Your business is up and running and you’ve built a website to showcase your products and services. You’ve even started a blog and plugged it with the most relevant keywords, but you still aren’t seeing the level of traffic needed to grow your brand. You may be doing everything right on your website whilst overlooking one key element of your SEO strategy. Nowadays, it is what you are doing away from your webpage that counts for more than half of your search ranking. The following five tips will have you climbing the rankings and maximizing your digital impression.
1) Backlinks, Backlinks, Backlinks
As the title suggests, backlinks are the name of the Off-page SEO game. Backlinks are any link on someone else’s webpage that redirects to your site. Search engines love to see that your website is interacting with others in cyberspace. Backlinks act as a double-edged sword however, because not every backlink works in your favour. Paying for or acquiring backlinks from seedy sites can harm your ranking. Google and others are getting pretty good at identifying imitation backlinks. Securing backlinks from authority sites or respected blogs in your field is the most sure-fire way to improve your search status.
2) Guest Posting
A great way to not only improve your Off-page SEO but also build digital partnerships is by writing a blog post for someone else’s website. Business owners are usually open to having additional content generated for them and as long as the article is relevant and helpful to their business, you can use this space to plug your brand and provide a link to your website. As it goes with Off-page SEO though, not all guest posts are created equal. Try to write a helpful post for an authority or reputable website in your discipline.
3) Social Media Presence
Like it or not, social media is an unavoidable necessity if you are running a business in 2021. Running quality social accounts that link to your website factors into search rankings. It’s not just the number of followers or shares that your social accounts receive, but also how well you interact with others on your social platforms. Regularly posting will help your search ranking. Couple that with responding to questions and comments on your page as well as commenting on other posts, and you will maximize the effect that your social media output has on your search ranking.
4) Commenting on Forums, Blogs, and Question/Answer Sites
Venturing away from your website and interacting with users on other pages will help direct traffic to your site as well as improve your search ranking. Forums, however, are low-quality backlinks because anyone can post a link and claim to have a service worthy of clicking through to. That said, any traffic acquired through forums are from people who are actively searching for a solution and may find your services helpful to them.
Posting comments on authority blogs will help you gain exposure, as well as answering questions on websites like Quora. Be sure that you are providing quality comments and not just spamming the web with links to your site. Google will grow wise to your ways and adjust your ranking accordingly.
5) Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
It can be tempting to go for maximum exposure and plaster links to your webpage across the internet. The reality is though that search engines are becoming smarter and better at detecting fishy internet behaviour. If your backlinks aren’t accompanied by quality, useful content, you risk getting labelled as spam and watching your search rankings plummet. As the adage goes – if you build it, they will come. Focus your efforts on producing helpful, quality content and building lasting digital partnerships that are mutually beneficial.
Final Thoughts
On-page SEO and Off-page SEO are like two oars in a canoe. If you concentrate all your efforts on only one or the other, you are going to end up spinning in circles. But if you optimize both components, your website will start building steam and begin heading in the right direction. Once you get going things will become easier and flow more naturally – and as long as you continue rowing, you’ll continue climbing those search rankings.