Off-Page SEO Checklist: Free Guide to Boost Your Google Rankings
Updated: Apr 8, 2022
It’s frustrating when you’ve done everything you can do to optimize your website but you’re still struggling to rank on Google. In fact, when you focus on on-page SEO, you’ve only completed one-half of the puzzle. Another factor is off-site SEO which is believed to weigh ranking up to 50%. And because off-page SEO offers the most challenge, there are fewer people who volunteer to do it.
If you’re looking to get started with off-page SEO, this checklist will provide a trusted roadmap.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to all actions outside your website that directly impact your search engine ranking. These actions include building backlinks, being active on social media, and guest blogging.
Optimizing for off-site ranking factors involves improving the credibility, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority of your domain.
On-Page SEO Vs Off-Page SEO
In the simplest term, on-page SEO involves every action you take on your website to affect your ranking on search engines. Off-site SEO, on the other hand, focuses on increasing the authority of your domain through content creation and earning backlinks from other sites.
Here’s a quick visual guide:
Off-Page SEO | On-Page SEO |
Link building Social media Brand mentions Ratings and reviews management Influencer marketing Guest blogging | Site structure Internal linking Image optimization Canonicalization Page speed Relevant, high-quality content |
Off-Page SEO Checklist
Link Building
Building backlinks is the heart of off-page SEO, including the number and quality of backlinks to your website. Search engines use backlinks as an indication of the linked-to content’s quality. The more high-value backlinks your website has, the better it gets ranked than other equal sites with fewer backlinks.
There are several types of links you can obtain:
Natural and earned links, in which editorial publishers or consumers mention your brand organically without any of your actions. For example, a travel blogger adds a link to a post that points toward their favorite hotel, and your hotel gains a natural link.
Manually built links are acquired with some deliberate link-building effort. For example, you ask your customers to link to your websites or ask influencers to share your content.
Social Media
Social media platforms enable you to boost your brand awareness, more than an SEO play. However, you can gain domain authority and increase your search engine ranking through social media. When your content is shared in social media and gets direct traffic to your website, it shows Google that you’re gaining traffic from diverse sources and must have interesting high-quality content. Therefore, creating engaging content and distributing them on social media is important to have more shares, backlinks, and clicks. All of that helps build your domain authority.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a strategy that helps your business be more visual in local search results. That means your website will appear in the top spot within the moment local audiences are searching for information or products/services. Any brick-and-mortar business or those that serve customers in specific geographic areas benefit from this practice. To do this, you need:
Add your company to local and national business directories, namely Google My Business
Build positive reviews on sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor
Encourage your customers to leave positive reviews online
Content Marketing
In addition to on-page content marketing, you can leverage methods like guest blogging, guest posting, downloadable offers, surveys, and reports. These practices help drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and improve your search engine rankings.
Off-page SEO Checklist Backlinks
Social Media
Local SEO
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