Your SEO management strategy should attack your website ranking factors on two distinct fronts: on- and off-page strategy. We talk a lot about the varied on-page SEO techniques that help to rank a website. But there are several off-page strategies website managers should not forget in cultivating a powerful search engine strategy for targeted traffic.
Off-page SEO include factors that support your website’s authority in a distinct industry or space, and that’s powerful. The fact is your website should promote your brand’s authority. That’s its job. It’s biased. When your brand shines off-page, however, where your business doesn’t necessarily control the content or sentiment, that truly reflects brand authority. And Google, Yahoo and Bing take notice.
When planning your SEO strategy, try incorporating these key elements of off-page techniques to help promote your brand’s authority and send traffic to your website.
- Social Validation: Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing all have come to value the importance of social media validation a brand enjoys. How does that validation take shape? It’s simple. When a social media profile (be it a person or brand) shares your content online, search engines see it as a form of validation. It says this website is a resource that profile’s followers should know about. The more a website’s content (via links) is shared online, the more authority search engines ascribe that website in their given industry. Promoting your own content doesn’t necessarily support your authority as search engines can see when your profile is linked to the website whose URL you’re sharing. But it does get the ball rolling. The more you promote your own content, the better the chance your followers reshare that same content and the social validation starts adding up.
- Google-My-Business: Google has, in recent years, begun to attribute a great deal of importance to its own business directory, and those with activity on that platform get a boost in their SEO ranking. Sure, it’s a way of ensuring that those who care about such things stay active on the Google-My-Business platform and that it stays relevant. But, who cares? It’s an easy win for those who manage SEO. Start posting photos and videos and get your products and services posted on your Google-My-Business account today. And if you don’t even have a Google-My-Business account yet, what on Earth are you waiting for? Go and claim yours now!
- Inbound Linking: Promoting inbound linking has become a thorny issue for Google watchers. Those in the know understand that link-building may be more trouble than its worth when done wrong in that if Google spots something suspicious, it’s likely to err on the side of caution and penalize those involved. But when don’t right (when a non-biased link pointing to your site is published in what is clearly not a reciprocal relationship – one where you give a link to one site in order to get a link from that site or another), healthy inbound links can be powerful shots in the arm for strong SEO performance.
- Guest Blogging: Blogging is still the hottest trend in on-page SEO and the same goes for off-page strategy. When another brand offers your business an opportunity to post content to their site, it’s a great validation for your brand’s authority. Guest posting is a great way of establishing thought-leadership with good, useful content and adding a reference link pointing back to your website for more of that good content. It’s a win-win. a
If you would like to work with Proctor Digital strategists to help develop a powerful SEO strategy to build targeted website traffic for your site and grow your brand, call us at 773.664.5819. We’d love to help!