Have you heard that as many as 93 percent of all Internet-based research starts with a search engine? This means that business owners will truly need to invest in search engine optimization (SEO) including off-page SEO techniques.
Do you have all of your on-page SEO well handled? Do your product pages, content and blogs all have the relevant keywords? Does your website follow key SEO strategies such as internal linking?
Then it’s time for you to focus on off-page SEO techniques!
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to activities, you or others perform outside your website, to increase the search engines rankings of your website or blog.
Although off-page SEO is often related to link building there’s more to it than that. Many activities may not result in a backlink but will increase your brand’s awareness through the use of different forms of content and relationships with other bloggers in your niche. You’re building your reputation!
This will usually result in more positive mentions for your brand, better search rankings, and additional traffic to your website.
Below we outline a total of 16 different off-page SEO techniques that will increase your website traffic. Let’s get into it!
1. The Importance of Social Media
Search engine optimization incorporates many different aspects including press releases, blogging, videos, posting and sharing images, comments on your site, and social media pages.
Experts say that social media marketing is key for successful off-page SEO techniques. Social media pages that have plenty of shares and engagement show better optimization through search engines.
Through social media, you’ll be able to get others to do the work for you. The more people share your work through their pages and engage with your stories or videos, the higher your website traffic will be.
Google has said that it’s not using the major social networks directly as a ranking factor. However, social media can be considered as an indirect factor.
More people will visit your website and stick around for longer. Social media is a great way of promoting your content and helps you to get found online. Popular articles on social media are more likely to get links.
All of these factors improve your SEO, so your website will be higher up in the rankings whenever someone searches for your products or services.
2. Creating Useful Content
Creating a comprehensive guide or a thought-provoking post will in time produce links or even just a mention. Both of these are valuable and will result in more visitors to your blog.
Most bloggers link out to other articles when they write a post or mention something another blogger has done. Write an outstanding article and they could linking to or mentioning you or your blog.
3. Improve the Speed of Your Mobile Sites
In order to strengthen your off-page SEO techniques, you should make sure your mobile apps and mobile sites load as quickly as possible.
Improving the speed will not only improve your overall SEO but also keep your customers satisfied and coming back to your mobile site.
Research shows that even a one-second delay in loading a page reduces conversion rates by 7 percent. As such, your company will need to purchase the right hosting programs to increase the speed of your mobile sites.
4. Develop Mobile Apps for Your Company
Incorporating mobile apps in your company could improve customer retention. Mobile websites are there to get more people to purchase your products or services. The mobile app, on the other hand, can keep customers coming back by providing a rewards-type of platform.
A mobile app can also build a stronger brand through greater communication and awareness. Other benefits of having an app could be to inform users about new products or special offers and to attract younger customers.
According to a survey by Clutch.co the 3 main reasons, small businesses develop apps are to:
- Increase sales
- Improve customer service
- Compete in a specific market
However, sometimes a client may be searching for a particular mobile app and could come across your company. You never know what type of online media will help your customers find their way to your products and solutions.
5. Incorporate Audits as a Long-Term SEO Strategy
If you want to really see how strong your off-page SEO techniques are, you will benefit from undergoing an audit.
It doesn’t require too much data to get started on an audit. You’ll also love all the information you will get telling you where to improve your off-page SEO techniques and what actions to take.
One report from the Search Engine Journal found that 77 percent of experts think that businesses should take part in a full SEO audit every six months. Be sure to follow this advice to improve your website traffic!
6. Add Social Bookmarking Websites to Your Marketing Strategy
One of the greatest ways to promote your website content, such as your blogs or product pages, is to post your information on social bookmarking websites.
When you promote your work through social bookmarking websites, you will have a greater number of people going to see your blogs or other web pages. Your website traffic will grow steadily.
Some popular social bookmarking websites include Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious. Be sure to add your content to these sites to get more website traffic!
7. Submit Your Website Content to Forums and Post Comments
You will often find that every industry has an online community including customers searching for solutions to their problems. Forums are a perfect place to contribute your content and solutions to this online community.
You can comment on other people’s threads, offer advice, and post your own information in a new thread. This should all bring more customers back to your website and increase site traffic.
Commenting on blogs has become less popular because of all the spam comments. Most blogs make the links no-follow. However, you shouldn’t leave comments for a backlink. Leave a well thought out comment that might catch someone’s attention, this could be the blogger or with luck an influencer.
When someone notices your comment they may want to find out more about you and start following you on social media or become a subscriber.
8. Submit Your Work to a Blog Directory
If you submit your blogs to a blog directory, this would create backlinks bringing customers and website visitors back to your original content. This strategy was very widely used a few years ago but is now much less useful, in fact, many say it’s dead.
If you do use this method you should use only trusted high authority directories and spread out your submissions over a few weeks to make it look more natural.
You will need to search for the correct blog directory for your content and industry. Then you’ll need to submit it to the correct category.
Do be prepared for a longer time period to pass before you see real results from a blog directory submission. Although you probably won’t see any drastic changes in your rankings with this method, used sparingly it might improve your search engine rankings slightly.
9. Publish Press Releases Online
Every business has an event or an announcement to make at various stages in their growth. As such, press releases have become a standard way of making that announcement.
Today press releases are published online to get more eyeballs to their content and more people visiting a website.
PR Newswire is a popular site you could use. In order to boost your website traffic and search engine optimization, be sure to publish press releases sparingly for content that is newsworthy.
Use press releases with caution, if used too often they may have an adverse effect on your SEO efforts.
10. Join Question-and-Answer Websites
One of the best ways to get high website traffic is to join question and answer websites. When you join these websites, be sure to search for your industry and products in order to find your key customer demographic.
Once again, be sure to link back to your website when you’re answering people’s questions. This will allow you to get more readers back to your site and improve your off-page SEO techniques.
A couple of the best-known question and answer sites are Quora and Yahoo Answers.
11. Take Part in Video Sharing Websites
Video sharing is another great way to get your contents to become viral. The more your videos are shared across the internet, the greater your website traffic will be.
YouTube is the second most visited site on the internet and popular videos rank in the SERPs. Videos can’t be ignored!
Video sharing websites are a great way to improve your off-page SEO strategies. Be sure your video has the right title, description, tags, and backlinks so that more people visit your site.
12. Share Documents Online
Websites like SlideShare also offer a great place for you to share business documents and presentations. You can create quality documents either in a PDF or PowerPoint platform and share them across relevant websites.
This will also increase your website traffic and improve your off-page SEO.
13. Submit Infographics on the Internet
Infographics are becoming more and more popular on the Internet. You can invest in this trend by making creative and innovative infographics that stand out from the crowd.
This post from bufferapp.com mentions a few tools you can use to make your infographics.
The internet is full of websites where you can submit infographics. Be sure to add your company name and website when submitting your work.
When people start sharing your infographics you can create a continuous stream of traffic to your blog.
14. Paid Internet Advertising
Have you seen the ads at the top of a search engine page? By investing a little extra money, you could have your content displayed at the very top of a search engine.
Paid Internet advertising is technically considered search engine marketing (SEM) instead of search engine optimization. However, this will still be a great way to get more people to see your products and services.
As these visitors are targeted they should like what they see on your site and may bookmark your blog and come back later.
15. Take Part in Quest Blogs
Another great way to get your name and Company out there online is to connect with customer or client blogs and submit guest blogs to their site.
Guest blogging allows you and your company to get greater brand recognition and higher traffic numbers through backlinks from a client website.
Do your research and find out which companies or clients would be interested in featuring a guest blog. Reach out to them and offer them a chance to write a guest blog for your site as well. It could be a win-win situation!
Here’s an excellent guide to guest blogging from Brian Dean.
16. Need More Off-Page SEO Techniques? Share Images Online!
People love to see images and photos online. You will find that sharing photos or pictures will get greater engagement from your readers.
Consider submitting some great images to Flickr, Pinterest, Instagram and other websites. Share what you find as well! The more you share, the greater people will engage with your website and products.
You’ll find image sharing is a great way to strengthen your off-page SEO techniques!
There you have it!
Off-page SEO is a lot harder to get good results than on-page SEO. You have to work at it over time and perhaps get out of your comfort zone and network with other bloggers.
These 17 tips should boost your SEO strategies and improve your website traffic numbers.
If you have any more questions about SEO techniques or you have any suggestions to improve your off-page SEO, be sure let us know in the comments area below!
Thank you so much for this informative article! Was searching for the best Off-page SEO techniques and here you have covered all the points very clearly. I will definitely implement all these things on my website.
You’re welcome!