What Is Off-Page SEO? Strategies Beyond Links (2024)

Earlier, we made a guess that Homes & Gardens likely has earned a lot of authority to be so highly ranked by Google for our search of “wildflower meadow gardening ideas.” But SEOs don’t have to make assumptions - we can fact-check. By entering that domain name into Moz’s free Domain Authority Checker, above, we can see that this site has built up a fairly healthy DA of 60, has earned over 17k links from other domains, is ranking for nearly 190k keywords, and has a low spam score of just 1%.

Using tools like the Domain Authority Checker, Moz Link Explorer, and the Moz Competitor Analysis tool will help you understand the health of your current link profile, how powerful a link to your content from a third party could be, and who is linking to your competitors. There are three scenarios you need to understand when it comes to links:

1. In some cases, the strength of your content or the authority/popularity of the people in your organization may be so high that your website will earn links without having to ask for them.

2. In other cases, you may be able to proactively build links to your site by contributing to third-party publications. For example, you might agree to be interviewed by a third-party publisher or contribute a quote or article to one, earning links from your effort. You might publish traditional digital press releases that include links back to your site. You might sponsor third parties, as in the case of a software company sponsoring a seminar being conducted at a college and earning links from that sponsorship. And, in the case of local businesses, you might build links to your website by building out your set of local business profiles around the local search ecosystem.

3. While you should strive to earn as many links as possible from the first two methods, website owners in competitive markets may need to grow their DA and PA by engaging in proactive outreach to third parties in hopes of winning further links from sites that are relevant to your topics and organization. Read all of The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building to consider the many different ways in which you might build relationships with authoritative site owners, write emails and social posts that result in new backlinks, and gradually grow your brand over time so that your ongoing content publication is enjoying fast crawling, thorough indexing, and better rankings.

Regardless of how you win links, those that offer the greatest contribution to SEO efforts are generally those that pass the most equity to your content. There are many signals that positively contribute to the equity passed, such as:

• The linking site's popularity

• How related the linking site's topic is to the site being linked to

• The "freshness" of the link

• The anchor text used on the linking site

• The trustworthiness of the linking site

• The number of other links on the linking page

• Authority of the linking domain and page

But before you set out in search of backlink opportunities, be certain you have taken the time to understand which linking practices Google considers to be spam. To avoid negative consequences, stay within the webmaster guidelines of both Google and Bing, and don’t engage in the following link spam tactics:

• Buying links - never pay anyone to link to your site

• Injecting hidden links into a website you do not own by exploiting security flaws

• Overusing keywords in the anchor text of the links you build

• Engaging in large-scale link exchanges or link farming schemes

Earning citations/mentions

While both search engines and SEOs focus a lot of attention on links, acquiring them isn’t the only method of improving your off-page SEO. While Google’s John Mueller confirms that unlinked mentions of your brand or its content don’t pass equity the way links do, the Search Quality Evaluators’ Guidelines makes the following statement:

Educational degrees, peer validation, expert co-authors, and citations can be evidence of positive reputation information for professionals who publish their work.

It’s always a best practice to try to earn a link whenever your assets are positively mentioned, but even when that is not possible, an authoritative and relevant publication mentioning your name, brand, organization or business still contributes to search engines’ perceptions of the good reputation of your enterprise.

For example, even if our example Homes & Gardens website had only mentioned the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery instead of linking to it, this citation would still count towards the positive reputation of the business and its SEO strategy. And not only do such unlinked citations have value in the eyes of Google and Bing, but they can also build brand awareness amongst the public and bring traffic to your site.

In the local business medium, brands should strive to both build structured citations in the form of local business listings on platforms like Google, Yelp, Apple Maps, and other aggregators and directories across the local search ecosystem as well as earning unstructured citations on blogs, news sites, and other third party platforms. These activities are core to the off-page local SEO strategy of most local brands.

Earning social mentions