Any SEO effort that neglects either on-page or off-page search optimization may be failing to reach its full potential.
What do peanut butter and jelly, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and on-page/off-page SEO all have in common?
They work better when they’re together.
Sure, you can improve either one on their own, and your efforts may even yield some benefits. Don’t be fooled, though—optimizing both is the quickest way to unlock the true search potential of your website.
On-Page SEO
In its current form, your site may have components that act as roadblocks to your organic search visibility. To fix this, go through your existing infrastructure and identify any areas that aren’t up to snuff:
Quality of Content
Organic search has come a long way in telling what content is quality and what belongs in the trash. The first (and most important!) step of optimizing your on-page SEO is to ensure that you’re providing high-quality content that creates value and authority for your audience. Original content will ensure that your readers are getting info they can’t find elsewhere, and will help your SEO by giving search spiders unique terms to index.
On-Site Formatting
Formatting the hidden components of your page is a necessary part of ranking well in search, as well as constructing a user interface that is simple and easy to use.
- Format your URLs so that they are less than 255 characters and contain relevant information about the article.
- Page titles and headings should be unique, and offer specific value for your readers.
- Tags can highlight specific keywords to stand out in search indexing. ALT tags on your images can help your visuals carry their SEO weight and create more opportunities for unique indexing.
On-Site Blogging
If your site doesn’t have a blog yet, you’re already starting from behind.
Research gathered by Factbrowser showed that B2B marketers who blogged generated 67 percent more leads than those who didn’t. In addition, data collected by Hubspot found that marketers who made blogging a priority were 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI.
Regular blogging is also the perfect way to address the problems faced by your readership, provide company information, showcase your brand identity, and attract authority-adding links.
Mobile Mania
With Google giving search priority to mobile-friendly sites, you can’t afford to neglect optimizing your website for mobile access. This may mean working with your web dev team to ensure that your site is responsive when moving to landscape orientation and can be resized and scaled appropriately for a wide variety of devices.
Keyword Usage
Do research to find keywords that are relevant to your topic and get high search volume, yet are unique enough to avoid indexing competition.
- Tools like Google Keyword Planner can help show you how different keywords rank in search volume and can even generate keyword ideas for you, helping to take the guesswork out of the equation.
Off-Page SEO
But as we mentioned above, on-page SEO is just the first half of the equation. Off-page SEO can yield many benefits not found by its on-page counterpart.
Social Media
Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and even Pinterest can be an off-page SEO goldmine. Effectively implemented social media can:
- Increase the outreach of your message
- Establish brand awareness
- Give your customers a platform for feedback and commentary
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Help you build connections with industry insiders
Each site you use has unique algorithms that dictate what each user sees—for the best SEO impact, learn how to optimize your content for each unique platform.
Link Building
Optimizing your linking strategy is another good way to build off-site SEO. Link building may be old-fashioned, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless—it only means that you need to be more careful when implementing it.
Google’s algorithms keep a keen eye on websites that draw massive amounts of links quickly or links that lead to poor quality websites. Unless you want search engines to lump your site in with the rest of the low-quality rabble, make sure your links are to reputable and legitimate hosts.
Working Together
While on-page SEO is great for search indexing and off-page SEO is great for bringing qualified traffic to your content, the two work best when kept together. Keep your content original and your on-site elements optimized for SEO. That way when your viewers are drawn in by your exceptional social media outreach, they’ll be able to easily find the authoritative content that you have ready, and will be much more likely to share it with others.
Can you think of any other techniques to increase the value of your on-page and off-page SEO efforts? Let us know in the comments below!
