Search engine optimisation, or SEO, should be the central part of any digital strategy. Whether big or small a businesses website not only needs to represent them in a digital world but also attract both existing and new customers. SEO isn’t just about keyword research or a quick one-time solution but is part of an ongoing process. Good SEO is also not just what you do to or happens on your site but also what happens off your site as well.
In digital marketing, all your efforts lead your customers to your website. In the simplest of terms, onsite SEO helps search engines identify your site as being relevant to a search query and offsite SEO encourages traffic to visit your site from other external sources. Both onsite and offsite SEO are important and should work together so when done properly, offsite SEO can make your onsite SEO more effective and vice versa.
Encouraging traffic from other external sources is usually the central purpose of offsite SEO and can be done in different ways. Links to your site is one of the most effective of these. Each external link you have to your site is viewed by search engines as a “yes vote”. The more yes votes or links that your site has the more your site is seen as being relevant and good quality so the more likely it is to appear higher up in search engine results. Search engines want the most useful content to appear at the top of their search results and inbound links indicate that your content is the most useful and therefore most likely to answer a searchers query. The best kinds of links come from trusted and relevant sites with the most effective being natural editorial links from other sites such as bloggers. Identifying and working with influencers in your industry whose sites have high traffic, gives you more through traffic to your site and can make a real difference to your search engine rankings.
Social media is also an important part of offsite SEO. The more people who see your content the better and social media allows you to share your content in creative ways and is a great way to engage with your audience. Great content shared across different platforms gets your existing customers and new customers to notice and respond to you. Whether you are posting, tweeting or updating you have the opportunity to link your audience back to your blog, product or service pages. Be proactive with your social media and share relevant links in your content. This will encourage your audience to visit your site and hopefully engage which is another positive signal to search engines that your site is relevant.
Offsite SEO isn’t restricted just to the digital world. Any contact that your audience has in the real world with you, your product or service should also reinforce your brand and direct them back to your site. A great customer experience and the right products offline encourage conversations and interactions all of which can introduce more customers to your site when they want to find out more about what you offer.
