Off-Page SEO Techniques to Outrank Competitors

On-page vs off-page SEO

Optimizing for SEO isn’t entirely new to most Ecommerce business owners. However, most people put effort into on-page SEO rather than looking at their activities outside their website. Both types are critical to improving your page rankings with search engines.

Let’s do a quick review of these two types of SEO.

On-page SEO:

On-page SEO includes any technique you employ on your website to boost your search rankings. It includes the use of keywords in your written content and creating links in your site content to other pages on your website. It also includes tagging your content with meta tags, title tags, and meta descriptions.

Off-page SEO:

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, takes place around the web and off your site. It includes anything you do to promote your site online or help search engines recognize the value of your content.

What’s the difference? Other than the different scope of activities you’d undertake for each, a big differentiator is how much control you have over the results. Of course, making changes, testing and measuring results will always be easier on a site you own. However, a successful SEO strategy will always need both on-page and off-page SEO.

How do I use off-page SEO for Ecommerce?

Learning to use off-page SEO means understanding how and why search engines drive traffic to specific websites and how you can influence these results.

The best approach is to create a strategy with tactics that are a good fit for your business and target market. Over time, you should see incremental improvements that will help you decide where to continue to invest your resources. In addition, you can use website analytics tools like Google Analytics to track and measure traffic.

9 off-page SEO tactics for Ecommerce website

There’s no getting around SEO and how critical it is for your Ecommerce business. You need to make sure your product pages are ranking higher than those of your competitors.

Taking the time to optimize your site can bring you increased organic traffic from people who are likely to find your content valuable and convert to customers, which is an important way to cut spending on paid ads.

Here are off-page SEO techniques you can apply to your Ecommerce website to build traffic further:

1. Social media marketing and brand mentions

Marketing your Ecommerce site on your social media accounts, interactions on those accounts and brand mentions by other social accounts all help boost your ranking.

2. Content marketing and guest posts

Promoting and distributing your content through multiple channels can be beneficial in helping boost your signal online. This could include creating content specifically for social channels or promoting your website content on social. Partnering with or contributing valuable content to other websites can also help get your brand noticed.

3. Newsletters

People like interesting content, and they often really enjoy the content that’s been specially curated based on their interests. Creating a newsletter with custom content that appeals to your audience, with a couple of links back to your website, can be a good way to build traffic from your network.

4. Influencer campaigns

Borrowing bigger audiences by partnering with influencers can be a great way to increase your audience size and get your website seen by new people. Outreach from influencers is perceived as credible, as they often have loyal followers. Look for influencers who have followers in your target market, as this is not just a numbers game.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts have exploded in popularity. There are millions of different shows on a broad range of topics. If a podcast audience is made up of people who align with your ideal customer, appearing on the podcast as a guest or panel member could be a great boost to your brand.

6. Affiliate marketing

Allowing others to link to your products via their site or channels, while you share an agreed-upon fee or percentage of their sales, is another useful strategy. Tapping into new marketing and audiences can be valuable for Ecommerce businesses trying to grow their reach.

7. Local SEO and review sites

Sites like Google My Business, Yelp and Tripadvisor can help you get your Ecommerce business in front of local searchers with strong intent, which makes them even more likely to click on your website.

8. Q-and-A sites

Sites like Quora, Stack Overflow and Yahoo Answers act like giant forums where people go to find answers to their questions. Thoughtful responses from knowledgeable users are welcomed but use these mindfully. If you’re offering insight and expertise, a link back to your website is likely fine, even welcome, but simply dropping your link on the site will be seen as spammy.

9. Social bookmarking sites

Sites like Reddit fall into this category, but so does Pinterest. Social bookmarking sites create ways for users to share information and products they like and spark conversations. Get mentioned here or create your own valuable content that people can share, and you’ll drive new interest in your site.

Use caution with these off-page SEO approaches

Some off-page SEO practices have fallen out of favour with Google and other search engines. These include commenting and dropping high volumes of links on blogs and popular websites, dropping links in unrelated forums, and submitting keyword-stuffed posts to high-ranking sites.

Google and other search engines actively disavow some activities. They are known as black hat SEO and can result in penalties or even get your site de-indexed. It’s not worth trying to cheat the system, so keep your focus on the best user experience.

Benefits of off-page SEO

Being proactive with off-page SEO can bring you important gains. If you can boost your signal by getting noticed in other places on the web or get other valuable websites to link to yours, it can improve your website’s ranking.

Nobody knows all the factors used by Google’s content ranking algorithm. But, a study from Moz shows that off-site SEO likely carries more than 50 per cent of the ranking factor weight.

Off-page SEO can:

• Increase overall organic traffic;
• Boost the credibility of your website;
• Increase your Google search rankings;
• Raise your PageRank score; and
• Increase domain authority.

Google ranking is what most Ecommerce businesses focus on because it’s the most heavily used search engine by a huge margin. In 2021, Google accounted for just over 80 per cent of all combined global desktop and mobile search traffic, Baidu just over nine per cent and Bing almost 6.7 per cent.

Ready to get started? To optimize off-page SEO techniques for your Ecommerce website, you’ll need a strategy to build credibility with search engines, then a plan to implement the right tactics for your business. Over time, if used correctly, these efforts will lead to improved rankings and more website visitors finding your site.