Off-Page SEO

Written for Moz by Miriam Ellis. Updated on the 13th July 2023.

"Off-page SEO" (also called "off-site SEO") refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs) and to influence how people discover and engage with your content. Is a strategy for bringing attention and authority to your site, and when combined with on-page SEO and technical SEO, off-page SEO can help you meet your goals for search visibility, crawling, indexing, traffic, and conversions.

Off-page optimization seeks to improve the perception both search engines and people have of a site’s:

• Expertise

• Experience

• Authoritativeness

• Trustworthiness

• Relevance

• Popularity

When reputable and relevant sites and people link to or cite your website’s content, they are effectively “vouching” for its quality. Search engines and the searching public can consider this akin to a vote for why your organization deserves to be visible on the web. You may have to work hard to earn these “votes” and some you may earn without even asking, but overall, the goal of your off-page SEO is to build an effective digital footprint that proves why you deserve to be surfaced by search engines and chosen by the public.

The internet is a competitive environment, and your first step to being chosen by the public is to be found, whether right in the SERPs or via a link to or mention of your content on a third-party site or profile. Both search engines and people reach your content via links and mentions, making these pathways quite important.

When a searcher is looking for “wildflower meadow gardening ideas”, search engines like Google and Bing have to decide which results will best match the intent of their query. One of the ways they do that is by determining how many relevant and authoritative sources have linked to or cited each piece of content in their index.

If you use Moz tools, you can calculate the domain authority (DA) of an overall website. This well-known metric uses backlinks and other factors to predict how likely that site is to rank well in Google. You can do the same calculation at a single-page level to estimate page authority (PA). Each search engine has its own algorithm by which it determines which content deserves to rank for which queries, and these formulae are secret, but Google, in particular, has given us many clues over the years as to what they consider to be a high quality vs. a low-quality resource. SEOs study the following sources and events to learn more about these clues:

1. The Search Quality Rater Guidelines - Google utilizes a global workforce of Quality Raters whose job it is to evaluate whether current algorithms and experiments are delivering relevant results. The extensive guidelines they are given should not be directly equated with ranking signals, but reading them reveals a great deal about Google’s concepts of quality, expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Time and again, the document makes it clear that Google places a heavy emphasis on how many links and mentions a web page or piece of content has received, and this is a key reason why off-page SEO focuses on earning this type of notice.

2. Algorithmic updates - Google regularly releases acknowledged updates to algorithms, and you can see a recap of these updates here. Every few months, Google rolls out a core update, but they periodically issue other updates specific to some particular facet of search. By tracking and studying updates, SEOs have learned how much Google relies on links and citations to understand and rank results. They have also learned what Google doesn’t like when sites that engage in certain practices experience drops following an update that targets certain behaviors.

3. Third-party experimentation - Good SEOs continuously perform their own experiments, studies, and surveys in search of further insight into how to use the various types of SEO to influence visibility in the search engines and searcher behavior. Many SEOs regularly publish the results of their experiments, and a good place to start reading some of this documentation is the Moz blog. As you do your own reading and research, you’ll quickly see why off-page SEO places such emphasis on earning links and citations because of the impact that growth in these areas can have on search engine visibility and discovery by the public.

Looking again at the search engine results for “wildflower meadow gardening ideas,” we can assume with some safety that the top result exists on a site that has built up a healthy profile of links and mentions/citations.

And, when we click through to the site in question, we can see, in action, how they are sharing a little of their domain authority and page authority by linking out from their page to third-party resources, like this nursery in Cornwall:

This link from an authoritative site like HomesandGardens.com to a relevant resource like the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery is doing the nursery good in two ways:

1. Equity is being passed from the gardening article page to the nursery website via that link, assisting the nursery’s ability to rank well for relevant terms in the SERPs.

2. The public is being exposed to the existence of that nursery by the mention of it in the article and could become visitors to its website and customers of its business.

And that’s a good illustration of the nature of off-page SEO! Now, let’s look at some further examples of how off-page SEO works.

Earlier, we made a guess that Homes & Gardens likely has earned a lot of authority to be so highly ranked by Google for our search of “wildflower meadow gardening ideas.” But SEOs don’t have to make assumptions - we can fact-check. By entering that domain name into Moz’s free Domain Authority Checker, above, we can see that this site has built up a fairly healthy DA of 60, has earned over 17k links from other domains, is ranking for nearly 190k keywords, and has a low spam score of just 1%.

Using tools like the Domain Authority Checker, Moz Link Explorer, and the Moz Competitor Analysis tool will help you understand the health of your current link profile, how powerful a link to your content from a third party could be, and who is linking to your competitors. There are three scenarios you need to understand when it comes to links:

1. In some cases, the strength of your content or the authority/popularity of the people in your organization may be so high that your website will earn links without having to ask for them.

2. In other cases, you may be able to proactively build links to your site by contributing to third-party publications. For example, you might agree to be interviewed by a third-party publisher or contribute a quote or article to one, earning links from your effort. You might publish traditional digital press releases that include links back to your site. You might sponsor third parties, as in the case of a software company sponsoring a seminar being conducted at a college and earning links from that sponsorship. And, in the case of local businesses, you might build links to your website by building out your set of local business profiles around the local search ecosystem.

3. While you should strive to earn as many links as possible from the first two methods, website owners in competitive markets may need to grow their DA and PA by engaging in proactive outreach to third parties in hopes of winning further links from sites that are relevant to your topics and organization. Read all of The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building to consider the many different ways in which you might build relationships with authoritative site owners, write emails and social posts that result in new backlinks, and gradually grow your brand over time so that your ongoing content publication is enjoying fast crawling, thorough indexing, and better rankings.

Regardless of how you win links, those that offer the greatest contribution to SEO efforts are generally those that pass the most equity to your content. There are many signals that positively contribute to the equity passed, such as:

• The linking site's popularity

• How related the linking site's topic is to the site being linked to

• The "freshness" of the link

• The anchor text used on the linking site

• The trustworthiness of the linking site

• The number of other links on the linking page

• Authority of the linking domain and page

But before you set out in search of backlink opportunities, be certain you have taken the time to understand which linking practices Google considers to be spam. To avoid negative consequences, stay within the webmaster guidelines of both Google and Bing, and don’t engage in the following link spam tactics:

• Buying links - never pay anyone to link to your site

• Injecting hidden links into a website you do not own by exploiting security flaws

• Overusing keywords in the anchor text of the links you build

• Engaging in large-scale link exchanges or link farming schemes

Earning citations/mentions

While both search engines and SEOs focus a lot of attention on links, acquiring them isn’t the only method of improving your off-page SEO. While Google’s John Mueller confirms that unlinked mentions of your brand or its content don’t pass equity the way links do, the Search Quality Evaluators’ Guidelines makes the following statement:

Educational degrees, peer validation, expert co-authors, and citations can be evidence of positive reputation information for professionals who publish their work.

It’s always a best practice to try to earn a link whenever your assets are positively mentioned, but even when that is not possible, an authoritative and relevant publication mentioning your name, brand, organization or business still contributes to search engines’ perceptions of the good reputation of your enterprise.

For example, even if our example Homes & Gardens website had only mentioned the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery instead of linking to it, this citation would still count towards the positive reputation of the business and its SEO strategy. And not only do such unlinked citations have value in the eyes of Google and Bing, but they can also build brand awareness amongst the public and bring traffic to your site.

In the local business medium, brands should strive to both build structured citations in the form of local business listings on platforms like Google, Yelp, Apple Maps, and other aggregators and directories across the local search ecosystem as well as earning unstructured citations on blogs, news sites, and other third party platforms. These activities are core to the off-page local SEO strategy of most local brands.

Earning social mentions

Social media goes hand-in-hand with off-page SEO in a variety of ways.

Firstly, Google will directly surface the latest tweets from brands and people within the organic SERPs for some queries, as in the case of this Twitter carousel from the outdoor outfitter brand, Patagonia, shown above. Meanwhile, Google also allows direct links to social platforms within the Google Business Profile listings of local business:

And, of course, when your social media campaigns become popular and you earn a good amount of followers, your social profiles become a central off-page driver of brand awareness and traffic to your site:

Beyond using social profiles to build links to your own content, your off-page SEO efforts can get a real boost when influencers (people or brands that have developed a large amount of social media popularity) link to or mention your organization, members, or content.

In the following example, the influential brand, Patagonia, is linking to an institution that is holding a large-scale bird counting event. Patagonia’s willingness to share a third party’s content with their followers means they are sharing their influence with a third party, which can result in traffic, links, and increased brand awareness:

In fact, mentions and links from high-profile social sources have become so powerful that they have created the influencer marketing scenario in which brands and people pay socially-famous entities to promote them. This, however, falls outside the realm of SEO because it is a paid transaction (an advertisement), rather than an organic one, and while influencer marketing can play a big role in large-scale brand building, be sure you are aware of search engine guidelines on how to handle no-following and disclosing all links for which you’ve paid.

Earning offline-to-online attention

For brands like local businesses with physical locations, off-page SEO can also encompass offline marketing efforts designed to drive online awareness, traffic, and conversions. Additionally, virtual brands may invest in localized advertising campaigns designed to bring attention to their online offerings, as in the case of billboards or local radio and TV advertising.

Any type of in-store or local signage or word-of-mouth marketing campaign that contributes to online traffic, online reviews, or increased social followers can be considered part of your off-page SEO strategy, as can any traditional loyalty campaign that results in online benefits, such as an online birthday discount or online store credit for referring other customers.

Off page-SEO can be different for each unique organization, but this process will apply to most cases:

1. Identify your goals - Are you seeking to achieve more brand awareness, more links, more traffic, higher or broader rankings, more reviews, more time spent on your website by visitors, or something else? Be specific about what you want to achieve to measure whether your efforts are succeeding or need to adjust your campaigns, goals, or expectations.

2. Implement tracking - Apply analytics to any aspects of your campaign that can be tracked.

3. Identify your assets - Assess what you are offering that deserves to be linked to, socially shared, or acted upon by the public.

4. Activate your asset - Whether this is publishing a new article, emailing a link request, pitching to be a podcast guest, outreaching to a social influencer, or hanging a new sign in your shop front window asking for reviews, document the starting date and nature of your campaign.

5. Measure results - Benchmark success at different points in time. The results of some forms of off-page SEO can take months or even years to develop. Learn from your experiments and document your successes and further learnings.

To get better at doing off-page SEO, check out this chapter in the Beginner's Guide to SEO.

• Backlink Basics - Moz Academy

• The Beginner's Guide to Link Building