Off Page SEO: How to carry out this important organic positioning strategy and boost your brand

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Do you want to rank your website at the top of Google? Then you need to show the search engine that you are a reference for other websites. And that is what off-page SEO is for, a branch of SEO !

Don't think that putting effort into on-page SEO is enough . Well- doctor database structured pages, relevant content and keywords are essential for optimization, but it's no use just focusing on your website.

Off-page SEO was created so that your strategies also focus on the external part . And that is where you can search for links and mentions for your pages and show how they are relevant to the market, something that is decisive for the Google algorithm .

Next, you will understand:

What is off-page SEO?
What is the importance of off-page SEO?
What are the differences between off-page SEO and on-page SEO?
What are the off-page SEO ranking factors?
How to do off-page SEO in practice?
What should you not do in off-page SEO?
4 off-page SEO tools to boost your strategies
Keep reading to find out everything!

What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO is a set of strategies applied outside of your pages to demonstrate their relevance in the market and, thus, improve their positioning in search engines .

Google doesn't just want to find your content, understand what it's about, and notice how your pages are structured. Google also wants to know how your website relates to what else is on the Internet .

If your website receives links and mentions from other pages, and if these are relevant and trustworthy, it will have more points with Google. After all, people only share and reference things that are truly of quality and offer some value to them.

Consider, for example, a page with decoration tips on an architectural firm's website. If several blogs on decoration, architecture and design cite that page, or better yet, if it receives links from major magazines in the sector, it must be a great reference, right? Well, that's how Google thinks too.

Building that network of links that lead to your website ( backlinks ) is a practice known as link building .

Off-page SEO, however, is not limited to this practice . The strategy encompasses all measures taken outside the website, meaning that all link building with other sites, even if they do not generate backlinks, is considered valid for optimization.

Do you know why? Because Google does not only consider the links to the page as a ranking factor. It also considers mentions of the website or brand to assess its relevance to the market.

Therefore, an off-page SEO strategy should not only focus on generating backlinks. A simple mention can also be valuable! However, links have more weight for positioning and cannot be left aside. You will soon understand why!

What is the importance of off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO must be included in the optimization strategies to conquer the first places on the results page.

For the search engine, the links and mentions that a website receives show what other sites think about it. This is a strong indication of its relevance to the market, which is decisive for its ranking in Google .

This chart shows the weight of off-page SEO in page rankings. According to a study by Moz , off-page factors (highlighted in the chart) have a weight of more than 50% in Google ranking.

ranking weight
Source: Moz
To understand why this linking to other sites is necessary, it is also important to understand the value of links.

Links are the essence of the Internet. It was based on the interconnection between pages and documents that emerged in 1990 and works to this day. They are what take the user from one place to another until they find what they are looking for. And Google searches also work based on this.

Google's work begins with crawling web pages .

To do this, it follows the path indicated by hyperlinks . Therefore, when the robot accesses a page, it indexes the content , keywords and other useful information and then follows the links that are referenced on it.

In this process, Google also notices the relationship between these pages through internal links .

If Google considers a website to be popular, trustworthy, and authoritative in its market, and that site has links to other pages, it passes that value on to them as well.

This transmission is known as link juice , an important concept for link building. Link juice represents each share of the positioning power that a page transmits to the destination pages of the links that are referenced on it. This concept applies to both internal and external links.

Basically, link juice can be understood as a recommendation vote from one page to another . The graph below shows, for example, how the transmission of link juice occurs due to the popularity of a page (just one of the factors that are transmitted).

link juice
Source: Media Skyscraper
When crawling, Google notices these relationships between pages. So when the user does a search, the algorithm considers —among other factors— the transmission of link juice to rank the pages that appear in the results.

Therefore, off-page SEO strategies are essential for you to seek alliances with quality, trustworthy and authoritative websites that transmit good link juice to your pages.

Additionally, the referrals your website receives from other pages are also important sources of web traffic .

In the graph below, you can see the result of an analysis of websites from different niches and you can see that referral traffic is responsible for 3.64% of visits.

traffic sources
Source: Growth Badger
The percentage is not that high when compared to direct traffic or traffic from search engines. But we are talking about traffic that is not paid for and visitors who come to your page from a recommendation.

Do you see how referral traffic has the potential to generate more results for your business?

What are the differences between off-page SEO and on-page SEO?
Off-page SEO and on-page SEO are the two sides of the optimization strategy. Although they are different, they interact and must be worked together to improve their results.

But we can say that it can start with on-page SEO. These strategies are under your full control and are applied within your pages, both in the content and in the structure.

For example:

Publication of content.
Keyword optimization.
Editing titles, subtitles, meta tags .
Creating links for internal pages.
Editing page codes.
Definition of structured data .
These measures are necessary for Googlebot to understand your pages, what they are about, and whether you are offering a good experience to the visitor . Therefore, important ranking factors for your website are included in these.

However, since these factors are under your control, Google needs other references to understand if your content is really good . In the end, on-page SEO represents your website talking about itself, but what do other sites think about it?

And that's where off-page SEO strategies come in. With them, you'll build a link with other websites on the market to show that yours is a reference for them and you'll also bring more traffic to your pages.

But you should keep in mind that off-page SEO involves factors that you do not control, since other sites are the ones that create the backlinks. You, at most, can create alliances or induce these references. And here is another important difference in relation to on-page SEO.

Although they are different, these strategies are not completely separate: on-page SEO is one of the pillars of off-page SEO . After all, no one is going to recommend your pages if they offer mediocre content, don't work on mobile , or are confusing for users.

In addition, the visitors you attract to your pages with off-page SEO must find a well-structured site with quality content, otherwise they may leave immediately. Only with good on-page SEO will you have effective results with this type of traffic.

Therefore, it should be clear to you that one strategy does not work without the other.

seo guide
What are the off-page SEO ranking factors?
When Google was launched in 1998, it came up with a major innovation for search engines: PageRank . This was the search engine's initial algorithm, which has since gone through many updates to improve its way of classifying Internet sites.

Now, to understand the off-page SEO ranking factors, let's analyze how this algorithm evolved and what it considers today to evaluate backlinks.

Popularity
The creators of PageRank realized that search engines could present the best results to users based on the popularity of pages, rather than by alphabetical order or subject.

The logic would be the same as for scientific articles: the more citations they receive, the more relevant they are to the academic world (without the author having to search for those citations).

Thus, the more links a page receives, the more relevant it is to the search engine. It could then appear higher in the results and even transmit more link juice to the links included on its pages.

This logic, however, did not work for long, as it was very easy to create hundreds of links for a page . That is why today the search engine considers many other factors when evaluating backlinks, as we will see later.

However, the search for a greater number of references for your pages is still valid. Only manipulating off-page SEO is not enough, okay?

Creating backlinks on fake pages or receiving too many links in a short period of time can cause your website to be flagged as black hat and hurt your rankings.

Diversity
To refine the algorithm, it was necessary to add new criteria to the popularity of pages.

Now think: what is more valuable in determining your relevance, one person citing you 100 times or 100 different people citing you once?

For Google, the second option shows that you have gained the trust of several people (not just one), which is much more meaningful.

Based on this perception, PageRank began to also consider the diversity of domains with backlinks to the website .

This change already made black hat a bit more complicated, since it was not enough to create many links, but they had to be created in different places.

But still, it wasn't enough. PageRank needed to evolve even further. After all, it was still easy to get backlinks from several different websites, even if they didn't make sense to the user. So, new factors were added to the algorithm to evaluate the relevance of a page .

Context
What do you think is more relevant for a car website: receiving backlinks from automotive portals or from a fashion magazine?

For Google, a network of links within the same topic makes much more sense. When this does not occur, the search engine understands that there is a high chance of manipulation.

And even if it's not manipulated, a link taken out of context probably won't have as much value to the user, since they're interested in fashion and not cars.

Therefore, this evaluation of the context entered into the considerations of the algorithm, which began to understand that receiving a backlink from a page related to the area of ​​​​activity has more value for positioning.

To achieve this, Google had to evolve its understanding of context. Today, the algorithm already has a very advanced intelligence that is capable of understanding human language .

So it doesn't just evaluate the topics and individual words around the backlinks, but also the meanings of the terms and the relationships between the words. So there's no point in doing anything forced to generate those links, they must make sense within the text.

In addition, Google is able to notice the positioning of links on the page. If they are in the main content area, they have more value than those in the columns, header or footer.

Ultimately, links in main content are included with editorial intent, and if they are at the beginning of the text, they tend to be even more important.

Anchor text
Another factor added to Google's link evaluation was the anchor text , the text that the user clicks on to enter the link. It must be related to the destination page and make sense to the reader .

For that page about cars, for example, anchor texts like "car sales" and "used cars" count positively and help rank for those terms as well.

On the other hand, if the anchor text is not related to the topic, the user may be directed to a page they did not want to visit, something that Google does not look favorably on.

Attentive to this algorithm update, many sites began to create several links with the exact correspondence to the keyword they wanted to rank for.

In this way, another black hat practice was adopted and Google once again needed to update itself.

Reliability
Thus, another factor would come into play: trustrank, that is, positioning based on trust .

Google began to rank the most trustworthy websites by security , domain age, content quality, among other factors.

For the search engine, these sites help build a better, safer web and tend to create backlinks only to pages they also trust.

Therefore, pages with a higher Google trust rating pass more link juice. Pages that are referenced by them also gain votes of trust. So, this means that backlinks from trusted sites help your website rank better.

Mentions
With all these updates, Google's algorithm is now robust enough to evaluate the backlinks for a page and offer a good list of results from this network of links . However, we already said that simple mentions of the website are also important for off-page SEO.

If the robot is able to read and understand the content of a website, it can also identify how many times other websites mention a brand. If it is able to identify the context in which this mention is made, it can also know if this reference is positive or negative.

So, mentions of your website or brand on other pages, even if they are not linked, count towards ranking, especially in positive contexts.

How to do off-page SEO in practice?
Now that you know what really matters for positioning, let's see how to put off-page SEO into practice?

Below, check out our tips on how to implement the strategies and get relevant backlinks for your site.

Start with basic on-page SEO strategies
Remember how we said that on-page SEO is a pillar of off-page SEO? Without optimizing your pages, you probably won’t be cited as a reference by other sites . If you were, the traffic generated by backlinks may be lost, as visitors will become frustrated.

So, start your optimization strategies with your own pages. Organize the website categories, offer simple navigation, use friendly URLs , optimize titles and subtitles, write scannable texts , among other measures.

After doing the basics of on-page SEO, you can start looking outside. And, while you're at it, continue optimizing the pages with more advanced techniques.

Produce content worth sharing
One of the most important on-page SEO factors is content. Publishing relevant content on your website is the main way to show your authority on the topic, attract and retain visitors, and offer them the best answers to what they are looking for.

For off-page SEO, good content represents the opportunity to receive links naturally, without having to search for them.

To increase the chances of this happening, think of your content as linkable assets. The intention is to create content so good that it deserves to be cited by other sites .

And this doesn't just apply to blog posts. Market research, for example, is a high-shareable asset. E-books, infographics , and spreadsheets are also good materials that can generate backlinks.

Use guest posts and co-marketing
You can expect pages to receive links from other sites naturally, but they don't always come. That's why it's possible to adopt some strategies to create backlinks, without having to pay for them, without insisting too much and without harming the user experience.

But how to do it? With alliances! Guest post and co-marketing are models of alliances between different websites or blogs that generate backlinks.

A guest post is the production, as a guest, of an article for a partner website. In this article, you must offer content that is relevant to your partner, that offers value to their audience and that contains a link to your site, in the context of the article.

On the other hand, co-marketing is a marketing alliance to produce and promote material together that reaches the audience of both.

For example, you can produce an ebook on a topic of mutual interest and promote that material with links to both websites. That way, a link to your website will appear on your business partner's website.

ebook guest blogging
Look for authority alliances for link building
To make guest post and co-marketing strategies more worthwhile, you should give priority to allies who have an audience that is similar to yours or who are in the same area of ​​activity . This way, Google can notice the relevance of your content and the backlink for the user.

In addition, you should find reliable allies whose website has authority and quality, so that they transmit more link juice to your pages.

This evaluation of the allied website can be done with a metric given by Moz: Domain Authority (DA) .


This metric gives a score from 1 to 100 that shows how likely a website is to rank well on Google . The higher the score, the more likely it is to reach the top.

Therefore, when looking for allies for off-page SEO strategies, prioritize those with a higher Domain Authority than yours, so that they can transmit authority to you.

Apply redirects on broken links
We said that off-page SEO encompasses factors that are not under your control. And this is true, since backlinks depend on other websites. But this is where a practice arises that depends on you to get more results with backlinks.

We are talking about redirecting broken links, which indicate the correct page to which users and the robot should be directed . Let's explain it better.

It's natural for pages to stop being part of a website over the course of its life. URLs change, content is updated, and pages are simply removed. When this happens, they often display the famous 404 Error , a code that says the page was not found.


With Error 404, the user is left without the content they were looking for, the robot ends the crawl and the relevance of the backlinks is lost.

But the good news is that you can fix that error, you just have to apply the 301 redirect . This is a code that is inserted on the page with the error, telling which page should be shown to the user. This way, you redirect both the user and the robot to the correct page, which then receives the link juice from the backlinks.