Off Site Optimization Plan
In the field of search engine optimization, we really can’t do it all ourselves. A big part of Google’s ranking algorithm measures what other companies and people think of our brand, marketing, value offer, company, people and products.
So high rankings might seem out of our control if we can’t reach influential people and convince them to link to our site and promote us. Rather than getting involved in link begging and spam, there is another solution. It’s something you need to budget for, because it offers tremendous value for a company with a professionally optimized website.
The more powerful your on site optimization and volume of content, and attractiveness of your brand, the more professional off site work will bring awesome returns. If you have an excellent advanced SEO pro and excellent content with a great brand, this off site work can bring multiples of returns. This is where you can join the majors as a market leader and reap the rewards.
On Site and Off Site
Search engine optimization is often divided into on-site and off-site tasks. On-site is the marketing pages, images, blog posts and other things a search engine can spider. Off site is content on other websites which contains links to your site or which promotes your company.
And while offsite work is more akin to Public relations, outreach, cold call sales, and advertising and promotion, managers expect SEOs to conduct it.
Increasingly, the job of off-site SEO is not something an SEO specialist should be doing. It’s unlikely the SEO hs the training or experience in brand promotion. Although we can do it, it’s sort of like asking a car driver to repair their own car. We just don’t do it well enough.
However, if we generate value for visitors, bloggers and journalists, and the visit our site, we may have our off site SEO challenges solved. What used to be given freely isn’t so much anymore. Given how intense the competition is for links now, website owners expect something in return, hence paid guest posts. Some are asking thousands of dollars for a single link from one of their pages.
New Google Algorithm Updates Making Website Owners Nervous
And in Google’s core algorithm updates, it appears they’re deprecating older backlinks. Google considers recent activity more important now, so everyone is forced to revisit the major task of acquiring new backlinks which often requires producing new more current, fresh and engaging content.
Off-site results might include brand mentions, placement of graphics, links in articles, video promotion, press releases, and even shares on social media. Pay per click ads can also play a role in offsite SEO where the audience becomes aware of your company/product, yet may not become a customer, and still promote your business.
Great content and strong promotion is perhaps the fountainhead of off-site optimization results. Your company’s brand, content developed, social media engagement, advertising, business partnerships, association activity, and other active promotion is the biggest factor in offsite search engine optimization.
Build a Strong Brand Customers Want to be Associated With
Yes, building a strong brand is a great way to build backlinks and get people sharing your content. However, your competitors may be just as strong as yours. You have to up the ante and do active marketing promotion. This is more than just marketing your marketing.
Off site means communicating smartly, strategically and confidently and being actively engaged in providing value in published content and via your own promotions. It also means targeting specific audiences, media channels, and partners to do whatever is needed to get them talking about and linking to your site. It means building relationships with key industry and topic authority websites to get them to support your website.
A digital PR outreach agency understands the importance of this task. They have the skill, resources, understanding and will to do a great job.
When You Pursue Backlinks You Don’t Really Deserve
Other bloggers, journalists and social media ambassadors might be bullied into linking to your site. The truth is your UVP isn’t good and the recommendation of your site will be weak, often placed on a low traffic, weak page which Google doesn’t recognize. Worse Google reduces your rankings because they believe you were build spam links.
Without that excellence, they may have to misrepresent or exaggerate the meaning and value of your pitch to them. This is where link building can become spammy and relationships with low quality websites can happen. You’ll almost certainly have to sweeten the offer by paying them.
Google and Bing may penalize sites with many links from spammy websites, which has spawned what is called negative SEO. Negative SEO is an unethical, potentially illegal practice of acquiring spam links to a competitor’s website to ruin their rankings and reputation. Unfortunately, negative SEO can be be damaging, and off-site optimization tasks include discovering such harmful activity.
What is Off Site SEO?
- envisioning and developing content that appeals to other website owners
- planning key target content pieces and focus keyword phrases
- promoting content to gain visibility
- building relationships with industry associations, journalists, bloggers, and social influencers
- creating infographics, YouTube videos, and other visual media for placement on other websites
- arranging for that content to be published on relevant high domain authority industry other websites
- researching backlink profiles of competitors websites using ahrefs seo software
- recording backlinks acquired via Google search console
Real off-site SEO success requires a strong brand via your content and promotion. Very often, bloggers and journalists will only link to a company brand they respect. This is the type of backlinks Google and Bing prefer to reward in their algorithm.
Building Relationships for Online Promotion
In a positive sense, off-site SEO work is the promotion of your high quality content, excellent products and services, and building business relationships. This last point is key. Those companies who build a strong business base with customers and suppliers can benefit more. People who do real business with one another tend to promote and link to each other’s websites effectively, in a way Google respects.
Off site optimization then involves nurturing new relationships and this sometimes becomes a business development activity. This may require imagination, communication and social skills and trading real value.
Magnetic Content
Creating high quality content for other websites is very costly in time and resources.
If budgets and creative designers are available, then this content can be a key part in off site optimization and link building efforts.
The off-site effort entails studying what kind of content and topics people like to share, from blogs to videos to news stories. Of course there is a big list of items and ideas for magnetic content that people love to link to.
And it is backlinks which are the holy grail of SEO. In fact, the most complex challenge of search engine optimization is strategizing how to acquire backlinks.
The key perhaps is to create magnetic, high quality content. Of course, brilliant content strategy is for another post. And run of the mill content made to promote your brand to customers may not be right for attracting links to your site. In fact, it could be a liability, because website owners want material that makes their brand look good and valuable.
The focus is off-site. It’s best to hire another marketing professional to ace the job of PR and marketing promotion.
Gord Collins | Advanced SEO Strategy | AI Marketing | AI Marketing Companies | Real Estate Marketing | SEO Software Platforms | AI Sales Software | Marketing Agencies in California | Marketing Service San Diego | Marketing Audit | Predictive Software | Software Marketing Startups | Gord Collins Linkedin | SEO Company