There are two main aspects of any effective SEO strategy – on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are important, but what’s the difference? Why is off-page SEO important, and is it relevant to small business websites, especially if your target customers are local?
On-page SEO involves optimising various elements of your website. This is everything from page load speed to text to your site’s URL structure, and more.
However, Google doesn’t just look at your website when it is determining your ranking position on its search results pages. It also looks at off-page factors.
In other words, indicators from other parts of the internet that help explain what your website is about and how well your pages can answer relevant search queries.
Specifically, Google uses off-page SEO factors to determine relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. The better you can score in each of these areas, the higher your website will rank.
Is Off-Page SEO Important to Small Businesses, Including Local Businesses?
The short and simple answer is, yes, off-page SEO is important to small and local businesses. In fact, it is important for all websites.
Let’s translate off-page SEO to the physical world to explain this further: a customer recommending your business to a friend is like a website linking to yours.
Customers will only recommend your business if they like what you do.
Google looks at links and other off-page SEO factors in a similar way, i.e. the website that links to yours wouldn’t do so unless it likes your website and its content.
A Bit More About Links and their Importance to SEO
Links are not the only element of off-page SEO, but they are the most important.
This is because Google and other search engines use them to determine the quality of a website. There are two main elements to the equation when Google looks at a website’s backlinks:
- Quality of the link, i.e. is the link on a high-quality, trusted, and well-known website
- Quantity of links
For the best results, you need to maximise both, i.e. get as many links from the best websites as you can.
How do you get links from good websites? That is a blog topic on its own, but here is a brief summary:
- Natural links – this is where you create great content that people find through your promotional efforts and like enough that they link to it without you having to do anything further.
- Manually building links – this primarily involves efforts where you ask people to link to your website. This could be asking influencers, suppliers, or customers, for example, or you could guest blog on a website related to your industry.
- Self-created links – where you create links for your website on online directories, industry-related directories, on forums, etc.
A final point to mention about links – it is unfortunately all too easy for link building strategies to go wrong, wrong enough that they damage the position of your website in Google search. The best approach is to get the help of an experienced SEO company in New Zealand to ensure your link building efforts stay on the right side of Google.
Other Aspects of Off-Page SEO
- Google My Business – this is Google’s free tool where you can input information about your business. This includes your address, what your business does, photos, and more. Google My Business information can appear in local boxes on search results pages and on Google maps.
- NAP and brand name mentions – Google doesn’t just look for links to your website. It also looks for mentions of your business elsewhere on the internet. This includes NAP mentions – name address and telephone number. It also includes mentions of your business name. A good example of the latter is your business being mentioned in a story on a news website.
- Social media activity – Google uses social indicators as a ranking factor. In addition, sharing the content you create on social media increases its reach, which can generate new backlinks.
- Reviews – reviews about your business on third-party review platforms can also help improve your rankings in Google, particularly if they are good reviews.
Off-Page SEO in Auckland
Whether you need SEO to attract customers to your website from Auckland or nationwide, off-page SEO should be part of your strategy. It could be the thing that sets you apart from your competitors in Google search.