Off-Page SEO in 2022 - What Founders Need to Know

As a startup founder, you’ve probably heard mention of SEO, and maybe even some of the different subcategories, such as on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Most of today’s businesses need to work on search engine optimization to one degree or another, for long-term organic growth and improved online presence. In today’s post, I’ll go through some of the basics of off-page SEO techniques that you’ll need to be aware of before hiring a specialized team, or attempting to do it yourself.

SEO comes in a few different flavors, but they all have the same fundamental goal: improving your website’s ranking on search engines. In other words, when somebody searches for a term related to your business, you show up higher on the page, making the reader more likely to click on your site. Off-page is all about improving your visibility on the broader Web, drawing in views, clicks, shares, and more to drive engagement and ranking higher. 

Off Page SEO Techniques for 2022

1. Link Building

To some extent, link building is basically a numbers game. You want to build a roster of hundreds, then thousands of links from other pages that lead back to your site. Not only does this give more opportunity for potential customers to find you through the links, but simply having a large number of high-quality links helps you rank higher in Google’s algorithm. So how do we build links?

• Submit your website to social bookmarking sites (e.g. Digg, Reddit, Tumblr, Instapaper, and Folkd)
• Share high-quality documents and press releases onto appropriate websites (Slideshare, Scribd, and prlog, openpr, respectively)
• Create content for your website that’s highly shareable: off-page SEO demands that the content actually on your site is likely to be shared in different places, leading to the creation of new links. 

2. Social Media Engagement

There’s no doubt that social media is bigger than ever, and effective off-page seo strategy frequently demands a top-notch social media presence. You’ll need to post regularly, create content that your target audience finds genuinely interesting or useful, and make sure you’re using beautiful, original images with high quality ad copy. The DIFFERENCE, one of our first clients, made particularly good use of masterful imagery to generate buzz in their social media and email campaigns. 

• Shareability is key: if you’re creating social media content that people find really engaging and useful, they’ll share it, creating a new link for your page and boosting your credibility.
• Psychological advantage: many people will visit a website, then check to see if the business has an active social media account. If they find a busy account with a number of followers, likes, shares, and frequent posts, it will immediately improve their opinion of your company and increase the likelihood that they’ll eventually make a purchase with you.
• Social media creates a new channel for people to find you. While it’s not the best off-page SEO technique for all businesses, for many startups especially in the B2C space social media is the first point of contact. A substantial amount of traffic can be driven to your website from these platforms, leading to a further boost in SEO as the visitor numbers increase.

3. Blogging

Writing articles and posting other written content online, while not the massive game-changer of the early 2000s, is still a high impact off-page SEO technique for 2022, as long as it’s leveraged correctly. A few basics to keep in mind with blogs: don’t stuff the content with keywords, use software that creates articles for you, or simply recycle material that others have already put together. These moves may save you time and give you a quick ranking boost, but in the long term the search engines will figure out that your material is of low quality, and you can be severely penalized. If you’re not a writer, hire a great writing or editing team who can put together content that will actually get read and shared online.

• Become a guest writer on blogs related to your industry, and share articles you’ve written on the many different blog aggregating websites (hubpages, ezinearticles, thefreelibrary) and directories (elecdir, industrydirectory.mjbizdaily, directory.entireweb).
• Post on forums. As an expert in your field of business, you likely have a lot of useful information that others can benefit from. If someone is asking a question in a forum, go on in and answer it! This can boost your social credibility and help more people find your website, as a lot more people will see your answer beyond just the person who originally asked.

• Create and submit infographics to websites like reddit, visual.ly, and infographicsarchive. Who doesn’t love infographics? It’s a ton of information packaged into an easily understood image that can be referenced again and again. Including them in your content mix is a great way to keep the organic clicks coming in 2022.

So maybe you’re getting to the end of this and you’re still thinking, why do I really need off-page search engine optimization? Can’t I just stick with some of the more basic on-page strategies? Unfortunately, no. Website competition is fierce, and companies are battling hard for even a few seconds of their potential clients’ time. Off-page SEO is being used every day to drive search rankings higher, improve discoverability, and ultimately steal your customers before they even find you. If you want to show up near the top on Google, and bring in the constant flow of organic traffic which is the lifeblood of any startup, you’ll need invest in an off-page SEO strategy. 

If you’re finding this all a little overwhelming, not to worry! There’s a lot to learn, and it’s easy to feel like it’s just too much. Fortunately, Trajex has your back - we provide startups with the affordable, high quality SEO they need to grow and thrive. You can read all about it here! Even if you’d just like to talk to another business owner who’s been there and can give you some pointers, we’d love to help you out. Book a free consultation today, and we’ll get the conversation started!