A search engine optimization strategy can be divided into two categories. They are on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are crucial for your digital marketing journey. It is impossible to survive in the digital world without these two SEO types. In this article, we are going to focus on off-page SEO.
So, what is off-page SEO? Off-page SEO refers to all the measures that are taken outside a website to improve its search engine ranking. Many people think off-page SEO and link buildings are one and the same. However, the fact is that off-page SEO is beyond link building. Link building is just a subset of off-page SEO. In this blog post, we are going to list the top off-page SEO strategies.
1. SEO and social media combination
The search engine bots crawl social media pages and web pages in a different manner. SEO experts say that the highly engaged social media pages, with tremendous share, tend to do better. In simple words, the more shares your posts receive the more you are benefited.
Do not focus solely on SEO. The search engines like Google take social signal as an important factor for ranking your site. So, SEO and social media marketing should be your ideal combination.
If you aim for higher visibility, you should run multi-channel marketing strategies. Do not forget to post the links to relevant news websites. Do not just limit yourself to Facebook promotions. Run the same campaign across email, mobile, PPC, and other social media platforms. It is a good idea to do A/B testing. Doing so will always evolve your campaigns.
2. Mobile App Streaming
Mobile friendly sites and mobile applications are valuable digital marketing tools. They both are different from each other. They both have different roles to play in a digital marketing strategy. Mobile sites serve the purpose of bringing in new customers. Whereas, mobile apps serve a different purpose.
Mobile apps are created to retain and reward existing customers with a steady stream of content. Here the main purpose is to improve brand loyalty. You might already know that more than half of the traffic comes from mobile devices. Google’s App streaming service is a life saver. It shows relevant content from apps without downloading anything. Since 85% of the time is spent by an individual on consuming content within apps, you have a great chance to retain the current customers and improve brand loyalty.
3. Work with influencers
Let us understand what exactly is influencer marketing? It is a process of identifying, researching, and supporting the people who can drive your brand’s message to a larger market. Influencer marketing is beyond off-page SEO. If done correctly, you can even improve your online reputation.
Here are the three steps involved in influencer marketing.
Identify an influencer: There are millions of influencer. Not every one of them is going to suit your business. Pick the one who belongs to your niche and has your target audience.
Reach out: Once you finished with making the list of influencers, reach out to them. Explain your business goals, and know how they are going to achieve them.
Convince them to participate: The last step is to convince them to share content. Most of the influencers can create fresh content for you. It is a good idea to leave some part of the content creation job to influencers.
4. Convert brand mention into links
Is your band growing? Is your audience talking about your brand, and mentioning it on the Internet? If yes, there is good news.
Many people mention your band name in their posts or comments. However, they forget to add the link to your site. These brand mentions are a great opportunity to build links. Here are the three steps to follow.
Identification: Identify how people mention your brand name. In most of case, it is your brand name. However, in some cases, it may be an abbreviation or acronym. So, it is good to make the list of all the words used by your audience to mention your name.
Discover mentions: Once you identify the words, you can use the online tools and discover the brand mentions. Social Mention, Hootsuite, Mention, Buzzsumo, and Talkwalker are some amazing tools that you can use to discover brand mentions.
Reach out: Once you have discovered brand mentions, reach out and ask them to add the link to your webpage.
5. Blog commenting
Although not many people follow this SEO best practice, blog commenting is one of the easiest and effective off-page strategies. It establishes a strong relationship between blog, bloggers, and readers. However, it is not a good idea to do blog commenting only for the sake of links. Dropping too many comments embedded with links is considered spam. Did you know? Many people still use bots to leave bulk comments on blogs. Google penalizes your website for such an activity. Forget higher search engine ranking, you will lose your existing ranking.
Whenever you add comments on a blog, make sure they appear natural. Ensure your comment adds value to the blogger and readers both. People will follow your link, only if your comment has something interesting to say.
6. Gain online reviews
Increasing your review count can benefit your business in two ways. That is, it improves online reputation management and SEO. Yes, when it comes to reviews, quantity matters more than quality. Ten 4 star reviews are better than two 5 star reviews. Therefore, gaining more and more online reviews is one of the best practices in ORM.
Not many know that online reviews do improve search engine ranking and overall SEO efforts. You should not ignore reviews, especially if you are running a local business. So, always encourage your happy customer to leave a review in popular business review platforms. Furthermore, post the link to review page in social media, send a follow-up email with review link, and provided discount coupons to the lucky reviewers. These are the best ways to improve the number of reviews.
7. Answer questions
If you are selling a product or service, it is quite natural for people to have some queries. Although one can create a frequently asked questions section on your webpage, you may not help all your customers. These frequently asked questions are very general and address only common issues. In reality, consumer queries need a comprehensive answer.
Therefore, answering questions on question-answer platforms has become one of the vital off-page SEO strategies. So, have an active presence on websites like Quora, eHow, Reddit, and Yahoo answers. Apart from links, the other advantages of answering questions are as follows:
Establishes you as an industry expert
Improves consumer relationship
Strengthens your online reputation
Better brand visibility and brand loyalty
8. Guest posting still works
“Guest posting is dead” is one of the craziest SEO myths we have. However, the fact is that it is one of the best methods to build links.
Although guest posting improves your search engine ranking, it should not be your only aim. Before you begin with guest posting, define your purpose. Once you have defined the purpose, make strategies to achieve it.
You should aim to give fair, actionable, original, relevant, and helpful content. These should be your top priority and not links to your website. Guest posting is done to bring in new customers. If you do not do it in a way it is done, then you are compromising your business goals.
9. Blogging
Blogging is one of the most popular and effective off page SEO strategies we have. Blog posts give your visitors an opportunity to come back to your website again and again. Similar to guest posting, be precise about the goals you want to achieve through blogging. Optimize your blog, and promote it in blog directories and blog search engines.
Your job doesn’t end after posting the articles. You should try to improve audience interaction. That is, make sure you reply to the comments of your readers. Also, do not forget to add social buttons. It gives your readers an option to share your content on social media. Promote your blogs on social media, it is the best method to gain huge traffic within no time.
10. Explore different types of content
No matter what type of business you own, or what is your business size, you will have a variety of potential customers. Some like to read plain text, some likes images, and others like videos. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to satisfy all your visitors. So, it is not a good idea to stick only to the text content.
Explore different kinds of content such as infographics, GIF, videos, memes, audios, etc. According to the latest trend, more and more people are shifting towards the videos. So, it is good to create content in more than one form. It gives you the opportunity to explore all the platforms such as Facebook, Quora, Pinterest, Youtube, etc. In the end, it helps you to have strong brand visibility.
