SEO is a great way to get your name out there. However, you can’t achieve the best results overnight.

Despite being accessible, there is still a learning curve to SEO. You need to learn about keywords, optimizations, basic HTML tags, user experience, and so on. On top of that, small businesses and SEO newbies compete with well-known high-authority sites that are already getting a lot of traffic.

Simply put, there’s more to SEO than the optimizations you do within your domain. A lot of off-page aspects like backlinks and mentions are important SEO factors that affect your rankings.

So, this post will discuss Off-Page SEO, what it is, why you need it, and easy ways you can do it.

What Is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO are comprised of SEO factors that happen outside of your domain. Some of these factors can be out of your control, such as natural links from citations and mentions. These backlinks and mentions build your domain’s credibility and send favorable SEO signals to search engines, boosting your rankings.

However, there are simple but effective strategies that can help you get backlinks yourself (we’ll discuss this later).

Why You Need Off-Page SEO

Popular sites often rank high because they’re already getting a lot of traffic and backlinks. However, for small businesses still trying to get their name out there, it might take some more work to get to that. After all, traffic, content quality, and backlinks are all SEO factors that are only often acquired by domains that have been on the game longer than everyone else.

That said, while you’re optimizing on-page SEO factors like design, navigation, keywords, and internal links, make sure you’re also getting backlinks and referrals outside your domain. Even if you have the perfect website, it won’t bring much ROI if no one ever sees it.

How To Boost Your Off-Page SEO

Once you’ve perfected your site design and keywords, you still need to convince Google (and other search engines) that you’re a credible website. Hence, you need to build a great backlink profile and increase site traffic, both of which are great SEO signals that will add to your credibility.

Here are a few simple strategies to improve your off-page SEO:

1. Create High-Quality Content

While this is general SEO content advice, unique quality content does more than improving your on-page SEO. Other bloggers often use complete and original content as citations and references, which they often link to on their own blogs.

For example, if you write the most complete and informative blog about “The Best Processors In 2022,” other tech bloggers might use it as research material and link it as a citation. The more links you have, the more traffic and favorable signals it sends search engine crawlers.

In other words, you need to write “linkable” content. Don’t just write blogs that are simple rehashes of every other article. Make sure your content is both helpful and unique, so it stands out from all the others in the SERPs.

2. Submit Guest Posts

Guest posting is one way to get more backlinks without waiting for other people to find your site and link to you.

How guest posting works is you publish a blog on another site. Then, blogs and publications that welcome guest posts will publish it as their own content (credited to you, of course). The common practice is to give the author a backlink in exchange for the high-quality, which can send more traffic and link juice to the author’s domain.

That said, guest posting isn’t always as simple as writing something and getting it published immediately. In most cases, you’ll have to submit a manuscript or apply as a guest blogger. However, once you’ve slowly built a great backlink profile for guest posting, the ROI is worth it.

Here are a few tips on guest posting to get the most out of this strategy:

• Only submit content to relevant blogs. For example, if you’re a tech business, you shouldn’t be submitting guest posts to a baking blog.
• Check for the host’s domain authority. Backlinks count as “votes.” If a reputable website links to you, search engines will also trust you as a reputable domain. Likewise, if a low-quality and spam-filled website link to one of your pages, you’re also immediately associated with spam and low-quality content.
• Make sure you’re getting relevant anchor text. An important aspect of a good backlink is relevant anchor text. If the anchor text associated with your backlink has nothing to do with your website or pages, search engines will count it as spam or irrelevant.

3. Social Media Marketing

While social signals aren’t an SEO factor, you can’t deny that it’s a great way to promote any business venture. When done right, you could build a following, get thousands of impressions on your posts, and build trust. Then, with enough effort, you can send traffic to your site through links and promotional content.

However, effective social media marketing doesn’t start and end with account creation. You need to keep up with it to ensure your content is high-quality and reaches the right people.

Here are a few social media marketing tips to help you get the most out of it:

• Define your target audience. Remember, the whole point of social media marketing isn’t just to get your name out there—it’s to reach the right people. You don’t need to be seen by people who are likely to never be interested in your products and services. Instead, focus on finding the people who are either most likely to talk about your products or buy them.
• Create content for your target audience. After defining your target audience, focus your content strategy on catering to them. Make sure you’re posting things your target audience likes and during times they are most active.
• Audit your social media marketing efforts. When you’re aiming for the most effective strategy, you need to monitor and analyze your performance regularly. Look at your impressions, likes, comments and see which types of content work, which don’t, and which need some changes.

Again, social signals aren’t a ranking factor. However, it can be an effective tool that gets more eyes on your small business. Like most marketing strategies, it needs some time and effort to get a great ROI.

Author’s Bio

JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.