Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Off-Page SEO Explained
- Why is Off-Page SEO Important?
- How does Googlebot make use of Off-Page SEO?
- Disavow Tool
- Buying Backlinks
- Backlinks and how to earn them properly
- Free Tools to help you with Off-Page SEO
- Social Media
- Guest Posting with Reputable Websites
- Start Using Videos to Keep People Engaged
- Bounce Rate & Dwell Time
- TV & Radio
- Building Partnerships
- Reviews & Reputation
- Link Juice Redirected
- Common Sense
- Conclusion
Introduction
This article was created to teach you the definition of what off-page SEO is and how it can help your website succeed in Google Search or any search engine results page for that matter. We’re going to use free tools to show our examples because it’s not always necessary to use paid tools to succeed online.
If you want an easy to read article giving you honest information about what off-page SEO is without the use of spammy affiliate links or any other misleading ulterior motives, then keep reading. This might be the first honest blog post sticking with the education part of it all, and not trying to sell you anything.
Off-Page SEO Explained
Off Page SEO is considered to be anything you work on which is not directly implemented on your website. When you’re building relationships by networking with people through social media or perhaps making use of something like Linkedin’s Marketing Solutions, this is considered off-page SEO. Preparing a guest post for someone else’s website which mentions you or links back to you is also considered off-page SEO.
Here’s a quick informative video to best help understand off-page SEO and its importance.
There’s a lot of time and effort needed to build a successful off-page SEO system that works for you. It takes a lot of research and building strategic relationships with important people to have successful off-page SEO methods that work well for you. There are many different methods included in off-page SEO. Here’s just a few you’ll need to set time aside for:
- Email Marketing
- Telephone / Making Calls
- Guest Posts
- Reputable Directory Listings
- Social Media
- Video Marketing
- Citations & Mentions
Off-page SEO (Sometimes called Off-site SEO) is much needed in your SEO plan of action. There’s technical SEO which we’ll talk about in a different post, there’s also On-Page SEO which we’ll also talk about in a different post, then there’s Off-Page SEO which is what this post is about and in this case includes link building but some experts think that link building is a category completely on its own but here we’re including it in this post about off-page optimization.
Why is Off-Page SEO Important
If you concentrate all of your efforts on technical and on-page SEO, this might work for a while and you will get some positive results for your website but there’s so many trust signals and domain reputation advantages you’d be missing out on by not having an off-page SEO plan. Let’s say you spent a lot of time connecting and becoming friends by networking with people in your field of work. One backlink earned in this fashion can be extremely useful for your blog.
Google will give you domain authority and trust signals. The only way to do this with on-page efforts is to create an amazing blog post and expect backlinks naturally but we all know how difficult this can be. It takes a lot of effort. Long form blog content backed up with actual facts will get you natural backlinks and this is in my opinion the best way to earn backlinks. We can thank Brian Dean for that example.
Making the efforts to execute consistent off-page SEO for your business. Some companies hire staff full-time just for this and the rewards are great.
You need to be very knowledgeable when and where you’re getting your backlinks from. You need to verify manually who else the website you want a link from is linking out to. If the website in question is linking out to multiple websites with low domain authority and high spam scores then you obviously don’t want a backlink from there yourself. Chances are that they’re probably selling links and Google’s algorithm will give absolutely no value to the link you acquire from this website.
It’s important to use common sense with your off-page SEO campaign and either do the work yourself as best as possible or keep a close eye on the staff or company that does this work on your behalf.
The blogs out there making the big bucks; you’ll notice they have beautiful and helpful content and you won’t find any shady practices because their careers depend on it.
How does Googlebot make use of Off-Page SEO?
Pretend you are a Googlebot and your job is to crawl and scour the web on a daily basis. You’re going to start to be pretty good at finding quality compared to non-quality websites and companies. We all know that Google wants to have the best quality and most reputable websites show up first in the search results.
What you don’t want is Googlebot crawling a spammy website and from a hyperlink being redirected to your website. This is not the end of the world when this happens once or twice but if you’re using shady practices, your website will never rank and can possibly be penalized. Actually what can happen is you might spend a ton of energy and time creating awesome blog posts or creating the best infographic but because of a few shady links, Google will not trust any part of your website.
Disavow Tool
Have you used Google’s disavow tool? It’s a life saver. Once in a while you should use whatever tool you want to find out as much as possible about your backlink profile and disavow all of the spam. Some experts think that it’s not worth the trouble because Googlebot already knows what’s spam, toxic, and blackhat, but I’m telling you that it’s worth the time and effort to completely block all the trash with Google’s disavow tool. Your websites Trust Score & Spam Score depend on it.
Here’s a free tool to check a website’s spam score. Click here to try it yourself.
If you see a website linking to you with a high spam score, you must block it from affecting your website’s online reputation with Google Disavow tool immediately. If you don’t want to do this yourself because maybe it’s too time consuming. Please get a hold of us and we will see how we can help you.
Check out this article by Glenn Babe about how disavowing toxic links helped this website come back to like.
Some websites have backlink profiles with a million links so going through them all and disavowing what’s toxic can be quite time consuming but we have paid tools that are made specifically built for this reason and we can do the work for you. We use Majestic for disavowing all toxic backlinks which will get your website ranking higher in Google Search again. For this service, you can contact us here: info@webney.ca or https://webney.ca
Buying Backlinks
Let me help you understand why you should never buy a link. RJ Jacques also talks about this in this post about why we should never buy backlinks. Google’s best practices are not asking you not to buy links because they don’t want you to cheat! They are actually trying to save you a lot of time and your hard earned money.
All you have to do is search Google for backlink selling companies and there are tons of them and they all use private blog networks. For proof of this, try and buy just 1 backlink for the fun of it and manually check the other backlinks from their websites and you’ll see what I’m talking about. You’ll see the blog posts linking out to a bunch of very well established websites with high domain authority and then at least once for every blog post they have on their website, they’ll be linking out to some low domain website which makes no sense.
If you think about it, when you’re linking out from your blog post. You’re most likely going to link out to a relevant article that’ll backup your webpage to show Google the relevancy, right! Well when you find that website linking out to a domain with a very low domain authority, that’s where you and Googlebot find a link that doesn’t fit or makes sense therefore was most likely purchased and that’s how Google’s algorithm learns about this and devalues everything from that website and the link that was sold to you for hundreds of dollars is with $0 in an instant.
Lastly, If you have a blog post and you’re trying to find a website to link out to, to back up your article. You’re not going to search Google and link to some blog post on the 10th page of the search result, right! Don’t buy links. It’s a scam.
When you hire a company that sells links, you’re 100% giving them your hard earned money for absolutely no reason and here’s the explanation:
If you paid a company with a backlink selling service like The Hoth or Power One, and you’ve now obtained a link from whatever website they have a connection with. Googlebot knows this and will not pass any link juice your way. Even worse, they may penalize that website you’re getting a link from and then it becomes very toxic and bad for your domain’s reputation and trust score.
One simple way for you to check manually is to take any given webpage and scan the webpage for all outgoing links. A reputable website like IBM.com will link out to very high domain authority domains to backup their findings and help their users. You won’t see them linking out to a brand new website with low domain authority.
A less reputable website (which is where your backlink comes from when you buy it) Do the same thing. Scan the webpage in question and check the domain authority and spam scores on all outgoing links. You’ll find that the blog post or online article is linking out to low domain authority websites and even spammy websites and right away you should understand that Google has noticed this before you and gives absolutely no value to the link you purchased from these backlink selling companies.
Google & their best practices are trying to save you from being scammed and also not wasting your money on bad SEOs like this. Follow Google’s best practices.
You have to ask yourself. Why would a website with a domain authority of 80 link out to a domain that has a domain authority of only 20! It’s not natural and it makes no sense. A reputable company will only link to you if your blog post is ranking #1 for a good topic. That’s when this looks natural and is natural and this is how you implement a good off-page SEO strategy. A backlink selling company is selling you a backlink from a website they made a deal with but the problem with this is that Google sees how unnatural this is and renders the link unworthy and you’re also risking a penalty for an unnatural backlink profile and if that happens, it’ll be better for you to get a new website domain because trying to fix a penalty is almost impossible and will take months or even years to do.
Instead of paying these backlink selling companies for backlinks that do not give you any value whatsoever, spend that time and money to create the best content you can possibly imagine for any given topic and the backlinks will come in naturally. If you really want to spend money, have an awesome infographic created and share it on social media and watch the backlinks come in naturally. Google has the smartest and the largest algorithm in human history & they know everything so don’t try and fool them by this toxic off-page SEO practice.
A good SEO company worth hiring will not offer backlink selling services. Instead they will help you create content, tools, infographics, contents, anything that will earn you the links naturally.
Here’s a link you can check out where Google themselves explain a bit about quality backlinks to your website.
Here’s a quote from SEO.COM
“Adhering to Google’s guidelines requires building your backlink profile organically through high-quality content, good SEO practices, and legitimate promotion strategies.”
Backlinks and how to earn them properly
The methods I’m going to teach you here might seem daunting at first but they do work extremely well and it’s the best and most natural way to get your website ranking number 1 in the search engine results pages (SERPs.) Getting one backlink using this whitehat method will replace thousands of dollars and hours of blackhat techniques used by many SEOs nowadays such as buying links.
Locate a local website or if there aren’t any local, then find a blog or company that you find appropriate and relevant and pick up the phone and call them, you’ll be surprised.
I know this image is scary but pick up the phone and make new connections, you’ll tank me in the end, and if you really don’t want to do it, you can hire us to do it for you. Contact https://webney.ca for further instructions.
Calling them and speaking with them builds meaningful relationships and it’s free. You can always subscribe to Sales Navigator in Linkedin if you prefer. Linkedin does make this process easier because when you try and contact new people, they can see who you are from your profile but anyway, getting in contact with people in your field and simple asking for a backlink or a Guest Post is the best and should be the only way you’re earning your backlinks following Google’s best practices.
Here’s a relative and great quality post by Bruce Harpham that will help you with a few more backlink earning techniques.
Free Tools to help you with Off-Page SEO
Did you know that there are so many free tools out there for digital marketers which are absolutely free to use. An expert SEO with a lot of experience doesn’t need tools because he can do it all manually and so can you, it’s really not that hard. If you’re not ready to do it all manually yet, that’s fine.
All you need to do is a Google search for whatever you need to do. If you want to know what a domain’s authority is. Let’s check Google for “Free Domain Authority Checker”
Now let’s click on the 1st result which is MOZ.
And that’s how it’s done.
I can tell you this from experience that there’s absolutely nothing you can’t do with free tools online with just a quick search. If you have subscriptions to a bunch of tools that we all know are a waste of money because it’s all available for free, why spend your hard earned money if you don’t have to.
Let’s add up 2 tools at $179.00 each. That’s $537.00 per month and $6444.00 per year + tax. Even if your company is well off and can easily afford this. What spend that much money when it’s all available for free with a quick search.
If you ever need to do a deeper dive into your website, get a free trial at any of these tools and get the data you need and then quit the subscription. The money can be much rather well spent with your staff or family.
We can rank a website #1 in Google Search without paying for 1 tool, backlink, or whatever else they’re trying to push on you.
Geoff Kennedy wrote a useful post over at WIX about this very topic. Please click here for more information about working on SEO with absolutely no tools.
Social Media
Social media didn’t do too much when it all first started but nowadays social media will help your off-page SEO work immensely. If the right person was to share your post or infographic or video which should be hosted on your website, you can end up earning a lot of backlinks naturally.
It might be worth starting a YouTube channel or a Facebook page for your business and getting as many followers as possible. Having social media profiles in your knowledge graph also helps trust signals.
I know personally if I find something useful from any given social media outlet I’ll send myself a reminder to link to the content from a post I’m working on if the relevance is there. There’s nothing better for search engine bots than crawling a link that backs-up a fact in your article with a relevant link that helps users.
Guest Posting with Reputable Websites
Guest posting is a tough one because not a lot of people including myself are very motivated to spend sometimes many hours on an awesome article fully researched and you know very well that what you’ve prepared would be worth 10 times more on your own website than someone else’s.
If you’re going to do this then let me remind you of a few things to keep in mind when looking for a website to write up a guest post for.
If we go back approximately 10 years ago, almost all blog/guest posts were allowing a do-follow link from inside the blog post itself & if they weren’t allowing that, then at least they’d allow your BIO at the bottom with a do-follow link there, but not no more! It’s all been taken away thanks to Google’s algorithm Penguin which is now a part of their core.
To work past this you’ll have to do your research when submitting a blog post. You’ll want to find a website relevant to your niche and contact them about this. Make sure they allow at least a do-follow link from your bio and be honest with them that preparing an article for their website to use will be very informative and valuable. In exchange for this you’d like a do-follow backlink from their website to yours. This is more than fair, especially if it’s going to take a week for you to prepare a blog post which will benefit them more than it will yourself.
Email Outreach
Once you have enough guest posts out there all linking back to your main domain, place these links nicely in your email signature. This will show potential clients that you are very knowledgeable and reputable in your field of work.
I’ve used this method before, mostly when I was just getting started in digital marketing but it worked. I had a cheap tool in my professional email platform and it showed me that mostly everyone clicked these links and I did get a lot of sales because I had guest posts on platforms like SEMrush & MOZ.
Start Using Videos to Keep People Engaged
2025 is the start of many new AI companies offering to produce high-quality videos for free. There’s no excuse not to use video anymore and it’s well worth it. With the attention spans of the average person nowadays, video marketing is a much more popular method of content marketing.
You can choose whatever text you want with your logo and 5 minutes later you have a free high-quality video for use on social media platforms and even on your website which will help you SEO quite a bit.
inVideo AI is a platform you might want to try, they give you a certain amount for free, but there’s a ton of them out there and video is king nowadays and can easily earn you backlinks if you take the time to create an informative video. Even creating a YouTube channel all while using AI to create the videos for you is a great idea.
Don’t forget to add your domain to your YouTube channel and I’m sure a good percentage of YouTube users will end up visiting your website. If video marketing is something you need help with, please contact Webney at info@webney.ca or https://webney.ca
Click here to learn a bit more about how to earn backlinks with video marketing.
Bounce Rate & Dwell Time
Bounce rate is when people come and visit your website and leave right away so that’s obviously what we want to stay away from. Take the time to write good content and make the user experience of your webpage awesome. Dwell time has to be high. We want people to land on your webpage and stay there as long as possible and there are many ways to make this happen.
I was visiting a blog post the other day and I must have stayed on that same webpage for over an hour. What they ended up doing / the way they kept the reader involved and interested was to give away amazing and helpful content but most of all they gave free deliverables as part of their technique.
So imagine you’re reading about something you really need and are interested in and they’re giving you free spreadsheet downloads in the middle of the post and it’s all for free!
When Googlebots see this, they want to rank the article #1 in Google Search for sure because people are landing on this webpage and staying there for 45 minutes or more!
When website owners build a free tool or explain things in such detail plus include free downloadable deliverables. It really works out.
Something else that works quite well is white papers. Instead of asking people to download a white paper. Embed the white paper into your website and have people read it there.
I know if I’m reading a white paper that the author put so much energy and useful information into it. I’ll be there for a while. I might even take a few breaks and come back to it which means I’m on this blog post for a few hours. This is the complete opposite of a very bad webpage where people bounce away from it right away so I’m sure you can see which website is going to rank higher in search engines.
Bounce rate & dwell time is considered an on-page SEO metric but I have included it in this off-page SEO article because you’re only going to attract quality backlinks with high-quality blog posts that people spend a lot of time on so it’s worth mentioning. Go ahead and implement a video within your article while you’re at it. May as well.
Some people write out a very long blog post and add a SoundCloud widget in case readers would rather listen to the blog post instead.
It’s actually quite useful to be reading a blog post and playing the audio along with it at the same time and as mentioned earlier, we can now do this with AI videos as well which definitely makes your blog post a linkable asset.
TV & Radio
Off-page SEO is impacted indirectly from TV & Radio. It’s the reason why companies want the best easy to read domain names with no dashes. The main reason why TV & Radio ads help off-page SEO is because there are so many people sent to the website in question. The click through rates are so much higher and Google’s algorithm is smart enough to know what’s going on. Google analytics starts to receive so much traffic from what is called a direct hit.
. Larger companies have the budget for expensive TV & Radio ads. In fact if a company is always advertising on their local TV and radio stations, then they’re most likely able to outrank their competition organically. Google’s algorithms are able to put 1 & 1 together and they figure if the company is able to run ads on TV & Radio which are quite expensive, then the company must be the real deal!
iNet Solutions helps us understand this more.
Building Partnerships
We’ve spoken about this a bit earlier but it’s quite important so let’s dig a bit deeper into this. The best opportunities are built with relationships and friendships with others.
A simple way to start a new connection is to always comment on someone’s blog posts and after a while, the author will notice and start to reply to your comments. If what he or she is writing about is very interesting for you, then a new friendship can be built and people start to get introduced to more people and so on..
I have a friend in the digital marketing industry who is a “people person” and he has no problem making new friends using this method. In fact he was invited to a wedding 500 miles away from home in a different country just to go hang out and talk about a massive project.
It started out as I mentioned, just comments on blog posts, then they added each other on Linkedin & that’s how they started a working relationship together.
Now this might not be your average definition of off-page SEO but it’s quite relevant.
As mentioned earlier off-page SEO is any work completed off the actual website and this example seems to fit. Just like what I mentioned earlier about making phone calls, this method is quite similar.
Neil Patel is famous for his position in the SEO world and here’s a bit on what he has to say about blog commenting. He also has many free SEO tools you can take advantage of on his website.
Again I’m going to mention Linkedin. It’s the best platform to start meeting and connecting with others. You’ll get much more out of a paid plan in this case but if you’re a hard worker, you’ll find that the small price to pay for a subscription is nothing compared to what you actually get back in earnings.
Reviews & Reputation
Asking for reviews builds trust signals and is a great off-page SEO method to make use of. Google clearly states that collecting quality and highly rated reviews for your business can help your website rank higher in Google Search. Click here to learn more.
There’s nothing wrong with asking good friends and family to leave a review for you if they know for sure the services or products you’re offering are of good quality. Getting reviews from clients is sometimes tough to do. It seems no one has time to help out with this but it’s worth the effort to keep trying.
Google reviews is not the only way to go. It’s very easy for spammers to leave you a bad review or even a fake review and Google is not at all interested in helping you with removing it. You can choose to use a different platform like Trustpilot where people have to create a lengthy profile in order to leave you a review and much less people are willing to do this.
TrustPilot is very reputable and you can embed their widget on your website which will in turn be crawled and taken into consideration by Googlebot.
Reviews and your online reputation when networking or dealing with other companies, or even leaving positive professional blog comments on reputable posts in your industry can help your off-page SEO efforts immensely.
Link Juice Redirected
This is another on-page SEO method but it’s got a lot to do with off-page as well since we’re concentrating on an incoming backlink earned with a great linkable asset like long form content for example.
Let’s say you are selling tree cutting services and for you this is extremely important because this is how you make a living and feed your family. You can contact us if you need help with this but what you need to do is create something amazing that will attract backlinks.
Make absolutely sure that the first internal link from that new awesome webpage you’ve created links to your tree cutting services page. This is how your money page receives a lot of link juice and therefore ranks much higher in Google Search. The higher you’re ranking, the more calls you’re getting for cutting down trees!
I’d like to thank WooRank for this image and here’s a link to an awesome video WooRank has created explaining more on Link Juice.
Internal linking is an extremely important on-page SEO strategy but when the inbound links come in from your off-page SEO efforts, you’ll need to know how to create an internal linking expert strategy. Internal linking is more important than inbound links and we’ll get right into it on a different blog post. Here’s a bit more information about inbound links, thanks to this great author Lukas Rasmussen.
Common Sense
I wanted to finish this article with a bit about common sense. It seems like there are so many blog posts out there selling tools people don’t need and giving advice which benefits the author more than the user/reader. You can build a great and very successful off-page SEO campaign with pure common sense. No need for tools that cost a fortune. A great trick also is to right click on all the links to see if the link is being tracked by an affiliate marketing tracking code. I see these all the time and that’s when I realize that I’m about to read a 2000 word article which is all about some author trying to sell you something with links that send you out to purchase a tool he’s advertising!
Try and find a blog post in which the author is honestly trying to give you advice by using free tools and words that are from plain experience. If the post you’re reading is teaching you how to grow your business in the most honest way without pushing sales onto you, then have the common sense to read more of his posts/articles and possibly try and get a hold of him. Sometimes these are the types of people who can help you the best. Some of thee guys do not rank #1 because they’re too busy helping real clients and are more concerned about their success than their very own. Webney Website Design Company believes in these methods.
Conclusion
My off-page SEO experience goes 10 years back. I’ve worked with the Godfather of SEO, Bruce Clay. This is a man who offers free SEO tools and cares very much for his clients. He also wrote a real book called SEO for Dummies. I am self-taught and you can do the same. I’ve spent 10 years learning from the best and most honest SEOs. I’ve learned HTML, CSS, & JavaScript, not because I want to build web applications, but because I want to be better at my SEO career. Please get in contact with me if you don’t have time to do your own SEO. I will prepare a proposal for you which will be more than fair and the results will be amazing! Click here to get a hold of us!
