On-Page and Off-Page SEO: The Definitive Guide

We’ve already given a brief overview on this blog of https://www.tendlyn.com/blog/everything-you-should-know-about-search-engine-optimization/

Off-page SEO is anything affecting your ranking outside of your website. For this reason, you cannot influence off-page SEO directly. This is decided in the form of ranking signals that Google picks up from other websites in relation to yours. Improving off-page therefore entails efforts at making your site appear trustworthy, relevant and authoritative so that it gets a push up the search results. This involves activities such as:

This means that the question you should be asking isn’t which is more important, but where you are at with your own SEO strategy. This is where the ‘it depends’ comes in. Naturally, on-page SEO is much more straightforward from the perspective of the site owner; optimization relies entirely on you. Off-page SEO is more challenging, simply because there are more limited tools at your disposal. A strong SEO strategy is one which has a blend of both on-page and off-page considerations – having a perfectly optimized site won’t help your ranking a great deal if you aren’t visible through external links, for example. But if you are someone who is starting out from scratch with their SEO strategy, you have to pick your battles. Trying to hit all elements of both on-page and off-page at once will be overwhelming, and won’t create a very coherent approach. A great way to prioritize is to think about SEO like building a house; your on-page considerations are the foundations, so that everything that goes on top is stable. Off-page considerations are the roof which finishes off the house. Would you put on a roof before the foundations? Of course not! It makes no logical sense. Neither does desperately trying to get other sites to link to you when you haven’t put any time into making your site friendly to Google. Prospective sites are very unlikely to bite, because linking to an un-optimized site could run the risk of penalizing their own ranking.

So, in order to put together a long-term, cohesive strategy, you need to get the basics down first. This means getting your site set up so that it meets Google’s requirements for promoting you higher in the rankings. This is also known as improving your ‘organic’ web traffic i.e. direct from the search results. Since 51% of web traffic comes from organic searches, focusing on the on-page side is enough to see many businesses get up into those first few results. But more importantly, what do both sides of SEO have in common? Answer: Content, content, content! It simply isn’t possible to succeed at any kind of SEO unless you are developing really great content for your site and partnerships. The reason? Content IS SEO. Google’s algorithm has changed a lot over the years, but one thing that has stayed consistent is rewarding sites who produce authoritative and relevant content, whether that be blogs, eBooks, vlogs or case studies. If you aren’t doing this, your site simply won’t reach its full potential because you aren’t proving that what you offer is valuable to those searching. This should be your primary focus, even before you bring SEO into the game.

To round up, both on-site and off-site SEO are integral to a good strategy. However, it’s important to get the basics sorted with your own site first before you turn your attention to what’s happening outside it. As always, your content is the key to success in both sets of techniques. Focus on this, and you will see your site gain traction!