Off-Page SEO

What Is Off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is anything you do to increase traffic to your site that doesn’t involve your actual website. As a small business owner, you are most likely already taking charge of some aspects of off-page SEO without realizing it. A Google Business listing, a Yelp listing, a BBB listing, and social media engagement are all important signals to search engines and can all be called link building.

Link Building For Trust

Link building is planting links to your website all over the web. Links to your site are not all equal though, and some can have a negative effect. Domain Authority is a metric that search engines use to judge whether a website is trustworthy or not. The meta-metrics that determine the domain authority metric are numerous. Basically if a site gets tons of traffic and is seen as an authority on their site’s subject matter, their domain authority score will be higher.

What does all this mean to a small business owner? The strongest links you can get to your website are from sites that have a high domain authority, but are also in the same or similar industry as yours. That’s not to say that links to your website that don’t check these boxes won’t benefit you. It’s important, no matter where links to your site come from (barring links farms or really spammy sites), that your NAP (name, address, phone number) be consistent wherever it's written.

What Is Your Review Strategy?

Off-page SEO is all about trust. If your answer to the question above is “What is a review strategy?”, then this section is for you. Positive reviews on reputable websites are a crucial metric that search algorithms reference when deciding if to prominently serve your site to searchers. Developing a plan to collect reviews will be invaluable to your marketing efforts.

Prompting your customer or client to leave you a review can be an awkward interaction for some business owners. Tapkit has experience in facilitating reviews for our clients and can help you develop a plan that takes into account what type of business you run as well as your typical customer journey. The main thing to remember is that search engines take reviews very seriously as they are a great way to gauge the trustworthiness of your company.

Is Your Google Business Listing Optimized?

Your Google Business listing is your most crucial off-site property. By some measurements, your Google Business listing is more important than your website. Creating this property isn’t rocket science, Google makes it very easy, but optimizing it to its full potential takes a deeper knowledge. Every SEO package includes Google Business optimization and maintenance. Maintenance is required if your services change, your hours change, cross posting your blogs to Google Business, and more.