On-site optimisation is not enough. Here’s why off-page SEO matters.

Let’s get one thing straight: search engine optimisation or SEO is not limited to the efforts you put on your website.

Off-page SEO, sometimes called off-site SEO, is the part of search marketing that doesn’t happen directly on one’s own website.

Circling back to our definition of SEO, SEO is a marketing discipline that is all about being more visible on organic search engine results—particularly Bing, Google and Yahoo!—requiring a combination of technical know-how and creativity to drive traffic and rise up in rankings. It isn’t merely about peppering a site with keywords to attract people. Because SEO is a strategy for brands to make it easier for visitors to find your site, optimising your webpages alone is not enough.

Off-page SEO techniques thus involve efforts outside one’s own website. This is done by generating links — a process called link-building — thereby increasing your website’s credibility and rank. SEO agencies like ours can help you build links to your website.

Why are link-building and establishing website authority score crucial in SEO?

Link-building is about acquiring hyperlinks from other websites. The hyperlinks generated by these external sources are called backlinks, inbound links or external links. Collectively, they establish a website’s authority score.

Because other websites share your content or refer to your website, it signals search engines that you produce valuable content and your website is important to others.

Every link to your website coming from other sources are like endorsements that attest to your website’s quality.

This is important because your competitors may be applying the same on-page SEO techniques as you, and therefore you have the same on-page SEO score. The differentiating factor will thus be the off-page elements.

Search engines will then consider the quantity and quality of external backlink sources to know which websites are the best to rank on the search engine results page (SERP).

How do you build backlinks in 2020?

It is impossible to look at 2020 without recognising the presence of the coronavirus and how it abruptly changed everyone’s lives.

In a previous article, we already established that marketing during the coronavirus pandemic must be a consistent process, and at this time, we recommend that brands focus on building brand awareness. Link-building greatly helps overall off-page seo, which contributes to the improvement of search rankings, and by extension, brand awareness.

The most common sources of backlinks are directory sites, forums, and social bookmarking sites. When we request backlinks from other websites, there must be good value in our content that will compel website owners to link to us.

A caveat, however: as the most effective off-page SEO techniques consider that search engines look at the quality of backlinks — meaning that they come from authoritative pages — marketers should first consider that the definition of “authoritative sources” is currently going through immense development at the moment.

Moreover, The Washington Post recently reported that websites like Facebook and Google-owned YouTube have taken action against sites that spread misinformation. Facebook labels inaccuracies and lowers their rank in users’ daily feeds. Meanwhile, YouTube’s algorithm prioritises more credible sources.

As websites continue to identify sites that spread misinformation, marketers must take note that search engines are bound to catch up. It is important to make sure that the external links come from sources that are truly trustworthy, but also to make sure that your own content contains verified information.

Thus, some of the easy-to-implement methods that produce highest quality backlinks are the ones which require a lot of effort, such as getting links from Wiki sites like Wikipedia, as well as getting links from popular blogs via a manual email approach.

Producing appealing content like infographics may also attract other website owners to reuse your infographics and mention the source link thus linking to you. At this time, certain content ideas will be more relevant to your audiences, whose behaviors (including their behaviours on search engines) will likewise be affected by the milieu.

Because content and SEO overlap, if you want your link-building strategy to work, the key is to create valuable content. At the end of the day, link-building is about creating content that people will find useful. The links will follow naturally.