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Off-page SEO: a guide to link building
14 July 2022
Link building is one of the most difficult, yet most effective, areas of SEO. While technical and on-page SEO are more like a science — straightforward to implement if you know the formula — off-page, SEO involves a bit more creativity. Here, Andy Kehoe, Marketing Executive at technical PR agency, Stone Junction, discusses the benefits of off-page SEO and explains how to get started.
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to all the tactics that you deploy away from your website to increase search engine rankings. Put simply, on-page search engine optimization happens within the site, while off-page SEO happens outside the site - an example of off-page SEO would be me writing this guest post for Connectivity.
In off-page SEO, links from other sites are the bullseye. According to Backlink.io, the top results on Google have an average of 3.8x more backlinks than the results that appear in positions two to ten. That’s because links to your site tell Google that your content is worth a read, it’s almost like a personal recommendation for your website.
In turn, high quality backlinks increase your domain authority — a metric that measures how likely a website is to appear in search results. According to Moz, “Studies show that off-site SEO-related factors likely carry more than 50 per cent of the ranking factor weight.”
What types of links can I build?
Types of links for off-page SEO include: natural links, manually-built links and self-created links. Self-created link techniques include link farms — websites that carry the sole purpose of linking to a bunch of other websites, or practices such as spamming comment sections and forums with links to a website.
While this may have worked in the early days, Google’s algorithm has advanced greatly. Self-created links are now seen as a cheap attempt to gain search authority, and could result in a penalty that destroys your search rankings. No matter your link strategy, we advise that you regularly check your site for toxic backlinks using a site audit program such as SEMRush, so you can take steps to remove them if they appear.
Manually built links are typically achieved by reaching out and asking people to link to your content. If you have a website, you’re likely to have come across this — emails from hopeful enquirers asking if they can write a guest post, or offering to pay you to feature a link to their website. These link strategies tend to be ineffective - your links must be relevant and look natural for Google to credit them.
Natural links are backlinks achieved organically without any purposeful outreach activity from the creator. For example, you publish a whitepaper on the top ten reasons to invest in robotics, and another business in the industry references it as a source on their blog content. The better your content, the more likely you are for people to reference it in their own work. In addition, your on-page SEO activity will encourage natural links - the more people who are finding your website, the more people can share it.
With link generation, the goal is to achieve as many links as possible that you didn’t ask for. However, unless you’re a huge brand, this won’t happen by accident. One way we work with technical and engineering businesses on their link building is to achieve editorial links in trade media. We start by writing high quality content, working relevant keywords into the text as we write.
How to get editorial links
Before writing your content, look at the trade media’s editorial style and format and try and match it as closely as you can. You can use the magazines forward features list as a guide for when and where your article could appear.
Importantly, make sure your anchor text is relevant to the page you are linking to, and that you are varying it regularly so Google doesn’t get suspicious. If you’re hyperlinking "Technical PR”, ideally you want to link to the accompanying page on the site, rather than your homepage or about us section. You might notice we applied this exact tactic in the introduction of this article…
Working with trade media
Once you have identified a relevant feature, you can send your content to a trade publication. For example, if you’re operating in the automation sector, you could target UK publications such as Drives and Controls or Controls, Drives and Automation, or US publications like Automation World or Automation.com.
Automation World’s website, for example, has a domain authority of 55, as well as 8,743 referring domains and over 400,000 backlinks. All of these stats indicate that it’s a well-known, trustworthy site with a good reputation. Therefore, getting a link on its website would provide you with powerful link juice, which determines the strength of a link and how much positive ranking factor it passes onto the domain it’s referring to. In addition, things that determine strength of link juice are the freshness of the link, the anchor text used on the linking site and the number of other links on the linking page.
How to distribute your content
When sending content to trade media, you need to make it as easy as possible for the editor to publish. Editors are inundated with emails - writing the content in the style of their publication and providing them with a picture can go a long way.
It can feel daunting to reach out to editors if you’re new to off-page SEO. A major advantage of working with a PR agency is that it will have built strong relationships with relevant media, as well as established a reputation for providing good content, making the process much easier.
Since 2006, Stone Junction has accumulated over 22,000 backlinks, with many coming from highly regarded sources. So, if you’d like to get started on your off-page SEO journey, you know who to ask.
Could working with an established PR agency benefit your off-page SEO? Stone Junction has secured coverage for its clients in publications like Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Wired and many others. Enquire today for more information.
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