Off-Page SEO: Why It Matters & How to Do It in 2024

Off-Page SEO is a subset of search engine optimization that takes place (you guessed it) off-page.

The most important off-page SEO activities include link building, online reviews, and local SEO.

In this article, we will be discussing:

• What is off-page SEO and why it matters so much
• How is off-page SEO different from On-Page and Technical SEO
• Off-page SEO strategies
• A step-by-step process for developing a strong off page SEO strategy

Without any further delay, let’s get into it.

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What is Off-Page SEO?

As we have just mentioned, off-page SEO is a collection of all your off-page activities aimed at improving your search engine rankings and generating more traffic. 

The specific off-page techniques include:

• Link building
• Getting placements on review sites and generating user review
• If you have a local office, creating a Google My Business profile and optimizing it for local SEO
• Taking advantage of social media to promote your recent content and re-directing traffic to your blog
• Digital PR 
• Participating in interviews and podcasts to generate publicity for your brand
• Infographics submission

We will be taking a much closer look at each specific strategy in the next section.  

For now, let’s discuss why investing in off-page SEO should be a priority for your business, even in 2024.

Benefits of Off-Page SEO

Since the biggest portion of off-page SEO is link building, let’s start with the most important reason why people invest so much time into it – PageRank. 

A Flow of PageRank

PageRank is at the core of Google’s algorithm. 

It is no longer publicly available, but it still plays a major role in how pages are ranked on search engine results pages. 

It works by assigning each website a numerical score based on how many other websites link to it. The more websites that link to a particular website, the higher its score will be. 

The higher the score, the higher the website will appear in Google’s search result pages. In other words, websites with a higher pagerank are considered more important and relevant by Google. 

This helps Google quickly determine which websites should appear at the top of the search results page.

You used to be able to see a page’s PageRank score with Google’s PageRank toolbar. 

However, that has led the SEO public to completely obsess over this metric and attempt to manipulate it in many ways: through PBN links, spammy directory websites, excessive reciprocal links, and other tactics that are considered a “link scheme” in 2024.

Over the course of over two decades, Google has released countless algorithm updates to combat these shady tactics.

They no longer work for SEO (at least not as well), however, high-quality backlinks from actual, relevant resources are still thought after and pass on PageRank.

As confirmation, we have this tweet by Google’s Own Gary Illyes:

Yes, the tweet is six years old at this point. But, as Gary mentioned, at the point of writing the tweet, PageRank has been a part of the algorithm for 18 years, so there is really no reason to believe that Google has removed such a core component from it in 2024.

Increased Domain Authority/Domain Rating

Like PageRank, Domain Authority and Domain Rating are Moz’s and Ahrefs’ metrics that measure a website’s backlink profile strength.

They function in a very similar way – taking into account the number of a resource’s incoming quality links, as well as their “strength”, depending on the linking domain’s age, own authority, etc.

There are two ways in which these differ from PageRank.

The first is that they measure the entire domain, not individual pages. 

The second is that these metrics are publicly available if you own either Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush.

A higher domain authority/rating is directly associated with higher rankings on search engine results pages, according to Backlinko’s study conducted on 11.8 million search results:

So, even though, DA and DR are not official Google metrics, they are commonly used as indicators of a website’s authoritativeness, reputation, and general strength. 

In Layman’s terms, the higher your DR, the easier it will be for you to rank higher in search engines. 

Having a higher DR will also make it much more difficult for your competitors with lower scores to outrank you.

Organic Traffic

Ranking at the #1 spot for all target keywords is the end goal of any business’ SEO strategy. 

The closer you get to that spot, the more organic traffic you’re going to generate. 

In fact, according to another study done by Backlinko, the #1 search engine result on Google gets almost 30% of all traffic for that keyword:

However, this only includes organic traffic, which comes from Google and other search engines.

Off-page SEO also generates a substantial amount of referral traffic – which comes from the referring page, whether it’s a blog post, review site, or even a social media post. 

What’s so great about referral traffic is the fact that it can be a lot more targeted than general, organic traffic, which brings us to the next benefit. 

Higher Lead Generation and Sales

By placing links on relevant websites, the traffic that you get from them is going to be more interested in what you have to say or even sell.

On a small scale, it’s likely not going to be noticeable, but after a while of investing in off-page SEO, you will also generate a substantial amount of leads, which have a higher chance of converting than cold leads you would generate through outbound techniques.

In addition, if you have a local office or store, creating a Google Business profile is one of the first things you should consider if you need more customers. 

Increased Brand Awareness

This applies more to digital PR and participating in popular interviews, podcasts, and other types of earned media.

Getting your name out there has a snowball effect – the more people will see your name out there, the more of them will come to your site.

In turn, by having a high organic traffic number, you’ll have an easier time booking shows with podcast hosts and interviewers, which will get you even more traffic and brand awareness. 

And the more people know about your brand, the more likely they are to buy from you and leave a review, which, again, may help some other people make a buying decision in your favor. 

So, as you can see, off-page SEO is beneficial to your business in every conceivable way: from generating traffic to helping with conversions.

However, you also need to be aware of its downside. 

Which is just how long it can take. 

In order to build an effective, all-encompassing off-page SEO strategy, you need several team members dedicated to their tasks over months, or even years.

An ideal off-page team includes:

• Link builders
• Social media managers
• Brand partnerships and outreach managers

Of course, in a smaller teams, some members will have to juggle multiple responsibilities, and it’s definitely possible to achieve success with just a couple of members, but don’t expect it to happen overnight. 

Aspects of Off-Page SEO

Now, let’s take a look at the specific strategies that off-page SEO entails.

Link Building

The first one (and arguably the most important), is link building.

It is the process of acquiring inbound backlinks from relevant, authoritative sources.

This is typically done through email outreach.

As we already mentioned, links pass on PageRank, which, in turn, increases the “weight” or value of your web page in the eyes of Google.

However, not all backlinks are actually good for you. 

So, what makes a link good for SEO? Let’s take a closer look.

What Makes a Good Backlink?

The best backlinks are contextual, in-content placements in other people’s blog posts – usually to a blog post of your own, or a homepage if the linking page is a listicle (top 10 article). 

Anchor Text

The first thing is the link’s anchor text. 

This is the clickable part of the text, usually highlighted in blue and underlined.

There are several types of anchor texts:

• Exact match keyword
• Partial match keyword
• Semantic

As their names suggest, exact match anchor texts include the specific target keyword of the page that’s being linked to. 

Here is an example: content distribution. 

Partial-match anchor texts include some variation of the linked page that still matches your target keyword partially. For example, link building. The exact target keyword of that page is “white-hat link building”, making this only a partial match.

Semantic anchor texts include your target keyword’s synonym or other variations but don’t have a single matching keyword in them. For example, website visitors.

Which ones should you aim for?

Typically, the “best” anchor texts for SEO purposes are exact and partial match keywords.

However, it’s not as black and white as it might seem at first. 

If the linking page has a lot of exact-match keyword anchor texts to several pages, it can be considered an over-optimized link scheme by Google. We’ll take a look at what link schemes are a little bit further below. 

So, the golden middle would be partial-match anchor texts.

However, semantic anchor texts can also make a huge difference on your rankings.

This is because anchor texts are actually a ranking factor in an of themselves. Google indexes all of your inbound links, and if the algorithm sees that your page is being referred to with a ceratin keyword, your page might start ranking for that keyword – even if it’s not your actual target keyword and it doesn’t appear anywhere on the page.

Linking Domain Authority and Uniqueness

Next up, we have the actual linking domain, also known as “referring domain”. 

The higher the Domain Authority/Domain Rating of the website that’s linking to you, the more “weight” that link has.

The domain’s age is also a big playing factor. A link from an old and reputable source such as Backlinko is infinitely more valuable than a link from a small startup that just went online a few months ago.

Finally, take into consideration whether that specific website has linked to you in the past.

Links from new, unique domains are also more valuable for SEO than several links from one and the same resource.

But again, it’s better to have three links from Backlinko than three unique links from three small, but different websites.

Relevance

A natural link has to make sense in terms of context. 

This is simple: for example, a link from an article on how to measure the pressure in your car’s tires to a car workshop will make perfect sense.

However, a link from that same article to this guide will raise quite a few eyebrows: both from users and Google.

Other Links On The Page

The number of other links on the linking page also matters a lot. 

The more outgoing links a page has, the less PageRank every individual page is able to pass along, diluting the value of all links.

So, your ideal link-building targets should be pages with as few outgoing links as possible.

Rel Tags

“Rel=” tags are little snippets of HTML code next to every link.

You can view them by right-clicking anywhere on the page, then hit “Inspect”, and then “Console”.

There are dozens of different HTML tags a link can have, but the most important for SEO are:

• Dofollow
• Nofollow
• UGC
• Sponsored

Dofollow is the default value of any link if it doesn’t have either the “nofollow”, “ugc”, or “sponsored” tag.

Even if the link does not have the “dofollow” tag, it’s set to be “dofollow” by default.

Dofollow links are the most sought-after by link builders as this is the only type of link that actually passes on PageRank to its full potential.

Nofollow links do not pass on any PageRank.

Sponsored and UGC links also act like Nofollow links

It is also a requirement by Google to mark any UGC (user-generated) and sponsored links as such. 

This includes things like blog comments, user-submitted guest post articles, ad banners, and other links included as part of a paid collaboration.

So, to sum it up, the perfect link:

• Comes from a unique, authoritative domain
• Has an exact or partial-match keyword in the anchor text
• Makes sense contextually
• Comes from a page with few other outgoing links
• Is dofollow

Now that we know what makes a good backlink, let’s take a look at the types of links you should absolutely avoid.

What are Link Schemes?

Most low-quality and spammy link building techniques have been labeled “link schemes” by Google. 

This includes:

• Unmarked paid links
• Reciprocal links and exchanges of links for goods o low-quality SEO services
• Automatic link building, such as using a bot to spam forum and blog post comments
• Directory links
• Guest posting with excessive, over-optimized exact-match anchor texts
• “Invisible” links that are the same color as the background of the page
• Links from PBNs (private blog networks)
• Social bookmarking
• And more

All of these kinds of links are to be avoided at all costs. 

When done on a small scale, participating in link schemes (probably) won’t hurt your SEO.

However, these links will be picked up by Google’s algorithm and de-valued, which means that they won’t contribute to your rankings, either.

However, when done excessively, these link schemes may get Google’s attention and cause a manual review of your site. 

If Google’s staff determines that you were participating in excessive link schemes on purpose, they may even penalize your website, severely reducing your search engine rankings or even preventing your site from appearing in search results altogether.

Now, let’s move on to the next off-page SEO strategy.

Review Sites

Securing a placement on a review site like G2 is HUGE.

While backlinks from such sites are most often marked as “nofollow” or “sponsored”, the benefits you get from putting your business out there are hard to ignore.

Firstly, before making a purchase, people need to do some research – and this research is 10 times as extensive for B2B buyers.

Having your business displayed among your competitors allows potential customers to evaluate all of their options in a non-biased manner.

Additionally, positive reviews by your satisfied customers increase the chances of any future clients converting by a long shot. 

The best thing about review sites is that placements on those is typically free – all you need to do is register an account and wait for it to get verified by the staff.

Local SEO

Local SEO involves three things:

• Optimizing your pages for local keywords (on-page technique)
• Local link building
• Setting up and optimizing your Google My Business Profile

Again, setting up a GMB profile is easy – all you have to do is register your business and fill out all of the necessary information, such as your location, open hours, contact information, or even directions on how to get to you.

This is one of the first SEO steps you need to undertake if you have a local business – simply showing up on the Google Map for certain searches can massively increase the publicity and foot traffic that your business will receive.

Social Media 

While social media is only loosely related to SEO, it can still be beneficial for your off-page efforts.

We won’t go too deep into how to run a successful social media page for your business as this topic deserves an in-depth guide of its own.

However, the most common tactic that most businesses use is re-posting their fresh, quality content to their social media channels.

However, this only really works in your favor if you already have a decent following built up.

Another important aspect of social media for SEO is social signals.

Ever seen the little social media icons near the title of a blog post? That’s what they are. 

Even though these don’t hold nearly as much “power” as proper backlinks, social signals play their role in determining your page’s search engine ranking. 

Lots of likes = good content in the eyes of Google. 

Digital PR

Digital PR is a type of digital marketing that uses digital mediums for creating and managing public relations campaigns. 

It combines traditional public relations tactics with activities that take place on digital platforms, such as online media, social media, email, and other digital channels. 

The goal of digital PR is to build relationships with key influencers and the public, create brand awareness, and drive website traffic.

Digital PR is inherently linked to off-page SEO, as it helps boost the visibility of a website in search engine results. 

By utilizing influencer marketing, a website can get more backlinks, which are a key factor in SEO rankings. 

Additionally, by creating content that is shared by influencers and targeted audiences, a website can get more organic traffic, which can further improve its SEO rankings.

Finally, digital PR strategies that target media outlets can also help increase a website’s visibility, as the outlets often have high domain authority, which can further boost SEO rankings.

Interviews and Podcasts

Participating in interviews and podcasts is really a subset of digital PR, but we felt the need to give this SEO tactic a section of its own simply because of the impact getting interviewed can have on your brand visibility.

By taking part in these, not only will you be getting your (and your business’) name out there, but also getting thought leadership.

Thought leadership is a phenomenon when people perceive you as knowledgeable about a particular topic.

Share your own personal experiences and advice, and people will soon start thinking “Damn, this person really knows what they’re talking about!”. 

Most of all, audiences like case studies and learning about specific strategies that have helped you reach success.

In addition, if the podcast you took part in is hosted on an actual business’ website (not just Apple Podcasts, Spotify etc.), you will be generating extremely high-quality backlinks along the way.

But how do you get hosted on someone’s podcast? 

Podcast outreach is actually one of Respona’s use cases – we can help simplify the outreach process and increase your results tenfold. 

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

Now, let’s take a look at the most important on-page and technical SEO strategies to see how they differ from off-page SEO.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is all about creating high quality content and optimizing it for your target keywords.

Content

If you don’t have any content, there’s nothing to optimize for search engines. 

In addition to your home and product/service pages, you should also invest the time and resources into a robust blog.

It should cover a wide range of topics, targeting informative as well as commercial keywords. 

A solid content strategy should include the following steps:

• Define Your Goals

The first step in developing a content strategy is to determine the goals you want to achieve. These goals could include increasing brand awareness and brand mention count, driving traffic to your website, improving engagement, or generating leads.

• Understand Your Audience

Knowing who your audience is and what they’re looking for is essential to creating effective content. 

Analyzing data such as past purchases, social media interactions, and website visits can provide valuable insights into your audience’s interests, behaviors, and needs.

For conducting proper audience research, you can take advantage of tools such as SparkToro and Alexa.

• Create a Content Plan

Once you have a clear understanding of your audience and goals, you can begin creating a content plan. This plan should include topics, formats, and timelines for content creation, as well as strategies for distribution and promotion.

It can be a simple hand-written note or a robust excel sheet – it doesn’t matter as long as it’s a solid plan. 

• Produce the Content

If you have the time and writing experience, you can take on the content production yourself.

However, in general, it’s best to have dedicated writers and editors that will manage the process from start to finish for you. 

• Leverage Promotion Channels

Just publishing your content and hoping for the best is not enough – in order to get the most out of your work, it’s worth running an extra round of promotion on social media or even third-party websites.

Keywords

Keyword optimization involves two steps: research and the actual optimization.

For both steps, you will need different tools.

For keyword research, we like to use Ahrefs.

Its Keyword Research functionality can provide you with a detailed overview of your target keywords, including an estimate of how difficult it will be to rank for a chosen keyword, traffic potential, and even suggestions for other, related keywords to create content around.

An ideal keyword has a low Keyword Difficulty score and a high search volume.

In other words, you should always aim for the low-hanging fruit: keywords that are relatively easy to rank for but still yield a substantial amount of traffic. 

In addition, long-tail keywords (niche phrases that include over three words) are typically much easier to rank for than short-tail.

Once you’ve selected your target keywords and built content around them, it’s time to optimize the actual content.

Eyeballing it is not enough.

A strong strategy is to take advantage of a content optimization tool like MarketMuse.

It analyzes your content as well as the top 10 results ranking for your target keyword to provide suggestions for how many times it needs to be implemented throughout the article, as well as suggestions for other related keywords that need to be included for a decent shot of ranking high as well.

Title and Meta Tags

Despite not technically being “on” your pages, title tags and meta descriptions are also considered part of on page SEO.

These are the little snippets of text that appear on search engine results pages:

Optimizing them involves two steps: 

• Including your target keyword, preferably at the beginning of both the title and meta description
• Optimizing them for length

Titles and meta descriptions that are too long will be truncated and not displayed properly.

The optimal length for a title tag should be fewer than 60 symbols, and for a meta description: up to 160. 

Technical SEO

The goal of technical SEO is to ensure that your website runs well, displays correctly on mobile devices, and is easily crawlable by search engines.

Site Speed and Mobile Optimization

Nobody likes a website that takes forever to load. 

Neither users nor Google. 

Not to mention mobile-first indexing – even if your desktop version runs perfectly fine, failure to provide an optimized mobile version can prevent you from ranking high.

To track your core web vitals and identify issues, you can use a free tool by Google called PageSpeed Insights (Google Analytics is limited in that regard).

Crawlability

Crawlability refers to the process done by Google’s bots: every once in a while, Google will “crawl” through your pages and add them to its index.

A page that is not in Google’s index will not appear in search engine results.

There are many practices aimed at improving a site’s crawlability, including:

• Optimizing your Internal link structure
• Using a “flat” site structure to ensure each page on your website is reachable within 3 clicks or less
• Submitting an .XML sitemap
• Implementing a robots.txt file to designate pages that should not be crawled
• Manually submitting pages for indexing through Google Search Console

Now, let’s look at the actual process of acquiring high-quality backlinks. 

A Step-By-Step Process for Effective Off-Page SEO

Before you start link building, make sure you have a decent amount of valuable content already published on your blog.

As an example, we will be running an anchor text link building campaign for our guide on how to increase organic traffic.

Each step of the campaign will be done inside Respona, as it comes with all of the necessary functionality to prepare, launch, and track an email outreach campaign of any kind – link building included.

Prospecting

For prospecting, we will be using Respona’s built-in search engine. 

It is powered by both Google and Bing.

It also features an automatic scraping mode supporting multiple queries at the same time. 

The goal of the anchor text link building strategy is to find non-competing articles that mention your target keyword somewhere in the content.

We can find these with the help of some advanced search engine operators:

• Inurl:blog (only pulls pages that have “blog” in the URL)
• -intitle: (excludes pages that have your target keyword in the title)
• Intext: (only pulls pages that mention your target keyword in the content)

Our two example queries look like this:

inurl:blog -intitle:”organic traffic” intext:”organic traffic”

inurl:blog -intitle:”organic traffic” -intitle:”website traffic” intext:”website traffic”

This tells the tool to only look for blog posts that mention “organic traffic” or “website traffic” but are on a different topic, since they don’t mention them in the titles. 

Once your search is configured, you can add additional SEO metrics to make sure you’re only getting results that fit your specific criteria (such as Domain Authority).

After running the automation, Respona will automatically add all relevant results to your outreach campaign,

Preparing Your Outreach Sequence

For link building purposes, an ideal outreach sequence consists of two steps: your initial pitch and one follow-up, after 3-5 business days. 

We don’t recommend adding any more follow-ups as they only increase your chances of getting flagged as spam. 

Notice the variables like @first_name and @organization? 

These fields will be automatically populated at the personalization stage for each of your contacts in the campaign, saving you some precious time. 

To add a follow-up email, simply click the “create new step” button in the bottom left corner of the editor. 

At the very bottom, you’ll also see the “Insert an unsubscribe link in the emails” button – by adding one to your pitches, you’ll give your prospects an easy option to opt-out from further communications from you, reducing frustration and spam rates. 

Before we move on to the next step, let’s make sure to check our pitch for spam words. 

Click on the red circle icon in the top right to bring up our reply chance estimator:

It looks like we have a decent chance of receiving a reply with this pitch.

Here’s the full template we have used in our example – feel free to grab it for your own link building campaigns but make sure to change it enough so it’s not word-for-word and personalize it for every contact in your campaign.

Finding Contact Information

Respona makes finding contact information a breeze. 

It has a built-in contact finder and verifier that consolidates data from over 24 sources to provide accurate email addresses in real-time. 

All you have to do is select the search algorithm (for link building purposes, the 1st one is best: it finds the writer of your target article, and if it doesn’t find them, searches for other persons at the company), and set the desired positions and seniorities of your ideal prospects.

For our campaign, we’ll enter everything related to content, link building, content marketing, digital marketing and partnerships at all seniority levels. 

In the advanced settings, we’ll also enable the tool to assign company generic emails (like help, support, and contact addresses) to increase the success rate.

Once you click Find contacts, the automation will start running. 

Depending on the size of your campaign, it may take from a few minutes to a couple of hours. 

All of it is in the cloud – so you’re free to start another campaign while it’s doing its magic. 

Once it’s done, you can review its results, re-assign contacts if need be, or even run additional searches by name, job title, and domain.

When all contacts are assigned, it’s time to move on to the last step. 

Personalizing Pitches

Here, all variables inserted into your template will automatically be populated. However, that’s not enough.

To make a lasting impression on your prospect, you need some manual personalization.

But don’t worry – Respona can help you with that as well.

It actually comes with a built-in AI that scrapes your prospect’s content for important snippets that you can just copy and paste into your pitch. 

This will make it look like you actually went through the trouble of reading your prospect’s article before reaching out, which will surely be appreciated.

Before launching your campaign, Respona will also run each email through an additional verification process to make sure you’re not reaching out to any recent contacts, and that your pitches don’t contain empty placeholders/variables. 

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Now Over To You

Hopefully, now you know everything about off-page SEO and are ready to take on off-page SEO campaigns of your very own.

However, simply because of the volume of work involved in it, you may need help. 

If you’re looking to start link building to your own website but not sure how to do it efficiently, consider starting a 7-day free trial of Respona to see how we can help first-hand. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How is off-page SEO different from on-page and technical SEO?

On-page SEO is all about the content of your website, and technical SEO ensures that it runs smoothly and looks good.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is all about link building, and getting publicity for your website on third-party resources such as blogs, social media, review sites, and even maps.

Is link building worth it in 2024?

The SEO expert consensus is that link building is very much worth it in 2024 (even for an eCommerce website!), as long as you follow white-hat strategies only and avoid participating in link schemes. 

What do I need to start working on my own off-page SEO?

First of all, you need time. Off-page SEO is a huge process that can’t be managed overnight.

Secondly, you will need a dedicated team of link builders, social media marketing managers, and brand partnerships managers.

How long until I see the results of my off-page SEO?

You can expect to start seeing results of your off-page SEO efforts within a few months of starting your campaigns, but the changes will be incremental and slowly build up over time. 

If you’re in a highly-competitive niche, it can take years to finally start ranking as high as your competitors.

Can I still rank high without off-page SEO?

You can – but off-page SEO can provide you the advantage you need to finally outrank your competitors by building a stronger backlink profile, earning brand mentions and positive reviews.