SEO is a very broad term, many things contribute to an overall SEO strategy, it doesn’t just pertain to content or copywriting. To see big improvements in organic growth also means having a well-rounded and optimized strategy. This well-rounded strategy doesn’t just include strategic content for your readers. SEO also accounts for back-end website tasks (Don’t worry, this is completely non-techy stuff!) unless you have someone else maintaining your website tasks for you, you want to know what off-page SEO is.
Off-Page SEO Strategies to Improve Organic Growth
If I told you that SEO was only effective if you optimized your content for keywords and guaranteed organic growth would happen, that would be a lie. The goal I want for your business is long-term growth and success, so we have to face those somewhat nitty gritty tasks at some point to make the best positive impact on user experience that we can. To have a successful business means to make sure that our visitors want to keep coming to learn from our content and give them the best reader-focused, off-page SEO experience that we can.
SEO isn’t just about optimizing your content with keywords and connecting with your reader. SEO means that your entire strategy is based on user experience and your website is optimized to load promptly. Your content connects with your reader and you’re using keywords and phrases, and you are strategically placing links inside of your content along with CTA’s for the most effective organic growth marketing plan. Off-page SEO is one of those things that are easy to overlook.
Investing in off-page SEO improvements
When I built my first website, I had no one helping me with back-end maintenance tasks, and was focused on saving money and starting low budget, which there’s nothing wrong with wanting to save money, but you also want to invest in things that help your business grow. The low-budget investing led me to install numerous 3rd party plugins on my website rather than buying one premium plugin for all the things I needed those other plugins for, and that caused several website and plugin issues.
Having an abundance of plugins and large PNG images on your website slows down website speed. So when we talk about SEO, we want the user experience of our website and content to be smooth and load pretty quickly.
There are 3 critical elements for off-page SEO. They are completely easy to solve and require maybe minutes of your time. These should also be considered like a monthly recurring maintenance task list.
1. Site speed
Site speed is one of the many factors that go into SEO because you have seconds to capture the attention of a website visitor. So you want to make sure that your website speed is appropriate for website visitors.
WordPress plugins
The number of plugins you have running on your website can cause it to slow down. It also depends on the type of plugins that you have running might be extremely resource heavy. 3rd party plugins for example – run the risk of security issues and plugin conflicts almost constantly. So if you’re a DIY-er and you’re maintaining your website, just be sure to keep plugins to a minimum as well as keep them updated.
Image sizes & formats
JPG or JPEG images are smaller format sizes and don’t take as many resources to load. PNG and SVG images have a significant impact on page load so if your image is not transparent, avoid using PNG and SVG images on pages.
Image sizes really shouldn’t be any bigger than 1200×800 px. I know there are image compression plugins, but it’s always best practice to compress any image before you upload it to your website.
Typography formats
TTF & OTF are the best format fonts. SVG fonts are also a resource hogger and will slow down page speed.
To check the speed of your website, you can go here to check it.
2. Marketing
Optimizing doesn’t stop at website content. You also have to optimize for content marketing too because your ideal reader needs to see those key phrases to know that you are talking to them. SEO also matters wherever you are marketing your content because this is your organic growth strategy.
Pinterest for example – Think of creating a pin the same way you would create a blog post. The Pin title needs to be SEO-friendly. When I say SEO in terms of titling and writing content, we’re talking about key phrases or keywords. The title needs to be keyword friendly. The description also needs to be keyword friendly. Wherever you are marketing your content, always keep SEO (keywords) front of mind.
If the goal is organic growth by optimizing your content, then your marketing content needs to be optimized also. So…
To optimize your marketing content, you need to have:
SEO-friendly title or trigger phrase
Read this post about trigger titles and get some examples.
SEO-friendly description
If your goal is organic growth, keep your content user-focused. Your description should focus on what current struggle they are experiencing and HOW this piece of content is going to solve that specific problem.
CTA – What I call the “Tell them factor”
Always direct your readers where you want them to do next, either with links or another piece of content.
You can also use what I call the SER method which means Sympathize, Edify, Relate. To see the training on writing niche-specific copy, join my group and watch here.
3. External link building
Link building builds your website’s credibility. When other websites link to your domain, it adds value whether it be a link in a text on a page or a mention of your website. A link from a well-known website source to your website has a lot of potential to bring you traffic.
Link building is also strategic and needs to add value to your content. The external link should also be niche-specific and relevant to your audience. You wouldn’t want to link to something that your audience can’t relate to or link to something completely off-topic.
Building backlinks is a process like implementing off-page SEO. It also comes with strategy, and that’s why we focus on building links with domains and influencers that are serving the same niche.
Collab with someone
Know of a well-known influencer serving the same niche? It never hurts to reach out and ask if they are willing to do some sort of product or services collab or even do a guest interview with them. You can publish the interview on your website in the form of a post or video.
Writing for other online publications
Websites where you can actually create an account and write a post like Medium.
Guest write on a community website
This is probably your best bet for organic growth because it makes it a little more personal rather than writing for a huge publication. A community website is a group of people behind the brand (mostly freelancers) that run and contribute to the website.
Reaching out and emailing a well-known and established person serving in the same niche
Links are automatically “do follow” unless you specifically indicate they are to be “nofollow”, which just tells bots not to follow these links. Nofollow links are usually used along with affiliate links. If you are linking to another website or a website is linking to yours and it’s marked as no follow, it won’t increase the link or domain value.
Focus on the 3 most important factors for off-page SEO to improve organic growth
To recap, for site speed, focus on cleaning up PNG images with JPGs and eliminating plugins that you don’t need. If you have typography that is SVG format, switch them to TTF or OTF font. The second is marketing. Make sure you optimize your marketing content for keywords and that it is user-focused.
Last is building external links – and you can do this by reaching out to someone in the same niche as a collab on services or products, emailing a well-known influencer for a guest interview, and requesting to write for a community website to get your content in front of someone else’s audience and have a better opportunity for organic growth.
Let me know below what your favorite takeaways from this post were. Let’s chat below!
Hey there skimmer
Wanna listen instead of read? Listen to episode 17 // What Is Off Page SEO Anyways? A Step-By-Step Talk-Through on Organic Growth Strategy.
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