April 7, 2025
Delivering high-quality content, using the right keywords, and improving your loading speed—all of these on-page processes improve your site’s user experience and can directly benefit your SERP performance. However, what you do off your website can be equally important.
Off-page SEO involves all the activities that help you bring attention to your website from outside resources. It includes actions and processes that help you to build up your topic authority, and your target audience to discover your pages.
A typical off-page SEO checklist primarily focuses on building up your backlink profile, but there’s much more to it. It can include various processes that have the ultimate aim of building your reputation, authority, and trustworthiness from external sources.
That can mean increasing your brand mentions, creating guest posts, enhancing your social media game, earning citations, building relationships with relevant influencers, and engaging with various online communities.
While the off-page SEO task list can be long and challenging, it’s essential that you keep up with it if you want to shape your online reputation and boost your engagement.
Consider this—you’re an expert who wants to share their expertise with the world. So, you decide to stand in the middle of the street and start shouting about all the things you know. For most people, you’d be nothing more than a weirdo screaming in the middle of the street.
But if you had others promoting your expertise and telling their friends and family to give you a listen, businesses endorsing you, and celebrities singing your praises, you’d stop being a weirdo. People would start seeing you as the expert you were.
It’s a similar thing with websites.
When other sites (and users) are pointing to your website and telling their visitors to check you out, they’re essentially telling them that they trust you and that your site is worthy of their time. They’re telling them that you have something of value to offer.
This simple fact shows real users and search engines that your site is credible and respectable, so you’ll ultimately see an increase in your website traffic and an improvement in your SERP performance.
Of course, as with anything that has to do with SEO, things aren’t always quite as simple as getting a few shout-outs from a couple of random sites. So, let’s dive deeper into the topic and find answers to the burning questions—what does off-page SEO include, why is it important, and precisely what is an off-page SEO checklist?
Let’s start with the basics and see why off-page SEO is important and what kind of benefits it can come with.
In essence, it’s important because it shows your site’s importance. It shows that your site has something that others deem valuable and worthy of endorsing.
From the perspective of real users, it acts as a vote of confidence for your site. From the perspective of search engines, it signals high content quality and topical expertise. Search engines, in particular, will pay close attention to this as their ultimate goal is presenting their users with the best available content that will deliver the most value.
After all, if everyone’s saying you have a cool website (especially if everyone with established online authority is doing so), the likelihood is that you do, in fact, have a cool website.
But it’s not just some tweaks in user and search engine perception you’ll enjoy with off-page SEO. Some of the concrete benefits also include:
Perhaps the biggest benefit of off-page SEO is that it tends to offer greater long-term results. The more backlinks you have, for instance, the more backlinks you’re going to get down the line as your authority in the field increases. The more brand mentions you have, the more of them you’re going to get and the more users you’re going to attract from diverse sources.
Now, with the benefits of off-page SEO explained, it’s time to get down to business and see what you can do to ensure you get this right.
Unfortunately, much of off-page SEO is out of your direct control. Whether others are talking about you and what they’re saying is mainly up to them, not you.
That said, with a proper plan in place and high-quality content already on your pages, it becomes easier to encourage external sources to give you their thumbs up. All you have to do is identify how to get started with your plan, and that’s why I’m here.
Below, we’ll go over all the main points you’ll want to pay attention to when you get into off-page SEO and see how you can take charge of them.
Shoot me your email to get the free off-page SEO checklist 2025 in Excel so you can keep track of your progress more easily. Better yet, sign up for Rankioz and let it do it for you automatically.
Backlinks are the backbone of your entire off-page SEO strategy. They act as an endorsement or a recommendation where other websites are telling their visitors to check you out. They’re essentially a digitalized form of word-of-mouth marketing, and they are a big deal for everyone involved.
They’re primarily a big deal for the website that gives you the backlink.
You’re not alone in your endeavors to keep your visitors on your pages longer—everyone wants that. So, when a site is telling its visitors to go to you instead of to one of its internal pages, it’s technically encouraging them to leave sooner.
Of course, there are some nice SEO benefits for the site in question when its pages have useful external links (you can learn more about the importance of external linking on my on-page SEO checklist. Still, most sites will be very picky about which external links they’re using, so you’ll have to make it worth their while.
Secondly, backlinks are a big deal to users.
They make navigating the entirety of the internet much more user-friendly and convenient. Say someone wants to start a new hobby, such as crocheting, so they looked up crocheting for beginners. If they come to a well-optimized site, they might be able to use it to gather all the relevant information.
They’d easily find external sources that offer tutorials, other sources that sell crocheting patterns, and others still that sell high-quality yarn. Instead of having to search for every individual thing from scratch, users would get looped into a network that connects them with everything that’s relevant to them.
The only catch is that they need to first find a trustworthy website that connects them with other trustworthy sources that connect them with other trustworthy sources—and so on and so forth.
Lastly, backlinks are a big deal to search engines and to your site. They dictate your domain authority, help search engine crawlers determine your content’s context and relevance, assist in page discovery and indexing, and, most importantly, impact your ranking on SERPs.
If you have good backlinks, you’ll get lots of positive attention from other referring sites, real users, and search engines. If you have bad backlinks, things won’t be quite so peachy.
Not all backlinks are made the same. Some can be highly helpful to your SEO strategy, while others can leave you hanging towards the back of the SERPs. It all depends on how authoritative the website that places your backlinks is.
Site authority refers to how trustworthy, reputable, and credible a website is. High website authority generally means that the site has an established online presence, a virtually impeccable reputation, and high topic expertise. It also means that it has high website traffic, high SERP rankings, and high user engagement.
When you get backlinks from these kinds of sites, you can improve your own brand perception. I mean, why would websites that are already in good standing link to you unless you had something good to offer? Both real users and search engines will see this as a vote of confidence and start regarding your site as a high authority one.
Some great examples of domains with high authority include renowned news outlets, government sites, educational sites, and general industry leaders. Getting a backlink from those domains would be a cherry on top of your SEO cake.
As a rule, most SEO tools will give you a domain authority score ranging from 0 to 100, telling you how authoritative your site, as well as your referring site, is. You want both to have high scores. Low-authority websites will only end up harming you.
For your backlink profile to make sense and help your SEO efforts, you’ll need to pay close attention to who’s liking to you and how they’re doing it. The links and the anchor texts they come with need to be relevant not only to your site and the content of the specific page, but also to the referring website and its content.
Users and search engines rely heavily on context to determine the value and relevance of a backlink.
Say you’re running a health and fitness website. A good, contextual, relevant link would come from sites that handle similar topics. A renowned gym website linking to yours would be great, as you two would likely have many overlapping topics. It would be even better if you had an educational site linking to yours, especially if it’s regarding any health/fitness research studies.
A health and beauty website linking to yours could be a stretch but suitable, depending on the main topic of the referring page.
All of these backlinks could help users and search engines put your website in context and better understand what you’re all about. It could even help you reaffirm to search engines that your page perfectly matches the search intent, which would bring your rankings up a notch.
Now imagine if it was a tech website that links to your health and fitness page. Or an automotive site, banking site, or online casino? How likely is it that any of these sites would have topics that overlap with yours?
Even if these sites are high-authority ones with flawless SERP performance on their own, it wouldn’t do you any good if you got backlinks from them. It would only confuse real users and search engines alike, giving them no useful information about you. It wouldn’t necessarily harm your rankings, but it wouldn’t improve them much, either.
So, focus on getting backlinks from sites that are relevant to you and your industry as a whole.
Think about backlinking the way you do about word-of-mouth marketing. If a trusted family member, business, or an industry expert told you: “Hey, this is a really good thing; check it out,” you’d probably believe that it is a good thing, and you’d immediately have more trust in it before even interacting with it.
If a shady person with a criminal record told you the same thing, you’d have a much different opinion of it. You’d probably think that what they’re recommending isn’t all that great, and you’d immediately be suspicious of it.
Backlinks are kind of like that. When reputable sites link to you, they lend you some of their domain authority, in a way. They create a link between their reputation and yours—if they’re trustworthy, you appear trustworthy. If they’re credible, you’re credible, and vice versa.
Of course, it works the other way around, too. If you get link endorsements from shady, suspicious, and malicious websites, users and search engines will automatically assume your site shares these characteristics.
So, it’s always in your best interest to steer clear of any sus sites and avoid spammy, low-quality backlinks at all costs.
While you can’t always get different sites to link to you, you can avoid bad links by disavowing them. Many technical SEO tools will come with a disavow feature that lets you tell search engines that you don’t want to be associated with a website that links to you.
Naturally, creating high-quality content for your own website is crucial for your SEO. You can’t meet search intent and rank high if you have nothing to rank high with. However, creating high-quality content for other sites can be pretty useful, too.
Guest posting and content outreach are great ways to get your name out there and start garnering some good backlinks. In a nutshell, it means reaching out to relevant websites and creating content that they will post on their pages with a couple of links that will lead back to your pages. The backlinks will typically appear either in the content body or in the author’s bio section.
The idea behind this is that it allows you to share your expertise and industry insights, setting you up as a relevant authority with useful information to offer.
However, it has to be done right. Otherwise, both you and the sites you post to can be flagged for link spam.
So, how can you avoid being flagged and ensure that your guest posting efforts actually benefit you? Let’s see.
When you first start looking into guest posting, you’ll find that it appears relatively easy to do. There are millions of sites out there that will accept payment in return for publishing your content. Some might give you credit. Others might make it seem like they were the ones creating said content.
Many won’t even care about your content’s relevance or quality. So, you’ll find sites that look like parenting blogs posting a lot about joining the stock market, using video editing software, finding good online betting sites, and buying private beaches.
Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense, and partnering with such sites won’t do you any good. The chances of you attracting higher traffic and building up your online reputation through them will be less than slim.
Instead, always try to connect with reputable, industry-related websites that make sense for you and what you’re trying to do. Look for websites in your niche (not competitors, of course) that have a shared target audience and that can help your expertise shine.
Although it may take more time, effort, and resources, it will ultimately pay off because you’ll be connecting with sites whose users might actually be interested in your products/services.
Most commonly, those who get flagged for link spam are the ones with large-scale guest-posting strategies whose only goal is building up their backlink profile.
When you have a bunch of content on random sites that aren’t necessarily related to your industry or the general topics you’re discussing on your pages, it screams that you’re paying for them and that those are not natural backlinks.
It’s even worse when you have highly optimized and uniform anchor texts on all of them.
Search engines can see right through it and instantaneously conclude that you’re trying to manipulate user perception and fake your way through the SERPs. What’s more, you won’t just get a slap on the wrist if search engines catch you doing this. You’ll get penalized for it, and your site will either be pushed to the back of the results or not even appear in the results at all.
Don’t risk it!
When you’re creating content as a guest poster, make sure that you’re using natural, non-spammy links with anchor texts appropriate for the content itself and the page they’re linking to. While you can certainly create somewhat similar guest posts for a few different referring websites, make sure that each is unique and that your link fits in with the content, not necessarily with your keyword research metrics.
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when doing guest posting outreach is that you need to create informative, valuable content that attracts engagement.
First and foremost, that’s because you’ll have a difficult time convincing high-authority sites to publish your stuff if the quality is iffy.
Reputable sites are putting their reputation at risk if they publish subpar pieces. They’re harming their own rankings, disappointing their users, and tarnishing their brand image. They’ll want the guest content they post to meet their quality criteria and deliver value to their users. Otherwise, they won’t give you their time of day.
Secondly, even if you can somehow convince a reputable site to publish lower-quality content, what does that do for you? It certainly doesn’t benefit you. It shows real users and search engines that you don’t have the expertise you claim you have and that your site is likely full of similarly low-quality posts.
Why would search engines show such content to users, and why would users want to stick around and engage with you?
So, when trying your hand as a guest poster, make sure to prioritize your target audience and present them with content that gives them real value. This is your chance to make the right first impression and actually impress. There’s no “fake it till you make it” here. Create your guest content and do it right.
Social media is its own thing, with little direct influence on your SEO efforts. Still, it can be an essential tool to use to get your SERP rankings up to an enviable level.
Even though most search engines state they’re not using social media signals as a ranking factor (with the exception of Bing), it’s obvious that your performance on the results pages can be heavily influenced by how you put your social media accounts to use.
On paper, the specific number of likes, shares, and comments you get across different platforms don’t do much for your SEO since search engines aren’t in cahoots with social networks. In practice, the more likes, shares, and comments you get, the greater the increase in your website traffic, which does impact your SEO and SERP performance.
It all makes sense. If you’re highly popular on socials, your brand visibility is higher. If your brand visibility is high, people will want to come to your site and check you out. If you have high website traffic (with low bounce rates), search engines will conclude that your site offers something of value and will want to promote you.
So, at the end of the day, your social media accounts are a great way to get referral traffic and plenty of backlinks without relying on outsiders to help you with it.
If you’re following along with my off-page SEO submission list, here are the key things you’ll want to pay attention to when it comes to improving your social media signals.
Social media is all about increasing your visibility. If you were just starting out and had only a website to your name, it would be pretty difficult for your target audience to find you organically. If you added social media to the mix… Now, that’s a different story.
Social media enables you to connect directly with your users and build a true relationship with them. Through engaging content, comments, and even a few sponsored posts, you can start to attract quite the attention online. However, you do need to ensure that you stay active wherever your target audience is.
That means it’s not enough to have only a Facebook account, for example, and draw a commotion just there. You’ll need to put all platforms to use—from Facebook to Instagram, X, TikTok, and more. You’ll need to be everywhere your users are.
Although it can be overwhelming staying on top of several different platforms at once, it’s nothing you can’t handle. Start small. Identify the primary platform that the majority of your target audience is on, then work your way up.
Just make sure you don’t neglect any of your accounts. Inactivity can deter your audiences and make you seem unprofessional. So, stay active and make sure you’re sharing your content across all platforms. The more active you are, the greater your online visibility will be.
Staying active on social media doesn’t just mean sharing your blog posts to your accounts and then sitting back and relaxing. You’ll need to put in some extra work to get any off-page SEO benefits from it. That mainly means driving user engagement.
You’ll need to encourage your users to interact with the content you share. Get them to like, comment, or share your content on their own profiles. At times, this can be easier said than done, but as long as you have valuable content, it shouldn’t be too difficult.
There are many different tactics you could adopt:
It might take a while until you see your user engagement increase. Unless you’re lucky enough for your content to go viral at random, you’ll need to keep at it. Keep posting and keep engaging with your target audience.
You won’t always be able to do it all on your own. To amplify your reach on social media and connect with a wider audience, you might want to look into collaborating with influencers.
I know what you’re thinking—using influencers seems excessive and expensive. And it can be. On average, a sponsored post on Instagram, for example, can set you back around $1,300. For many SMBs on a budget, this is simply unachievable.
However, these numbers are for somewhat bigger influencers. If you have a tight budget, all you have to do is look for those with a smaller following.
Partnering with micro-influencers (with up to 50,000 followers) or nano-influencers (with up to 10,000 followers) can be significantly more affordable, with the average rates per post being between $10 and $500.
On the one hand, this is usually more in line with a stricter budget. On the other, it does mean you’ll only reach a smaller fragment of your target audience. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Smaller influencers generally tend to have more close-knit bonds with their followers. After all, it’s much easier to respond to all comments and interact with all followers when you have just a handful of them. Those with millions of followers simply can’t stay on top of them all and build a true, meaningful relationship with each and every one of them.
So, with stronger bonds, smaller influencers tend to have more of an influence on their followers. There’s more trust and respect between them, and instead of taking everything the influencer says with a grain of salt, their followers tend to truly believe their recommendations.
When you have a nano- or micro-influencer endorse your business, their followers will be more open to actually interacting with you. While you’ll ultimately get less of a traffic boost, you’ll be more likely to enjoy greater loyalty.
Random, unlinked brand mentions are the bread and butter of your online reputation, but they can either help you shine or bury you in the ground.
Now, you don’t have to be a business owner to accurately guess that most brand mentions don’t come with an accompanying link to the brand in question.
When people are talking about you in different online communities, they don’t necessarily want to keep you in the loop. They simply want to discuss your brand and share their opinions with others.
In some instances, those opinions could be recommendations. If you have a happy consumer, they might want to share with others how great you are and how others can benefit from doing business with you.
In some instances, the opinions could be words of caution, warning others to avoid your business because they’d had a negative interaction with it.
Whatever the case is, you’ll want to know about it, as these mentions can shape your reputation and ultimately impact your SERP performance.
On the one hand, unlinked brand mentions help you build up authority within your niche (provided that the mentions are good; the effect is the opposite if they’re bad).
On the other, they help put your business in context for search engines. Each mention tells search engines a bit more about who you are and what your website is about, helping build up your credibility.
So, what does our good old off-page SEO checklist include in regard to brand mentions?
First things first, to stay on top of your brand mentions, you’ll need to monitor them. Keep in mind that the manual approach won’t be able to cut it. Go ahead and try it. Type in your brand name in search and see whether you can uncover every single mention. See how much time it takes you.
If you want to cut to the chase and get an overview of your mentions, you’ll want to automate the process.
Now, most SEO tools designed to boost your rankings will typically come with a convenient brand monitoring feature. However, if you’re just starting out and aren’t ready for full-blown SEO software suites, Google Alerts can serve you just fine.
A completely free service, it allows you to put in any phrase or search query you want, including simply your brand name, and get an overview of all the content that contains it.
For added convenience, it also allows you to set up alerts and get email notifications with links to new pages that contain your query. You can get these alerts as frequently as you’d like—daily, weekly, or as soon as new content matching your criteria appears. The last option is generally the best one if you want to stay on top of your mentions.
When you get timely alerts, you can optimize your strategy on how to respond. You can immediately address any negative comments, dispel misconceptions about your brand, and engage with users without a hassle.
It’s not just individual users who might be commenting about your brand without mentioning you. It could also be different sites and platforms. Review sites, blogs, news outlets, and more could be talking about you without actually providing their visitors with a link to your business.
If you want to diversify your backlink profile while keeping all links as natural as possible, it would be in your best interest to reach out to all those sites mentioning you and have them include your link—either to your homepage/landing page or a specific page you’d like to promote. Of course, you’ll want to focus on reaching out mainly to those sites that mention you in a positive light.
In most instances, all you’ll have to do is ask, and you shall receive.
If you consistently do this and keep monitoring all brand mentions and reaching out to sites that talk about you, you’ll quickly see a change in both your website traffic and your SERP performance. It might not be quite as dramatic a change as with direct on-page optimization, but it will certainly help.
Probably the most important thing you can do for your business is keep a close eye on all reviews that come your way. Whether they come from real users or fake ones, happy customers or disgruntled shoppers, you’ll want to know about them.
Sometimes, you’ll get reviews straight on your business page on Google, where you’ll be able to address them directly. Other times, you’ll get reviews on different forums, social media platforms, and other online spaces.
Ideally, you’ll want to keep an eye on all of them and, if possible, respond to as many of them as possible.
If you get lots of good reviews, a simple “thank you” can help you build a stronger relationship with the customers and improve your reputation further. If you get bad feedback, which will happen regardless of how great your business might be, ignoring them won’t cut it.
Bad reviews are part of business, and both real users and search engines understand that. Of course, an overabundance of them will have a detrimental effect on your reputation and rankings, but a few bad ones can actually help you create a more positive brand image. You’ll just need to address them professionally and respectfully.
Approximately 56% of consumers say that how a business responds to a review impacts their perspective. So, as long as you don’t leave bad feedback hanging, apologize for your mistakes (if there were any on your part), and address negative comments appropriately, you might actually gain the trust and loyalty of all those who read your reviews.
Next up on the off-page SEO checklist is your local SEO and citation management. Unless you’re a global conglomerate or an international business, the chances are that you don’t need to take on all the possible online competitors on SERPs.
First and foremost, you probably want to stand out in your local geographic region. Of course, it would still be a plus if you ranked higher for broader searches.
In any case, to enhance your local off-page SEO, you’ll need to focus on three primary things—your Google My Business Optimization, your local business directories, and your reviews.
All of these will help you increase your visibility and inspire trust among both search engines and real users. Together, they can help you attract local audiences, increase your conversion rates, and deliver a more positive user experience. So, let’s dive deeper into these three aspects of local off-page SEO and see what they’re all about.
You won’t be able to do much for your local SEO unless you’re using Google My Business (GMB). It’s a free tool that lets you take charge of your online presence on Google and Google Maps, and it offers several key features that will help you stand out among the crowd:
For a free tool, GMB has plenty to offer. It’s up to you simply to take advantage of all these features.
What you’ll want to pay close attention to is information accuracy. Make sure that your address, office hours, and more are correct. If you make changes to them at any time, don’t forget to update the information on your GMB profile.
Add relevant images and videos (street view, office interior, menu, product/service pictures, and the like). If you have an FAQ section, make sure you’re adding relevant information. When you get reviews, respond to them.
You’ll want to stay on top of your GMB profile! Otherwise, it could only lead to user frustration and subpar local performance.
With your GMB profile handled, it’s time to look into external directories and make sure you’re included in them.
Depending on your precise location, you might not have access to super-specific local directories, though it’s always good to double-check. However, you’ll certainly have access to more generalized ones such as Yelp, Tripadvisor, Yellow Pages, Better Business Bureau, and the like. If you’re in a particularly niche industry, there might be some lesser-known but more relevant options that you should explore.
In some instances, your business might already be included in some listings without you knowing it. While this tends to be a positive, it could pose problems if your business information is outdated or otherwise inaccurate. Therefore, it would be a good idea to keep a close eye on your business listings and reach out to directories if you need to make any changes.
Whatever the case is, you’ll want your business to appear in at least a few different listings. Not only is this a good way to build up your backlinks, but it’s also a great way to deliver an exceptional user experience. If your target audience can easily find you using their go-to directories, they’ll be less concerned about your legitimacy and credibility.
I’ve mentioned customer reviews a couple of times, but it’s a good idea to spend some extra time on them. That’s how crucial they are for your off-page SEO. Reviews can impact your reputation and your SERP rankings, and they come with a long list of benefits for your business:
Customer reviews are a big part of all online and offline businesses, and they can be indispensable to shaping your reputation and helping you establish authority.
Good, old-fashioned competitor analysis never hurt no one. You’ll need it for dozens of critical tasks—understanding market trends, identifying consumer preferences, adjusting your pricing, improving your product/service offers, assessing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, finding content gaps, the list goes on and on.
You’ll also need it for reverse-engineering their on- and off-page SEO strategies and identifying what works and what doesn’t.
It’s especially useful for better understanding their backlinking profile and learning how you can improve your own profile.
Don’t worry; you won’t have to put on your detective hat and start digging up information manually. Most SEO competitor analysis tools can provide a bunch of useful information that you can use for your own off-page strategies.
To gain the type of information you want on your competitors, you’ll need a suitable tool. Two that particularly stand out are SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Both are all-in-one SEO solutions that cover the bases, offering insightful competitor research, keyword research, technical SEO analysis—the works. While both are on the more expensive side, being more suitable for medium to large businesses with a bit of a larger budget, they do have some free or more affordable options for competitor research.
Ahrefs Webmasters Tools, for instance, lets you perform backlink and organic search analysis on any domain you’d like. The information you’ll get with the free version will be pretty basic, but it could be a good start. To get a full overview of all of your competitors’ website organic traffic and backlinking profiles, you’ll need to cash out.
It’s a similar thing with SEMrush. It doesn’t currently offer a free competitor analysis tool, but it’s in the works, with its Backlink Checker due to come out at any moment. The free tool will let you see all the sites and pages that are linking to your chosen domain—that can be your own domain or your competitor’s.
Again, expect only basic insights with this free tool. For more information and more useful data, you’ll always need to upgrade to one of SEMrush’s premium plans.
Once you’ve assessed your competitors’ backlink profiles, you’ll better understand what kinds of websites are willing to refer their traffic to businesses in your niche. What’s more, you’ll better understand what kinds of backlinks offer positive SEO effects and what kinds can ultimately harm SERP performance.
Paid links and link farms might temporarily improve your competitors’ rankings (as well as your own), but they’ll ultimately result in search engine penalization, for instance. You can easily check whether your competitors are using these black-hat SEO strategies by checking the domain authority of their linking sites.
So, when assessing your competitors, make sure to look for high-authority websites that have added to their backlinking profiles. Moreover, make sure to assess the kinds of content that have earned them those backlinks.
Perhaps it’s your competitors’ tutorials that have garnered the most backlinks from high-authority domains. Perhaps it’s their reviews. Maybe it’s content with more infographics or long-form content that goes into the nitty-gritty of your industry. Whatever the case is, you can use this information to create more similar content types and hopefully earn more high-quality backlinks yourself that way.
The chances are that if a site links to your competitors, it would be willing to link to you. Now, this can work one of two ways—the site might be willing to publish new pieces of content with your backlinks in them, or it might be willing to replace your competitors’ backlinks with your own.
In either scenario, you’ll need to conduct thorough research and create content that delivers more value than what your competitors are currently offering. Don’t just copy-paste their content with minor tweaks to better match your brand persona. Create unique, high-quality work that distinguishes you from your competitors.
You’ll need to start by analyzing the referring website and the content it has on its pages. Assess how it relates to your industry and what type of content seems to best fit it—long-form vs short-form, infographics, studies, video tutorials, or anything in between. Then, start creating such content.
Focus on delivering value to your own users and to the referring website’s users, as well. Then, simply reach out to the site’s owner and make your proposition. If your content truly delivers more value, the chances are that you’ll have a new high-quality backlink in no time.
Influencer and community engagement is arguably the best way to drive authority and rankings. Most users don’t like doing business with faceless brands that are focused solely on transactions. They want to have a more personal experience, a human connection. They want to know who’s behind the brand and what that person is like.
You won’t be able to show this through paid marketing campaigns. You’ll only be able to show it through genuine interactions and through building a community.
Strong influencer and community relationships can help your off-page SEO efforts in more ways than one. You’ll increase your brand exposure and visibility, enjoy greater engagement rates across platforms, earn more organic brand mentions, and get more relevant user-generated content. You’ll establish an impeccable reputation and position yourself as an authority.
All of these signals will put your website in context for search engines, up the ante on your domain authority, and help you rank higher.
So, what precisely should you do for influencer and community engagement according to the off-page SEO checklist? Have a look.
Pretty much everything in SEO revolves around relevance. You want your content to be relevant to the users’ search intent. You want your backlinks to be relevant to your content. You want your influencers to be relevant to your industry. Otherwise, it will all be way too confusing to any onlookers.
Why would a beauty guru partner with a crochet pattern business? Why would a travel influencer partner with a video game developer? How does it make sense for a pet influencer to have a collaboration with a digital marketing agency?
Though you could technically create a unique spin and somehow interrelate any two highly distinct niches if you’re creative enough, it won’t really be worth the hassle. It’s much better for you to identify the relevant influencers who are closely related to your industry and then collaborate with them.
That way, you can not only ensure that your partnership is sensical for users and search engines, but that you and your chosen influencer actually share some of the same target audience.
When you share an audience, it’s more likely for you to gain high-quality backlinks and accompanying website traffic from your partnership and for the influencer to gain a wider following from you.
Influencers can only do so much for you. To really connect with your users and establish lucrative relationships that impact your SEO, you’ll need to pull your sleeves up and do some of the dirty work yourself.
That means being as active as possible on any relevant forums, discussion groups, and Q&A sites.
From it, you’ll get many of the crucial benefits that impact your off-page SEO—contextual backlinks, referral traffic, improved brand awareness, increased engagement, and, most importantly, improved topic authority.
However, you’ll also get some more unique benefits that can impact both your on-page and off-page efforts. You might uncover lesser-known keywords through community questions. You might learn more about how your target audience interacts with businesses in your niche. You could identify potential content gaps, learn about common concerns and pain points, and even find out how you can improve your products and services. It’s beneficial all around.
A word of caution, however! High engagement on forums, discussions, and Q&A sites doesn’t mean spamming every post with your links and expertise. Only engage in discussions when you can actually offer some valuable insights, and only add your links when they could benefit the wider community.
Your users want genuine interactions on these platforms. They don’t want you to push your agenda and use these online spaces as your personal marketing platforms.
On paper, it makes more sense to join huge, renowned forums and sites where you could potentially reach millions of users. In practice, it’s much better for you to prioritize joining niche communities with smaller user bases—at least at first.
It’s a similar thing to partnering with nano- and micro- as opposed to mega-influencers. Smaller communities tend to be more close-knit. The relationships are stronger, and users have more trust in each other. They have more frequent and more genuine interactions.
Building a strong presence in these niche communities will earn you loyal users for life who will always be happy to recommend your brand to others, give you some positive reviews, or use your backlink whenever they have the opportunity to do so.
So, try and look up local Facebook groups, for instance, or relevant WhatsApp communities. And remember, don’t try and market yourself outright. Focus on building genuine relationships and promoting your brand in a natural, organic way.
Technical SEO helps you keep your website code clean and organized, allowing for easier page crawling and indexing. While it’s, in a sense, more intertwined with your on-page SEO strategies, it can impact your off-page performance.
You’ll primarily have to pay attention to your own technical SEO. No high-authority website will willingly give you a natural backlink if your pages deliver a poor user experience. No one wants to have their reputation put in question because your pages are slow-loading or poorly optimized for mobile viewing.
Secondly, you’ll have to pay attention to your referring site’s technical SEO. If it has poorly optimized technical SEO, you won’t get any of the benefits that backlinking provides. Search engines might not be able to index the site, which means you’ll get no SEO value from your backlink. Users might get frustrated with the referring website, which means they might not even get to your backlink, let alone click through on it.
So, this is definitely something you should keep in mind.
As you’ve learned by now, not all backlinks will do you good. Many can harm your reputation, diminish your authority, and result in search engine penalties. You’ll need to keep a close eye on your profile and avoid all toxic backlinks that could harm you. That includes:
These are just some of the examples of toxic backlinks you’ll want to avoid. If you come across a harmful link when you’re auditing your profile, make sure to disavow it as soon as possible if you don’t want your rankings and reputation to suffer.
If you want a seamless user experience, you’ll need to work on your site security. Even if you’re just running a blog and don’t collect any type of personal information from your users, like email addresses, credit card numbers, and the like, high site security is still crucial. It keeps you and your users safe and instills them with trust and confidence.
At the very least, you’ll need to be using the HTTPS protocol as opposed to the HTTP one. It’s a more secure version for transmitting data over the internet that keeps all information fully encrypted, thus preventing sensitive info from being leaked or intercepted. With it, the only thing you’ll want to pay attention to is that your accompanying SSL certificate is valid.
While the protocol you’re using seems like a minor detail, it’s a critical ranking signal, with search engines almost always ranking sites with secure protocols higher.
However, there’s another way that your protocol could be affecting your SERP performance.
Many browsers will block or warn users when they’re trying to access sites without secure protocols. Even if the site is technically sage, users can be discouraged from accessing it simply because they got a warning from their browsers. This automatically decreases your website traffic and increases your bounce rates. So, make the smart choice and use HTTPS.
What’s more, try and make sure that your backlinks are coming from sites with secure protocols, as well. All the things I’ve just said impact your referring sites, too. If they’re not using HTTPS, their trust rating and overall authority will be lower, search engines will rank them lower, and users will be more wary of them, making your backlinks from such sites inadequate.
Finally, for long-term SEO success, you’ll want to maintain a natural, diverse backlink profile. In a nutshell, that means that you primarily want your backlinks to come from a wide variety of different sources—industry sites, blogs, forums, social media networks, guest posts, directories, and the like.
However, there are a few other signals that indicate your backlink profile is organic:
As a rule, if you’re dedicated to acquiring high-quality links and disavowing toxic ones, you should have no concerns, and your profile should appear natural and organic.
If you’ve been following along with this off-page SEO checklist so far, you’ve done a lot of hard work. From finding high-quality backlink opportunities to creating guest posts, upping the ante on your social media signals, increasing brand mentions, partnering with influencers, and more, you’ve invested a lot of time and resources.
And for what?
Did your website traffic increase? How are your SERP rankings now compared to before? Do you enjoy greater domain authority? Probably. But how would you know unless you were tracking your performance?
Tracking and measuring your off-page SEO success is critical if you want to identify whether all your hard work has paid off. It lets you assess your strategy, uncover weak spots and opportunities, and perfect your approach.
So, what precisely should you track and measure? Although there are many different metrics, the most essential ones are as follows.
First and foremost, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your backlink growth and authority score. Most SEO tools will let you analyze essential data points:
While it can be a lot of tedious work, keeping an eye on your backlink growth and authority scores will help you better understand how effective your strategy is and what you can do to improve it if needed.
Next up, you’ll want to track your external links and all the referral traffic you’re getting from them. If you see a significant increase in your referral traffic, it’s a clear-cut sign that you’re doing something good with your off-page SEO. It shows you’re relying on high-authority referring sites and getting relevant links back that are reaching your target audiences.
Again, most SEO tools will let you in on these critical metrics. However, if you don’t want to pay for expensive software suites, Google Analytics will do just fine. Sign in to your Google Analytics account, add the tracking code to all your pages, and then simply monitor the changes.
Hopefully, you’ll see quite a difference in your referral traffic.
Google Analytics also gives you insights into other important data that can help you measure your success. You’ll be able to see which websites are driving the most traffic to your site, as well as which of your pages are the most commonly linked to. You can use this info to create similar content types and attract more backlinks.
Perhaps most notably, if your off-page SEO strategy is a success, you’ll see a boost to your rankings on SERPs. As mentioned, many of your off-page efforts won’t have a direct impact on your rankings (though some, such as backlinks, certainly do). Instead, they primarily impact your reputation and topic authority.
Once you’ve established a good reputation with your off-page SEO and positioned yourself as an authority within your niche, rankings naturally follow.
All your off-page efforts combined help users and search engines put your site in context. They help make it clearer what your pages are about, how they’re relevant to search queries, and what value they provide. As such, they can help your content rank higher for your primary keywords, long-tail keywords, and LSI keywords.
So, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your rankings once you start implementing your off-page strategies.
The last few items remaining on the off-page SEO checklist are simply about wrapping things up. They’re about creating a strong foundation that lets you reap the benefits of your off-page strategies.
After all, the steps from above aren’t just a one-and-done deal. Nothing with SEO is. You need to keep working on your off-page strategies if you want to reach a higher position on SERPs and maintain it. Otherwise, all your hard work will give you just temporary results, and you’ll need to start from scratch every time you want to work on your backlinks, authority, and reputation.
So, here are a few of the most critical things you’ll need to do to maintain a working strategy.
Yes, I still stand by what I said earlier—the more backlinks you have, the more backlinks you’re going to get. But there’s a catch. You’ll only get more backlinks if you have a consistent strategy.
That means consistently putting out new, high-quality content. Consistently reaching out to high-authority sites for guest posting. Consistently being active in your communities.
The moment you stop working on your backlinks is the moment you’ll start losing them. After all, what’s stopping your competitors from reaching out to sites and having them replace your backlinks with their own? What’s stopping your referring sites from looking into linking to better-quality content?
You’ll want to stay dedicated and develop a strategy that you can easily stick to.
It can be tempting to turn to black-hat SEO strategies when you’re just getting started. If you pay for links, you can be sure you’re going to get them. If you use a PBN, you’ll increase the quantity of your backlinks. If you spam every single comment section on every single forum, you’ll certainly increase your brand mentions.
For a brief amount of time, these black-hat tactics might work. They might temporarily improve your rankings. But you can rest assured that you’ll be caught sooner rather than later.
Search engines are pretty discerning. They can easily catch virtually all malicious attempts to manipulate your rankings and user perceptions. And they will punish you for it with much lower rankings or even a complete ban from the SERPs.
The risk isn’t worth the temporary reward, so put in some extra work on organic off-page SEO. It will be much more worthwhile.
Even with a complete checklist such as this, you’ll still need to create your own strategy for success. You’ll still need to keep refining and perfecting your off-page SEO approach.
Continual work will help you guarantee that your backlinks keep coming, that your target audiences keep talking about your business, and that your authority keeps at its all-time high.
So, focus on creating high-quality content for your pages and for your guest posts, reaching out to relevant high-authority sites, collaborating with industry influencers, and engaging with your communities.
It’s not easy being brand new to off-page SEO. I’m not gonna sugar-coat it. When you still have a relatively small website, it’s difficult to convince high-authority domains to give you backlinks. It’s difficult to find influencers willing to partner with you. It’s even more difficult to get your users to notice you and start talking about you on different platforms.
But you know what they say—no pain, no gain. You need to push through these challenges, keep churning out high-quality content, and keep networking with those in your industry. Once you get one foot through the door, it will all become so much simpler.
So, are you ready to start building your SEO authority? Shoot me your email and start working on your off-page SEO checklist, or sign up for Rankioz and make things easier for yourself right from the start.
Off-page SEO includes all activities and processes outside of your website that increase your visibility online and affect your SERP rankings. Some of its key aspects include backlink building, guest posting, improving your social media signals, increasing your brand mentions, working on your local SEO and citations, and staying active in relevant communities.
A listing in off-page SEO refers to adding your business information to relevant online directories and databases.
Off-page SEO is the process of increasing your visibility online, boosting your SERP rankings, establishing topic authority, and improving your reputation by using sources outside of your own website.
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