One of the primary activities of an SEO campaign is Off-Page SEO. The simplest definition is that it is the work we do away from your website to help your organic search engine rankings.

For that reason, you must first accept that any SEO which occurs is not always fully under your control, for the simple fact that it involves websites and online properties that are owned and controlled by other people. That being said, you will find that most website owners are happy to cooperate with your SEO efforts.

A question that is frequently asked is why Off-Page SEO is so important. If you think about it, you can do all the optimisation you like on your website and that is certainly desirable in terms of SEO. But, whilst that might tell Google what your website is relevant for and show it that your website has lots of informative content, in isolation, it gives Google no measure of the authority or popularity of your site.

To do so, Google needs to look at other websites and locations online and what they find there is where the importance and authority of your website will be established. These are critical ranking factors when it comes to them determining where your website is going to appear in their results.

Compared to on-page there are not as many activities that can be undertaken to boost a website’s Off-Page SEO. This does not make it any less important, but for many, it may simplify the whole process of Off-Page SEO. There are basically three areas that deserve focus, and these are branding, social media, and link building

Google is a great lover of brands and making yours bigger and better will certainly not do any harm if done the correct way. In Google’s eyes, brands are seen as trustworthy, and any business whose brand is strong is also regarded as being more reliable. This plays perfectly into Google’s desire that its search results are high quality as possible.

With this in mind, any Off-Page SEO campaign needs to include strategies for your brand being mentioned in reviews, articles and social media, even if that is done without a backlink. Google’s crawlers are so sophisticated that they can pick up these brand signals and establish how that brand is perceived online.

Social media is something that many businesses do poorly, and in doing so they miss a huge opportunity, not only to build backlinks but enhance their brand too. Google may not place as much weight on social media as some other factors, but it does help with SEO and should certainly be part of your Off-Page SEO campaign that you craft with your SEO agency of choice.

Backlinks are what many people solely regard as Off-Page SEO, and it is certainly the most important aspect of it. Backlinks are one of Google’s top 3 ranking factors so it is little wonder that so much emphasis is placed upon them. Unfortunately, most businesses get it wrong, and go out and try to create as many backlinks as they can, with no thought or strategy to it. This can do way more harm than good.

The reason for that is that Google is as much interested in where the links are coming from, as the number of them. Further to that, they do not want to see countless spammy links coming from spam websites, and if they do, you can expect the website to quickly drop down the rankings.

The answer is a properly thought-out and structured backlink-building strategy that looks for links in a variety of ways, including established, high-authority sites, as well as on sites that are reputable, but maybe not as established. The types of backlinks should also vary to include raw URLs, links to the domain, links with anchor text, and some no-follow links too. The greater the diversity, the better, as that is what Google wants to see.