Off-Page SEO Ranking Factors That You Should Be Implementing Right Now

When you're building a website and trying to get more people to find it, you need to be focusing on optimising your website and making it easier to be found.

How do you do this?

You need to improve your website's off-page SEO score, it's one of the many types of SEO that you can optimise your website for.

Unfortunately, there's still many websites out there that aren't optimising their website for SEO at all, are you one of them?

Without working on your website, how will people find your site? They won't.

So in this blog post, I'm going to take you through the different off-page SEO ranking factors that determine how your website will rank in the search engine, and what you can do to improve your ranking.

Are you ready? Let's jump into the ranking factors...

What are the off-page SEO ranking factors?

There's many off-page SEO (also referred to as "off-site") ranking factors that contribute to how your website is positioned in front of potential customers within the search engine.

It would be practically impossible to list all of these out at once, so we'll be updating this list over time.

In general, you'd want to optimise off-page SEO in order to improve the quality of your site's content...

I know this sounds a bit strange, how can this improve your content's quality, and we'll get on to that...

Natural backlinks

Backlinks are extremely valuable to you and your website, without them, your site would likely never rank as well as it should.

Building backlinks takes time, and I'm sure you're wondering...

Well, what exactly are backlinks and why are they so important?

You see, when you create a website, and start creating content on your website, the search engines crawl and index your site.

They have to figure out what your site is about, and one of the ways that these crawlers can figure out what your site is about is by crawling the links that you link to, and how other people are linking to you.

One of the ways the search engines do this is by seeing the sites that link to you, and who you link too.

There are several ways to build backlinks to your website, the best one is to build them organically and naturally.

This is where you promote your content and others will add a link to your site if they like what they're reading.

Several attempts to forge the process of getting backlinks have been made, and guess what?

They don't work for the long term.

This is called black hat link building, and is an attempt to get search engines to rank your site.

It doesn't work, and if you're caught trying to cheat, you're going to get shut down.

Shared links

Shared links are similar to backlinks in that you'll get a link to your website by someone else, but how they're collected is slightly different.

You see, backlinks are typically collected through websites linking to you when someone finds your content, your site will be linked to from another site.

Shared links on the other hand usually are easier to obtain since people don't have to put your website link onto their site.

Why?

Because all they need to do is share your link with someone such as on social media or even in a thread.

It's great for building links to your site and will greatly improve off-page SEO since building natural backlinks can take longer.

Build trust with your audience

When you went to school, college or university, were you ever picked on for being too trustworthy?

Or maybe it worked against you for being too trustworthy.

Despite what other content creators will say, building trust is an important aspect to building off-page SEO in that without trust, Google and other search engines aren't going to rank your pages in any fast fashion.

You would want someone to be trustworthy with your pets right?

You'd want to know that someone will look after your pets whilst you're away, for instance, on holiday...

And if you trust that person, you're likely going to let them look after your pets for when you go away again.

This idea and concept is true of websites as well, and Google will look upon your domain authority score as part of the trust factor.

If your website users don't trust you, like, if they don't trust the content you're putting out, how will you expect them to share your content?

Why should they share your content?

Why should they link to your website?

Do you see where I'm coming from with this? It sounds so simple doesn't it, so how can you build trust with your audience?

Just be honest with everything you're telling your readers in your content, or on your product/landing pages, and be sure to link to relevant sources when you're creating content.

If you're going to mention a statistic, make sure you tell your readers where you found that statistic rather than assuming your readers are going to trust what you're saying.

Over time, you'll build up trust organically, and in turn, this will benefit your off-page SEO score since Google will see that you've got some trust from the people who've been on your site.

How does Google know?

They'll take into account performance metrics such as your website's bounce rate and page speed, also, they'll look at your website's user experience, so if your user experience isn't optimised, now's the time to work on improving it!

Utilise forums

Forums are a great place for SEO and link building and there's many great forums on the internet that you can go to publish content.

Believe it or not, a forum is a playground for answering other people's questions, and solving their problems.

So why would you put your website on them?

People like to search on forums to get information fast and see other people's opinions, and whilst opinions are subjective, you could for sure give your opinion in a forum to a question and if it's relevant, put your website link into there.

Of course, you'd only want to put a link to your website into a forum thread if it's appropriate and relevant.

There's loads of forums out there that have links spammed all over them, so don't just join a forum to do this.

Make sure you're offering quality to the forums you join!