Think of off-page SEO as the networking side of SEO that helps you rank better on web pages. And to do it properly, you need an off page SEO checklist.
Building relationships, earning backlinks, and leveraging social signals to boost your online reputation are all important aspects of off-page SEO, which is why you’d need an off page SEO checklist to do that.
To help you out, I’m sharing my own step-by-step off page SEO checklist tailored for 2024.
This off page SEO checklist covers essential strategies and tactics for ensuring your homepage ranks higher and maintains its competitive edge offline.
But first, let’s understand what off page SEO is.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off page SEO encompasses all the efforts made outside your website to enhance its search engine visibility and rankings.
It revolves around building credibility and authority for your online presence through external signals like backlinks (follow and nofollow links), brand mentions, online reviews, and social media engagement.
The most common example is how statistics from trusted and popular sources are often linked in articles to make a point. These links count as a backlink for the source website, further improving its credentials on the web for search engines.
So, while on-page optimization focuses on creating quality content and user experience, off-page SEO amplifies brand awareness and reputation. Search engines like Google use these external factors as indicators of trustworthiness to determine your site’s domain authority, relevance, and quality, ultimately impacting its ranking potential.
Complete Off Page SEO Checklist for 2024
To excel in off-page SEO and outshine your competitors, you need a comprehensive content marketing strategy that covers various aspects.
Here’s a detailed off page SEO checklist that I use, and you can tailor it to your process:
Audit Off Page SEO Checklist
All SEO begins with an audit.
It’s always best practice to measure your current performance, its pros and cons, and areas where your audience is the most active to lead your strategy in the right direction.
1. Audit Your Site
Before exploring off-page tactics, conduct a thorough technical audit to ensure your website is primed for success. The AIOSEO site analyzer can conduct a combined site audit in minutes.
AIOSEO’s site analyzer helps you ensure your off-page is fully optimized for search engines by verifying that crawlers can access and index all your pages without encountering barriers like robots.txt restrictions or noindex tags. It runs a complete site audit and identifies the issues that can be improved to enhance the overall site experience.
Some of these report features that I like include:
- Creating smart XML sitemaps
- Creating a complete SEO audit checklist for you to follow
- Social media integration to easily control your content on social media
Another ranking factor you should optimize is page speed. Without it, your website will likely not rank higher on SERPs.
So, you can audit your page speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix speed issues. With most web traffic now originating from mobile devices, ensuring your site is mobile-responsive is crucial. It offers a seamless experience across all screen sizes, and using responsive design techniques can help achieve this.
Additionally, make sure to implement structured data markup.
You can use AIOSEO’s schema markup feature to validate and enhance your schema markup and improve your site’s visibility in rich snippets and knowledge panels on search engine result pages (SERPs).
It’s fairly easy to use and automates the process for you. Doing so will make your content more attractive and accessible to users searching for relevant information.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use the schema markup feature:
2. Audit Your Backlinks
High-quality backlinks are a crucial off-page SEO factor, endorsing your site’s credibility and authority.
Regularly audit your backlink profile and external links to ensure they strengthen your SEO efforts.
Start by identifying and disavowing low-quality links, such as spammy or irrelevant ones, that could harm your rankings. Tools like Semrush can run a backlink analysis and provide a comprehensive report with action items on what can be improved.
You can also use an AIOSEO broken link checker for complete link status details. This tool can identify broken links and help you remove harmful ones. It provides comprehensive information about the broken links, such as the URL of the broken link, HTTPS code, and the page it linked to. This makes it easier for you to take the right action and fix this.
Monitor your link velocity by tracking the rate at which you acquire new backlinks to ensure a natural and sustainable growth pattern.
You can tell what pages on your website are “orphaned” and don’t contain or lead to any links. The tool uses AI to find link opportunities and give domain reports on the authority of websites that link to your pages.
Sudden spikes can look suspicious to search engines, so consider a strategy based on this audit.
3. Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlink Profile
Just like your own, analyze the backlink profiles of your top competitors.
Start by identifying the websites and platforms linking to your competitors, as these can be potential link acquisition opportunities for your site. Next, evaluate the authority and relevance of these links, aiming to acquire links from similar or higher-quality sources.
This could involve guest posting on well-respected industry sites or getting featured in reputable online publications.
Part of this strategy also involves conducting a link gap analysis to pinpoint websites linking to your competitors but not to you and prioritizing outreach to these untapped sources.
For instance, if you find a popular resource page linking to your competitors’ guides but not yours, contact the page owner with your high-quality guide, highlighting its unique value and relevance.
Link Building Off Page SEO Checklist
Link building is by far the most important off-page SEO tactic, so it’s important to get it right.
4. Build High-Quality Links
My personal favorite link-building strategy is creating source-worthy content that can bring high-quality links, also known as resource link building.
Compile or create comprehensive resource lists or directories related to your industry, positioning your site as a valuable reference.
For instance, engage in content outreach by promoting your high-value, link-worthy content (such as in-depth guides, original research, and infographics) to relevant industry publications, bloggers, and influencers.
One way to build high-quality backlinks is to analyze a website’s backlink profile. I use Semrush to do this.
Go to the Backlink Analysis section, insert the website link you want to run an audit of and you’ll get a complete overview of the opportunities you can capture.
5. Do Guest Posting
Contributing guest posts to reputable, relevant websites can be a win-win situation for both parties.
You provide valuable content readers will appreciate by offering well-researched, informative, and engaging content that aligns with the host website’s audience and editorial guidelines.
This effort helps build positive relationships with website owners and editors, paving the way for future collaboration opportunities.
For example, if you’re an expert in digital marketing, write a detailed article about the latest trends for a well-known marketing blog. This will enhance your reputation and drive quality traffic to your site, improving your SEO efforts.
6. Earn Brand Mentions
As my complete Off-Page SEO guide discussed, social media marketing also significantly brings attention to your website from outside sources.
While backlinks are essential, brand mentions can significantly contribute to your off-page SEO efforts.
Start by setting up alerts or using dedicated tools like Google Alerts to track instances of your brand or business being mentioned online.
Once identified, politely contact the website owners or authors and request that they convert existing brand mentions into backlinks.
You can also do influencer marketing by collaborating with industry influencers and thought leaders. This not only amplifies your brand’s reach and visibility but can also organically lead to more brand mentions and backlinks.
For example, as a marketing or SaaS business, consider partnering with influencers for product reviews or co-hosting webinars, which can naturally integrate brand mentions into their content.
7. Get Reviews on Third Parties
Positive reviews on reputable third-party platforms can significantly impact your local SEO and online reputation.
Claim and optimize your business listings on popular review sites like G2, Trustpilot, and Google My Business to ensure accurate and consistent information across the web. Choose these platforms based on your industry and business.
Encourage reviews by implementing strategies to actively solicit reviews from satisfied customers, such as sending follow-up emails or providing incentives.
To look more trustworthy, engage with customer reviews, both positive and negative, to demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction and transparency.
Optimization Checklist
Optimization in off-page SEO is all about winning the top section for your brand.
You can also do this by using SEOBoost’s content optimization feature. This feature allows you to optimize your content for keywords, word count, multimedia, and other important on-page ranking factors.
This is what a work in progress looks like. Notice how it conveniently lets you know what needs to be done and optimized, considering the competitive analysis.
Moreover, off-page optimization is part of your optimization tasks. Since it’s mainly targeted towards Local SEO, here’s everything you need to do:
8. Optimize for Local SEO
If your business operates within a specific geographic region, prioritizing local SEO is essential.
Start by claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing with accurate business information, high-quality images, and regular updates.
Ensure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistently listed across online directories and local citation sources.
Additionally, create location-specific content, such as neighborhood guides, event listings, or city-focused landing pages, to establish and enhance your local relevance.
You should use a good local keyword research tool like SEOBoost to map out the keywords you need to target. Along with the suggested keywords, it also runs a competitive analysis and informs you how to optimize the content using the right local keywords.
Social Media Off Page SEO Checklist
Finally, I’m returning to the most fun part of off-page SEO. Social media marketing has the incredible power to change your off-page SEO game forever.
A constant supply of readers from your social media profile to blogs or landing pages can boost your trust and authority on search engines overnight.
9. Share Content on Social Media
Social media platforms offer valuable opportunities for content distribution, audience engagement, and off-page SEO.
You can promote your website’s content (e.g., blog posts, infographics, videos) across relevant social media channels to drive traffic and potential backlinks.
You can also interact with your industry experts, respond to comments, and participate in industry-related discussions to build relationships and establish thought leadership.
This also means you can share resource articles in their inboxes!
For example, @Adobe shares works from many artists, branding strategists, illustrators, and designers on Instagram and mentions them. It also conducts challenges to encourage participation and increase visibility through its page.
While social signals (likes, shares, comments) may not directly impact rankings, they can indirectly increase visibility and engagement, potentially leading to more backlinks.
10. Collaborate with Industry Experts
Just like on social media, partnering with influential figures in your industry can amplify your reach and credibility on other channels, such as YouTube and Spotify, as well as in real life!
Guest blogging is the basic tactic; in 2024, you can join forces with industry leaders to co-host webinars, podcasts, or live streams, cross-promoting to each other’s audiences.
You can also curate expert roundup posts or interviews featuring insights from respected industry figures and encourage them to share the content with their networks.
11. Be Active in Forums
Engaging in relevant online communities and forums can help establish your brand as a knowledgeable and trustworthy resource. So, actively participate in industry-specific forums by answering questions, sharing insights, and offering solutions to common problems.
This can be LinkedIn, marketing channels on Reddit or Quora, or industry-specific platforms like GitHub Community for programmers.
When appropriate and relevant, include links to your website or specific content pieces as a helpful resource. As a business or brand owner, you can foster positive relationships with other forum members, potentially leading to future collaboration opportunities or backlink acquisitions.
Final Word
Off-page SEO can be tricky, so I keep this handy off page SEO checklist around.
By following this comprehensive off page SEO checklist, you’ll be well-equipped to review your off-page strategy, build a strong online presence, establish credibility and authority, and ultimately improve your search engine rankings.
Remember, off-page SEO is an ongoing process that demands continuous effort and adaptation. You should pair it with on page SEO strategies to produce the best results and use SEOBoost to do that.
With SEOBoost’s optimization features, you can create and optimize content from start to finish using the same platform.
Sign up for a 14 day free trial today and see the true potential of search engine optimization yourself.
FAQS
1. What is included in off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO includes all efforts outside your website to enhance its search engine visibility and organic traffic. These include building backlinks, brand mentions, and social media engagement.
2. What is the off-page SEO roadmap?
The off-page SEO roadmap typically involves auditing your backlink profile, analyzing competitor backlink profiles, building high-quality links, earning brand mentions, optimizing for local SEO, and leveraging social media and industry collaborations.
3. How to do off-page SEO in 2024?
To do off-page SEO in 2024, focus on cultivating a strong backlink profile through ethical link-building tactics, actively monitoring brand mentions, optimizing for local search, and engaging with your audience on social media platforms. Keep an eye on the latest trends and algorithm updates to refine your strategy accordingly.
