You can use our <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semrush.com/listings-management/start/">Listing Management Tool </a>to audit your citations, find new opportunities, clean up duplicates, and manage reviews.

What Is Off-Page SEO? A Comprehensive Guide

What Is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO Techniques

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