If you’re operating a business that serves local customers, then focusing on local off-page SEO ranking factors will be crucial to your success. This includes setting up and optimizing local business profiles on Google Business, Bing Places, Apple Maps, and similar sites to give your website the opportunity to rank for local search results.
Obviously, there are many off-page SEO parameters you have no control over, and that’s certainly the case when it comes to online reviews. When you place your business information on sites like Google Business, Bing Places, Yelp, and the abundance of other high-quality profile creation sites, you open yourself up to receiving feedback about your products and services.
Link decay is one of the most important off-page SEO factors that can affect the long-term rankings of a target web page. Link decay is a term used to describe what happens when backlinks that a URL has received slowly disappear over time.
If an unlinked brand mention occurs on a website, you can reach out to the site owner to ask about turning that brand mention into a backlink.
The more backlinks a web page gets from high-quality websites, the higher the URL will rank in the SERPs. This includes receiving more than one backlink from the same referring domain. Backlink quantity is valuable for off-page SEO because it represents a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. Therefore, the more times a domain links out to a target web page, the more votes it is casting for that content.
What this means for your off-page SEO activities during a link building campaign is that you want inbound links that are more likely to be clicked on to send PageRank value for SEO. Ideally, this would include context backlinks within the top section of the body content where visitors are mostly like to view and engage with the link; not backlinks placed in the footer, sidebar, or bottom of the web page where users will ignore them.
8. Referral Traffic
Therefore, if local SEO is important for your business, then you should work on these relevant off-page SEO activities to help improve organic rankings and visibility.
14. Brand Mentions
Although the off-page SEO ranking power of social media shares is still up for debate (some say it increases rankings while others say it has no effect), you should still make this an important part of your link building strategy.
Link decay is bad for off-page SEO because it leads to a decrease in the total number of referring domains and backlinks pointing to a URL which are two of the top factors you’ve learned about earlier on this off-page SEO list.
Therefore, you should actively build citations on websites like Yelp, YellowPages, Foursquare, Local.com, MerchantCircle, Hotfrog, Manta, and MapQuest to improve the off-site SEO signals for the business.
12. Social Shares
For example, if a web page only has one third-party website linking to it, then that page only has one referring domain. But if the web page has five external sites linking back to the URL, then it would have five referring domains.
As explained in this other guide on how long do backlinks take to work, you can speed up the effect your backlinks have for off-page SEO by increasing the link velocity. If you get a large number of backlinks in a short time period, you’ll typically see faster results of the backlinks working to increase your ranking positions in the SERPs for competitive keywords. Plus, you’ll see much larger effects over time as the SEO power of those links compound on each other.
Off-Page SEO Factors Summary
Citations are important for local search engine optimization because citations send off-site signals to search engine algorithms that a business truly exists. Citations also confirm the NAP information for a business that is stored in the Google Knowledge Graph, a database of billions of facts about people, places, and things.
What this boils down to is that the anchor text of the backlinks is a strong off-page SEO ranking factor. And the best combination for off-site optimization is to get links from other website URLs with high Page Authority that consist of an exact match or partial match anchor text for the target keywords you want the page to rank for in the SERPs.
5. Link Relevancy
For example, a web page may only have a single referring domain but have a total of 10 or more backlinks. That’s because the domain is linking to the same URL from multiple different pages on the site.
Although this seems like another one of those elements of off-page SEO that are entirely beyond your control, that isn’t necessarily the case. Using tools like Google Alerts and social media listening tools such as Reputation or Sprout Social makes it easy to track online mentions of your brand so that you can respond to them.
Brand mentions differ from backlinks as a mention doesn’t have to include a hyperlink. A brand mention is simply a text reference to your brand on a third-party site and doesn’t count toward the total number of links in the backlink profile. However, mentions are still beneficial because they are evidence that people are talking about your brand online.
Another important off-page SEO component is the amount of referral traffic that comes through a backlink. Although it’s not a confirmed ranking factor by Google officials, there’s a strong correlation that backlinks from a URL that sends a high number of referral traffic is a stronger link than one that doesn’t send any traffic at all.
Now, none of us have access to Google’s PageRank algorithm system; however, SEO tool providers like Moz have developed a Page Authority (PA) score to help estimate the PageRank value of each web page on the Internet using a proprietary set of factors that correlate well with Google’s system.
You might also consider building relationships with influencers in your industry to increase the chance of getting a positive brand mention from those people which can lead to brand searches on platforms like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and ultimately, to more users visiting your website and/or linking to it from their own sites.
15. Link Velocity
Companies like Sparktoro even suggest that inferred links (or brand mentions) will replace the Google Link Graph entirely in the future as explained in this article.
As you discovered, there are many crucial off-page SEO activities to consider, including the number of referring domains, total backlinks, linking Page Authority, link anchor text, link relevancy, internal links to the page, link placement, referral traffic, link decay, local off-page SEO factors, citations, social shares, online reviews, brand mentions, and link velocity. By addressing each of these off-page SEO ranking factors, you’ll be priming your website for success in terms of higher rankings and more organic search traffic.
If your brand is mentioned on social media, it’s an ideal opportunity to engage with your audience and build relationships by following up with a response and/or posting a relevant link back to your website.
The SEO theory here for anchor text optimization is that the keyword in the backlink is not the only signal the ranking algorithm system takes into consideration when passing PageRank to a web page. It seems that the words within a certain distance of the anchor text are also indexed to better understand the meaning of the linked page.
The link anchor text of incoming links to a URL is another top parameter of off-page SEO. In fact, Google officials have publicly stated that the anchor text of links is one of the most important off-page SEO activities that determine the relevancy of a target page for its intended keywords.
In general, a higher link velocity usually corresponds to better rankings in search engines like Google because its algorithms calculate the popularity and relevance of each web page by counting the number of other web pages pointing to it (i.e., referring domains and a total number of backlinks previously discussed in this off-page SEO list).
This is another top off-page SEO element that can help improve the quality of the inbound links your content receives, and ultimately, the ranking positions in the search engines.
Additionally, internal links also help distribute Page Authority and ranking power throughout your website. There have been many SEO case studies on this topic and the conclusions are almost always the same: URLs that receive the most internal links from other high PA pages often rank higher in the SERPs for their target SEO keywords.
The number of positive reviews a Google Business Profile receives and whether the business owner actively responds to customer reviews also correlate positively with higher rankings in the SERPs.
After the link anchor text, the next most important element of off-page SEO is the relevancy of the link to the target page.
As explained in our local search optimization guide, there are three pillars of a good local search strategy:
- Proximity: How close your business is to the searcher’s location.
- Prominence: How prominent the relevant keywords are in the business profile listing.
- Relevance: How relevant the overall business is to the search query based on topical authority and localized content that can be crawled on the website.
What this factor means for off-page SEO is that you want the page that’s linking to your website to have a good number of internal links pointing to it to help boost its ranking power. You don’t want backlinks coming from orphan pages on third-party sites.
7. Link Placement
In 2016, Google replaced the Random Surfer Model with the Reasonable Surfer Model, which determines the probability that a user will click on specific links based on their features, such as placement on the page, color, size, font style, and anchor text. Essentially, the Reasonable Surfer Model reflects that not all hyperlinks are equally likely to be followed, and the amount of PageRank passed along is based on the probability of a user actually clicking on the link to visit the target page.
