90% of the marketers implement off-page activities wrongly, they do several activities without knowing why something is done. This article is not for blind followers of wrong practices, it’s purely written for the logical thinking minds!

Off-page Seo activities is a broader search for content which usually would include multiple objectives and hence as a digital marketer or as a business owner you have to make sure that what is your objective of performing an off-page activity from your end before you start with any of the off-page page activities.

If you by chance blindly do some random activities your efforts would lead you to nothing and hence think twice before you start with the off-page SEO activities for your website, as any single wrong step you take would lead to the following loss,

1. Waste of resources such as money, time and efforts
2. Delayed results for your business
3. End up misleading your marketing teams
4. You may get into the trouble of website penalty
5. You would receive negative reviews for your business
6. Your efforts may backfire
7. May get low-quality traffic to your website

And many other problems of performing wrong SEO off page activities.

Considering the above 7 and more problems I always suggest all the digital marketers I have come across to start the off-page SEO activities with the objectives and also, I have made an effort in sharing my knowledge with you about the off-page SEO activities to help you to take your business to the next level.

Here are some of the most common objective of off-page SEO activities, and I shall be taking you through each of them and how to achieve those off-page objectives,

Regardless of the objectives, I have also compiled the off-page SEO activities checklist for your quick reference, and one should go through this off-page SEO list even before they attempt to know the various objectives of Off-page SEO activities.

• Guest blogging on the websites which provide do-follow backlinks
• Get static links from credible websites
• Develop great content that can be naturally picked up by many other writers, influencers, and others in the content they develop
• Social bookmarking
• Commenting on the blogs/articles
• Activities on the forums such as Quora
• Directories submissions
• Profile creation
• Author Bios and more
• Affiliate marketing
• Image submissions
• Video submissions
• Profile creation on credible review portals and activities on the same
• List your website on all the local directories
• List your website on the Google business
• List your website/business on your business niche directories/forums
• Get a PR (Press release) done for your website, where many news websites will speak about your business either positing you or your business credible and great.
• Find popular and credible websites and buy a banner space and promote your business in that slot
• Make influencers speak about your business, they would either tweet about your business, write a post on their personal profiles or websites, or speak about your business on the forums or any other social media platforms.
• You can also push your brand on all your own social platforms

Off-page activity – Objective 1: Building backlinks to the website:

If your objective of an off-page SEO is to build a backlink you should prefer doing some of the activities those I suggest and even before you start building backlinks you have to make a note of the following and also don’t forget to go through this amazing article about the Off-page SEO

• Backlinks are built to your website from other websites
• Backlinks are built in order to improve the crawl frequency of your website
• The crawl frequency or stats are also measured as a Domain authority, Citation flow and by few other terms.

Hope, you have enough clarity on why backlinks are built? if not blindly go by a thumb rule for now that backlinks are built to improve the crawl frequency of your website.

You can read here how crawl stats improve your keyword rankings

If improving crawl frequency of the website is the main objective you have to be building backlinks from the websites which provide do follow links to your website. If you are performing activities on the website which doesn’t provide do follow links and expecting the SEO performance/rankings of your website you are daydreaming and you can never achieve the results.

You should start doing the following if your main objective is to get a do-follow backlink,

1. Stop commenting on the blogs, which never help in improving the crawl frequency of your website especially when they are no-follow links
2. Stop being active on the forums if they are providing you a no-follow backlink
3. Your activities on social media have to stop if your main objective is to get a do-follow backlink
4. Stop web 2. 0 submission
5. Stop directories submissions, as most of the websites have moved from do-follow links to no-follow
6. Stop social bookmarking activities if you are in need of do-follow backlinks

What you should be doing to get the best backlinks?

1. Guest blogging on the websites which provide do-follow backlinks
2. Get static links from credible websites
3. Develop great content that can be naturally picked up by many other writers, influencers, and others in the content they develop

Objective 2: To Get referral traffic to the website:

If your objective is to get lots and lots of referral traffic, only traffic but not for the do follow backlinks then you should do the following activities.

Understand your business thoroughly and the target audiences for the same, so that based on that understanding you can pick/shortlist the websites on which your target audiences spend the time.

The websites those are excluded above in the topic backlinks as an objective can be considered here, as they are not capable of improving the crawl frequency of your website but can for sure drive tons of traffic to your website, the list goes like this:

1. Social bookmarking
2. Commenting on the blogs/articles
3. Activities on the forums such as Quora
4. Directories submissions
5. Profile creation
6. Author Bios and more

Objective 3: Drive leads or sales- Affiliate Marketing

Driving leads or sales is one of the biggest objectives for many businesses who don’t trust on the SEO or who don’t have enough budgets to invest in paid marketing and that’s when this off-page activity helps drive leads/sales and in turn revenue.

You can for sure rely on all the above activities mentioned under the objective 1 & 2 , but these two may not necessarily guarantee the results as expected as sometimes these activities don’t get any business at all and hence I recommend to go with the affiliate marketing when your objective is to make revenues (sales or leads) through off-page activities

Affiliate marketing is a marketing activity in which your product or service is promoted by other business or content portals for every sale contribution they get paid a commission or percentage of the product selling price.

To achieve success in affiliate marketing you need to find the best websites which are speaking about the products or services that you are handling as a business and the same people promoting your products or services will help you achieve your objectives of selling a product through their website.

If your objective is just leads you can also expect some business from the local directories such as Sulekha and Justdial in India.

Objective 4: Online Reputation Management

Reputation management is an activity performed in order to maintain a positive profile of your business on the internet for the users who are researching the credibility of your business or products.

When your target audiences find your credible, genuine and best rate you, your business will be reaching a new height where the conversion rates of your sales go high, the user engagement on the website improves, the content gets shared, word of mouth and many more advantages.

Improved user engagement is one of the signals for ranking your website high on search results and hence this will be helping you to achieve better results on SEO

Here are some of the activities those you can do in order maintain a positive brand talk about your business on the internet:

Create a profile on the credible review portals such as mouthshut, Trustpilot, Glassdoor, Google business listing, and others and ask your customers to provide feedback about the product or service

In case of any comments on already created profiles and especially if its negative consider responding to them on priority, try to solve their problem and ask them to rerate you, for sure this will work, they will rate you high when you address their queries or concerns and that’s how we maintain a 4.5-4.8 rating for our clients across all review platforms

Objective 5: Help users find your business across internet:

Your business cannot be found everywhere on the internet especially when you are expecting people to know about your business, its addresses, telephone numbers, directions, and offerings, you can certainly make use of credible portals those help you to achieve all these objectives,

Do the following,

• List your website on all the local directories
• List your website on the Google business
• List your website/business on your business niche directories/forums

Objective 6 : Awareness or Branding as an objective:

When you prefer people to come know your website or business you have to pick the platforms those give your business a good visibility, and also position your business in a top level.

For positioning of your business do. The following,

1. Get a PR (Press release) done for your website, where many news websites will speak about your business either positing you or your business credible and great.
2. Find popular and credible websites and buy a banner space and promote your business in that slot
3. Make influencers speak about your business, they would either tweet about your business, write a post on their personal profiles or websites, or speak about your business on the forums or any other social media platforms.
4. You can also push your brand on all your own social platforms

Note: if branding your objective, you have to leave a strong message to user or create a impactful ad or create value to the user (user have to benefit)

Objective 7: Content marketing- You content to get shared across internet:

Content marketing is one of the biggest channels for many businesses in terms of attracting right audiences, building brand awareness or product awareness, achieving any other intended goals such as sales, leads or any other and all these is not possible just by building great content, it also needs to be promoted and that’s when the off-page activity plays a crucial role and the following are some of the activities those are done as an off-page activity in content marketing,

• Promoting content in the groups on social media platforms
• Answering on the forums
• Commenting on the blogs
• Getting content shared by the influencers on the internet
• In fact, all the activities mentioned in the above 6 objectives can be done to achieve the goal of making your content reach as many audiences as possible.

By doing all the above activities you will be taking your content to several audiences who may show interest in it and in case if its interest they do share it, they speak about it, they get in touch with you for the services or products that you are serving and can help them too.

Note: Achieving all the above 6 objectives are possible through content marketing, but your content should be of great quality and use to your audiences.

Conclusion:

Many digital marketers’ perception of SEO off-page activities is to build backlinks and unfortunately, many others don’t know the purpose of doing off-page SEO and they end up doing everything wrong or they fail to prioritize their work based on the objectives or goals. I don’t want the marketers to be taking the wrong step in any of their implementations or in the learning stage and hence have bought this to you.

I believe this article will become your off-page SEO activities checklist at least from here on and I encourage you for implementing the off-page activities based on the objectives or aligned with the business owners’ goals.

This article also helps you to gauge your off-page SEO efforts and what have they reaped throughout the process and its implementation.

If you have any suggestion, you are welcome, please do not forget to share the knowledge when you believe it all sounds appropriate for you.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Consultant